The premise of this study is that Dickinson's poetry is significant not in what it communicates to a reader, but in what it does to a reader. Dickinson famously defined her own response to poetry as an immediate sensual reaction. The continued popular and critical success of her poetry provides evidence of her capacity to elicit a similarly spontaneous, visceral response from her own readers. In order to trace the origins of this affective poetic, I examine Dickinson's rhetorical strategies in relation to the larger discourse of antebellum women. In particular, I argue that Dickinson's poetics can be considered a subtle re-emphasis of contradictions within a larger discursive formation, a specific rhetoric of seduction that permeated the antebellum culture within which she lived vicariously. The linguistic mechanism of Dickinson's own "rhetorical seduction" is examined through an analysis of her poems and letters considered not as communications but as rhetorical constructions designed to elicit a spontaneous reaction from a reader. The consequences of the rhetorical seduction Dickinson's poetry and letters effect is examined further through an analysis of the rhetorical slippages evident in a number of critical texts of recent years that have Dickinson's poetry as their focus. Throughout the study, the positions occupied by figural seducers and victims are considered interchangeable within a dialogic reading situation. Consequently, while the central focus is the "discourse of seduction" that is crucial to Dickinson's poetics, each individual chapter is also a specific critical application--new historicist, feminist, deconstructive, reader-response, psychoanalytic--to the poetry. In this way, the study is simultaneously a reflexive meditation on the attempted "seductions" of Dickinson's life and text by recent critical theory, not least by the particular critical narrative constructed in the course of my own reading.

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