Introduction
This section of the Dickinson Electronic Archives (DEA) features "digital articles," critical performances that coordinator Martha Nell Smith has, in the past, called "samplers." As the goals of the reader's edition Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson are distinctly different from Correspondence with Susan Dickinson, so the goals of these digital presentations depart from those of Emily Dickinson's Correspondences (EDC). These digital articles now serve as samplers of what can be accomplished when shaping critical arguments via new media. As do printed critical articles and monographs, these digital articles have a strong interpretive drive, presenting evidence in order to tell particular critical stories and to make critical arguments. This interpretive role is what sets apart these critical articles from the offerings of the scholarly editions contained in Emily Dickinson's Correspondences, as they seek to persuade audiences that a particular interpretation is viable. The argument or goal of each is most simply put as follows:
- "Emily Dickinson Writing a Poem" presents evidence to show that the poet did not write in isolation.
- "Dickinson, Cartoonist" presents evidence to show that the poet's sense of humor varied from the raucous to the slapstick to the intellectually witty.
- "The Letter-Poem, a Dickinson Genre" contends that the poet may have been experimenting with blending prose and poetry in her epistolary scriptures.
- "Mutilations: What Has Been Erased, Inked Over, and Cut Away?" demonstrates that textual scars inhere in the Emily Dickinson literary and biographical record.
- "The Civil War, Class, & the Dickinsons: Emily Dickinson's Confederate Uncle" offers new biographical material that can perhaps help explain the poet's peculiar, seemingly unfathomable response (or lack thereof) to the most monumental event in the nineteenth-century United States, the Civil War.
- "Virtual Landscapes: The Homestead, the Evergreens, and More" (in progress) will explore the physical spaces of Dickinson's writing through a detailed, developed use of virtual imaging technology.
