"Edited by Her Friends": Claiming Posthumous Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America

"'Edited by Her Friends': Claiming Posthumous Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America" argues that nineteenth-century editorial practice provides a unique window into understanding the literary value of a text for its readers. By reading posthumously published poetry through its editing, my project imagines historical reading contexts for cases where stable poetic transmission seems most challenged, the author most passive, and the editor most powerful. My dissertation uncovers a tradition of posthumous poetry, including the work of Lucretia Davidson, Joseph Kent Gibbons, Ethel Lynn Beers, and Emily Dickinson, and elucidates this under-appreciated strain of nineteenth-century American poetry in which editorial practice and the work of mourning intertwine, not only in elegy and commemorative poetry, but also in the very idea of preserving and extending the memory and voice of the dead author.

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