An "inzile" and recalcitrant, Emily Dickinson is now named one of the chief weather-makers of modern literary culture despite the fact that she lived and wrote well over a century ago. She is even hailed as a prototype of modernism and postmodernism today. These critical assessments often appear to sideline or underplay or even antiquate the persecutory circumstances of the dogmatic New England Valley Calvinism of 19th-century Amherst that weighed heavily upon her sensibility. Living in the declining phase of its eschatological culture, conflicted with its traditional convictions about time,...