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An inzile and recalcitrant, Emily Dickinson is now named one of the chief weather-makers of modern literary culture despite the fact that she lived and wrote well over a century ago. She is even hailed as a prototype of modernism and postmodernism today. These critical assessments often appear to sideline or underplay or even antiquate the persecutory circumstances of the dogmatic New England Valley Calvinism of 19th-century Amherst that weighed heavily upon her sensibility. Living in the declining phase of its eschatological culture, conflicted with its traditional convictions about time, death, resurrection, heaven, hell, immortality, the Last Judgment, God and Christ rather than belong to it she reacted out of full integrity by the countervailing act of her strange poetic constructs in idiosyncratic English fretted with spiny, mysterious hyphens and dashes and in her innumerable letters. This book explores the eschatological origins of her poetics that unhinges the logocentrism of the Christian faith personified by God and death; she is found to be deeply engaged in what is the intellectual cathexis of our time decentering the presumptive authority.

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Masud Mahmood, Ph.D.: Professor of English, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh: critic, translator, and poet: co-published Selected Poems of Abul Hasan (Dhaka, 1993), contributed English translations of Bangla poetry to several anthologies at home and abroad; published numerous articles of literary interest in scholarly journals.

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