In Plain Sight: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry and the Problem of Literary History

In Plain Sight looks closely at the question of why Emily Dickinson is the only nineteenth-century American woman poet known today. Given that women published a tremendous amount of poetry at the time, their erasure from literary history is particularly confounding. By focusing on the conventions that allowed their poetry to thrive and circulate in the nineteenth century, this book seeks to make visible a whole field of poetry that has been long forgotten.