User:DeRossitt/The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H. D., and Gertrude Stein

The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H. D., and Gertrude Stein is a 2000 book by literary scholar Shawn Alfrey.

Overview
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Reception
Nancy Johnston in The Emily Dickinson Journal: Alfrey's The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H.D., and Gertrude Stein, is a theoretical study of the history and structure of the sublime, an aesthetic mode characterized by the relationship of subject and object. In her book, she explores how these three American writers strategically challenged and revisioned the boundaries of aesthetic and rhetorical power which are associated with the traditional sublime.

S. Renée Faubion in Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics: 1.Both Shawn Alfrey and Susan Stanford Friedman have made explicit connections between H.D.'s work and the sublime. Alfrey argues that the purpose of the sublime is to “historicize history"—that is, to make history itself an object of inquiry.

Joseph Dinunzio in The Review of English Studies: In a text of only 184 pages Shawn Alfrey attempts to complete several giant labours. The first is to gain purchase on the notion of the sublime over the last twenty centuries or so. The second is to isolate its major defects. The third is to propose an alternative, contra-Western, and feminine sublime, and to demonstrate that alternative in readings of Dickinson, H.D., and Gertrude Stein. Such a challenge invites a spectacular failure, and while Alfrey's close readings save the book from such a spectacle, she has difficulty negotiating all the bother which this subject raises.