Structure, Language, Imagery

Correspondence, as an important branch of American woman poet Emily Dickinson’s(1830-1886) literary creation, has received more and more attention from the literary circle in recent years. All the letters that Dickinson composed in her lifetime, like the poetry she produced, are full of originality and peculiarity. As far as the literary value of her correspondence is concerned, it is beyond the functionality of traditional letter-writing as a social communicative tool, or the instrumentality as the background study material of the writer. This study focuses on the narrative features in Dickinson’s correspondence, based on three fundamental aspects: narrative structure, narrative language and narrative imagery. It aims to analyze her epistolary narrative styles that were different from traditional ones and furthermore examine the poetic features that were represented in the letters to reach an ultimate literary value of Dickinson’s correspondence. Taken Dickinson’s correspondence as the creation of literature, this study will combine the Dickinson’s poetic works and narratological theories, to examine Dickinson’s letters from the perspectives of her leaping narrative structure, poetic narrative language and imaginative narrative imageries. The original contribution of this thesis lies in its new angle to read Emily Dickinson’s dual identity as both a poet and letter-writer, furthermore, presents additional possibility to carry out future analytical research in Dickinson’s poems and letters as a whole.