Emily Dickinson: a research guide

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to provide a guide to significant primary and secondary resources relevant to the study of Emily Dickinson and her poetry.

Design/methodology/approach

Online catalogs, bibliographies, and the worldwide web were searched to identify relevant items. In some cases, citation analysis and other bibliometric measures were used to determine the highest‐impact sources. Items were annotated after personal examination by the author. The paper is divided into two main sections: primary sources (anthologies, databases and web resources) and secondary sources (bibliographies, databases, biographical resources, reference resources, monographs, journals and web resources).

Findings

The paper introduces each resource, indicating its scope and contribution to the study of Dickinson. It acknowledges in particular the developments in recent Dickinson scholarship.

Originality/value

Dickinson remains popular among both scholars and laypeople, but the most recent bibliographies of Dickinson scholarship date to the late 1980s. This guide provides a late twentieth‐ to early twenty‐first‐century update to those earlier works.

Citation

Bluemle, S.R. (2008), "Emily Dickinson: a research guide", Reference Services Review, Vol. 36 No. 3, pp. 252-263. https://doi.org/10.1108/00907320810895341