Virginia Jackson on Phillis Wheatley ("To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth")

Close Readings

Hard to think of a scholar who's had a more significant influence on poetry studies in the last two decades than Virginia Jackson, and so what a thrill it was for me to welcome her onto the podcast to discuss the legendary Phillis Wheatley and her poem "To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth."

Virginia Jackson is the UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of two monographs, Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023) and Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton UP, 2005), and the co-editor, with Yopie Prins, of The Lyric Theory Reader (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014). Her articles have appeared in such journals as Critical Inquiry, MLQ, New Literary History, Studies in Romanticism, and PMLA.

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