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Crumbley, Paul and Eleanor Elson Heginbotham, eds. Dickinson's Fascicles: A Spectrum of Possibilities. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2014. $70.
Between 1858 and 1864, Emily Dickinson bound together over eight hundred poems into forty booklets, which scholars usually refer to as fascicles. In 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin published The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, he offered readers a facsimile edition of the manuscripts of these poems as she had arranged and collected them, as well as of other poems written on similar sheets of paper that were never bound, which he called sets. In the years that followed, scholars attempted to discover the fascicles' overarching or governing principle, for example, a love or conversion narrative, and explored the possible significance of features of Dickinson's manuscripts, such as her provocative punctuation marks, lineation, and variant words. Sharon Cameron's 1992 intervention into the fascicle debate, Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles, argued that the ordering principle that governed the fascicles was that of indeterminacy and that reading the manuscripts of Dickinson's fascicles accentuated rather than attenuated what had long been recognized as the signature feature of her printed poems, namely, their disruptive language and style, which generated interpretive multiplicity. Developing, extending, and challenging the formalist theories of Cameron and others who have viewed Dickinson's poems without historically locating her poetics and manuscript practices, the essays in this collection-the first to focus solely on the fascicles-present a range of perspectives and approaches that open up new ways of thinking about her poems. The contributors show the value of reading Dickinson's work by attending to her fascicles and more importantly also provide excellent models of how to read Dickinson's work generally by striving for what Domhnall Mitchell calls the "richest interpretations available" (87).
The introduction and many of the essays themselves present readers with a helpful overview...