"Revising the Script: The Meaning(s) of Dickinson's Manuscripts."

An essay on the textual characteristics of Emily Dickinson's manuscri pts. Autograph particularities, such as word-division, line turnovers , the shape of characters, and paragraph spacing are attended to in a n effort to tease out some of the interpretive positions made availab le by hand-written, rather than printed, poems. The essay concentrate s mainly on the correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but a lso looks at some works by Susan Gilbert Huntington Dickinson. The co nclusion is that these textual characteristics are often ambiguous, a nd were interpreted differently by Dickinson's contemporaries, includ ing her friends.