SOURCE: "Dickinson's Discontinuous Lyric Self," in American Literature, Vol. 60, No. 4, December, 1988, pp. 537-53.
In the following essay, Dickie maintains that Dickinson's poems should be analyzed not as pieces of a narrative, but as lyric poems in which the qualities of brevity, repetition, and figuration are the most pertinent and the most telling. Dickie stresses that such an analysis reveals a sense of self that is "particular, discontinuous, limited, private, hidden," and that this conclusion challenges those reached by feminist and psychoanalytic narrative character analyses.
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