Dickinson's writings were influenced by her ambivalent attitude toward the conventions of the nineteenth-century literary marketplace and her desire to shape more intimate relations with chosen contemporaries. Still, her poems and letters engage modern readers and speak to the social and gendered politics of our own day. The essays in Dickinson and Audience treat both the importance of Dickinson's personal friendships and the ways in which contemporary poetics continue to sustain the vitality of her writings. With contributions from Willis J. Buckingham, Karen Dandurand, Betsy Erkkila, Virginia Jackson, Charlotte Nekola, Martin Orzeck, David Porter, Robert Regan, Richard B. Sewall, R. McClure Smith, Stephanie A. Tingley, and Robert Weisbuch, the collection boasts a wide variety of critical approaches to the poet and her works - from traditional biographical and historical analyses to deconstructionist, feminist, and reader-response interpretations.