Studies why the poetry of nineteenth-century American women has all but disappeared from literary history, with the exception of the works of Emily Dickinson. Exploring works by little-known poets, it illustrates that the means by which the poetry came to be written and read contributed to and determined its eventual erasure.

• Introduction: Everywhere and Nowhere


• 1: Anthology Publication and the Woman Poet


• 2: The Sick Preface


• 3: Ballad Knowledge and the Poetics of Repetition


• 4: Collaborative Composition and Sororal Poetics


• Afterword: The Problem of Emily Dickinson

Alexandra Socarides is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, where she teaches nineteenth-century American literature and culture, women's writing, and the history of poetics. Her first book, Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. She is the co-editor (with Jennifer Putzi) of A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and co-editor (with Michael Cohen) of Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, Volume 7: Poetry. Her articles and essays have appeared in, among other places, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.