Imaginary Transatlantic Crossings Configurations of Domesticity and Foreingnood in Emily Dickinson’s Italian Atlas

Abstract

Basically intersecting transnational and spatial theoretical perspectives, this essay aims at a deeper understanding of Emily Dickinson’s internationalism, by focusing on Dickinson’s textual domestication of Italian-related images. Dickinson’s imaginary transatlantic voyage testifies to a peculiar use of Italy which actually reshapes the conventional travel rhetoric and, in so doing, Dickinson significantly partakes in the aesthetic construction of the nineteenth-century American textual space.