| Nowadays, with the voluminous publications on Emily Dickinson, the study of the most prominent, most puzzling aspect of Dickinson's poetry-her style, still lacks profundity though some tentative efforts have been made; while in China, the study of her style is all but a blank.The notorious ambiguity of Emily Dickinson's poetry is due to various reasons, of which the first is possibly her "queer" style that is said to have stunned back numerous readers. Facts call for a comprehensive, in-depth study on the characteristic features of Dickinson's poetry to prove beneficial both to foreign literature teachers in general and to Dickinson lovers in particular. Hence the present thesis, of which the author flatters himself by thinking that the efforts he has made have been worth it.Style speaks authorial intention; it speaks itself (from the Other, of course) as well. French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) observed, "Le style c'est rhomme meme" ("Style is the man himself) (de Buffon, 1753), which the present paper values as its rationale.This thesis is in four chapters. The first chapter outlines the biographical background of Emily Dickinson and her literary career.The second chapter makes a survey of Dickinson criticism and studies over a span of more than one century, since the publication of Dickinson's Poems, First Series in 1890. Critical works have mainly been incited by and directed to Dickinson's "strange" style, which may be considered sort of style-speaking, that is, her style speaks through the critics.Emily Dickinson was hailed by the public in 1890s, although in the meantime she was fiercely criticized by most critics for her bizarre style. But after a pouring of divergent criticisms in the first decade of the 20th century, she was almost "forgotten" (Price, 1912) in 1912. Then, with the publication of The Single Hound (1914), Emily Dickinson was again heatedly discussed since 1915. The major concern of the 1920s iswith the reasonableness of her irregularities, and Emily Dickinson was so much defended by the growing number of critics that some complained that she was "overrated" (Harold Monro, 1925). Up to the 1930s, with many books of her poetry published and studied since the 1920s, the significance of Emily Dickinson has been universally confirmed-she was now regarded as "a major American poet" (A.C. Ward, 1932), "among the finest poets in the language" (Conrad Aiken, 1935), and a "poetic genius" (Yvor Winters, 1938). Only one anthology of Dickinson's poetry was published in the 1940s (Bolts of Melody, 1945), when critics who had got accustomed to her style undertook a diligent but calm study. The publication of The Poems of Emily Dickinson (variorum edition) in 1955, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, touched off an unprecedented fruitful Emily Dickinson criticism and studies, which are still going on vigorously. In the 1950s, Dickinson was recognized as "perhaps the greatest of all women poets" (Spiller, 1955); in 1960s, a poet who "bridged the gap" between other important poets (Waggoner, 1965); and in 1970s, she was even seen as more influential than Walt Whitman(1819-1892) in the second quarter of the twentieth century (Thurley, 1977). By 1980s, her literary status as one of the major poets ever writing in the English language had been firmly established (Reeves, 1980), and critics in this decade tended to find greatness even in Emily Dickinson's supposed deficiencies or apparently queerness. The trend dominant in 1990s was the manuscript criticism which concerned emphatically with the textual importance of Dickinson's poetry. This trend has clearly crossed the turn of the century and is still popular today.The third chapter is devoted to a detailed analysis of Dickinson's style and its significance in her poetry. The whole chapter is in five sections. Section one attempts to define "style." Section two examines the different styles presented in the major versions of Dickinson's poetry published over the hundred years, and more, stressing the need to...
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