Download or read book Emerson s Emergence written by Mary Kupiec Cayton and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the culture of commercial capitalism came to dominate nineteenth-century New England, it changed people's ideas about how the world functioned, the nature of their work, their relationships to one another, and even the way they conceived of themselves as separate individuals. Drawing on the work of the last twenty years in New England social history, Mary Cayton argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson's work and career, when seen in the context of the momentous changes in the culture and economics of the region, reveal many of the tensions and contradictions inherent in the new capitalist social order. In exploring the genesis of liberal humanism as a calling in the United States, this case study implicitly poses questions about its assumptions, its aspirations, and its failings. Cayton traces the ways in which the social circumstances of Emerson's Boston gave rise to his philosophy of natural organicism, his search for an appropriate definition of the intellectual's role within society, and his exhortations to individuals to distrust the norms and practices of the mass culture that was emerging. She addresses the historical context of Emerson's emergence as a writer and orator and undertakes to describe the Federalism and Unitarianism in which Emerson grew up, explaining why he eventually rejected them in favor of romantic transcendentalism. Cayton demonstrates how Emerson's thought was affected by the social pressures and ideological constructs that launched the new cultural discourse of individualism. A work of intellectual history and American studies, this book explores through Emerson's example the ways in which intellectuals both make their cultures and are made by them.
Download or read book Ralph Ellison written by Lawrence Patrick Jackson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author, intellectual, and social critic, Ralph Ellison (1914-94) was a pivotal figure in American literature and history and arguably the father of African American modernism. Universally acclaimed for his first novel, Invisible Man, a masterpiece of modern fiction, Ellison was recognized with a stunning succession of honors, including the 1953 National Book Award. Despite his literary accomplishments and political activism, however, Ellison has received surprisingly sparse treatment from biographers. Lawrence Jackson’s biography of Ellison, the first when it was published in 2002, focuses on the author’s early life. Powerfully enhanced by rare photographs, this work draws from archives, literary correspondence, and interviews with Ellison’s relatives, friends, and associates. Tracing the writer’s path from poverty in dust bowl Oklahoma to his rise among the literary elite, Jackson explores Ellison’s important relationships with other stars, particularly Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and examines his previously undocumented involvement in the Socialist Left of the 1930s and 1940s, the black radical rights movement of the same period, and the League of American Writers. The result is a fascinating portrait of a fraternal cadre of important black writers and critics--and the singularly complex and intriguing man at its center.
Download or read book Emerson s Liberalism written by Neal Dolan and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2009-07-14 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerson’s Liberalism explains why Ralph Waldo Emerson has been and remains the central literary voice of American culture: he gave ever-fresh and lasting expression to its most fundamental and widely shared liberal values. Liberalism, after all, is more than a political philosophy: it is a form of civilization, a set of values, a culture, a way of representing and living in the world. This book makes explicit what has long been implicit in America’s embrace of Emerson. Neal Dolan offers the first comprehensive and historically informed exposition of all of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings as a contribution to the theory and practice of liberal culture. Rather than projecting twentieth-century viewpoints onto the past, he restores Emerson’s great body of work to the classical liberal contexts that most decisively shaped its general political-cultural outlook—the libertarian-liberalism of John Locke, the Scottish Enlightenment, the American founders, and the American Whigs. In addition to in-depth consideration of Emerson’s journals and lectures, Dolan provides original commentary on many of Emerson’s most celebrated published works, including Nature, the “Divinity School Address,” “History,” “Compensation,” “Experience,” the political addresses of the early 1840s, “An Address . . . on . . . The Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” Representative Men, English Traits, and The Conduct of Life. He considers Emerson’s distinctive elaborations of foundational liberal values—progress, reason, work, property, limited government, rights, civil society, liberty, commerce, and empiricism. And he argues that Emerson’s ideas are a morally bracing and spiritually inspiring resource for the ongoing sustenance of American culture and civilization, reminding us of the depth, breadth, and strength of our common liberal inheritance.
Download or read book Mr Emerson s Revolution written by Jean McClure Mudge and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2015-09-11 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume traces the life, thought and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a giant of American intellectual history, whose transforming ideas greatly strengthened the two leading reform issues of his day: abolition and women’s rights. A broad and deep, yet cautious revolutionary, he spoke about a spectrum of inner and outer realities—personal, philosophical, theological and cultural—all of which gave his mid-career turn to political and social issues their immediate and lasting power. This multi-authored study frankly explores Emerson's private prejudices against blacks and women while he also publicly championed their causes. Such a juxtaposition freshly charts the evolution of Emerson's slow but steady application of his early neo-idealism to emancipating blacks and freeing women from social bondage. His shift from philosopher to active reformer had lasting effects not only in America but also abroad. In the U.S. Emerson influenced such diverse figures as Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson and William James, and in Europe Mickiewicz, Wilde, Kipling, Nietzsche, and Camus, as well as many leading followers in India and Japan. The book includes over 170 illustrations, among them eight custom-made maps of Emerson's haunts and wide-ranging lecture itineraries as well as a new four-part chronology of his life placed alongside both national and international events as well as major inventions. Mr. Emerson's Revolution provides essential reading for students and teachers of American intellectual history, the abolitionist and women’s rights movement―and for anyone interested in the nineteenth-century roots of these seismic social changes.
Download or read book Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers written by Ralph Waldo Emerson and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson written by Alan M. Levine and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2011-09-16 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From before the Civil War until his death in 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson was renowned—and renounced—as one of the United States' most prominent abolitionists and as a leading visionary of the nation's liberal democratic future. Following his death, however, both Emerson's political activism and his political thought faded from public memory, replaced by the myth of the genteel man of letters and the detached sage of individualism. In the 1990s, scholars rediscovered Emerson's antislavery writings and began reviving his legacy as a political activist. A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is the first collection to evaluate Emerson's political thought in light of his recently rediscovered political activism. What were Emerson's politics? A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson authoritatively answers this question with seminal essays by some of the most prominent thinkers ever to write about Emerson—Stanley Cavell, George Kateb, Judith N. Shklar, and Wilson Carey McWilliams—as well as many of today's leading Emerson scholars. With an introduction that effectively destroys the "pernicious myth about Emerson's apolitical individualism" by editors Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk, this volume reassesses Emerson's famous theory of self-reliance in light of his antislavery politics, demonstrates the importance of transcendentalism to his politics, and explores the enduring significance of his thought for liberal democracy. Including a substantial bibliography of work on Emerson's politics over the last century, A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is an indispensable resource for students of Emerson, American literature, and American political thought, as well as for those who wrestle with the fundamental challenges of democracy and liberalism.
Download or read book Emerson s Transcendental Etudes written by Stanley Cavell and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is Stanley Cavells definitive expression on Emerson. Over the past thirty years, Cavell has demonstrated that he is the most emphatic and provocative philosophical critic of Emerson that America has yet known. The sustained effort of that labor is drawn together here for the first time into a single volume, which also contains two previously unpublished essays and an introduction by Cavell that reflects on this book and the history of its emergence. Students and scholars working in philosophy, literature, American studies, history, film studies, and political theory can now more easily access Cavells luminous and enduring work on Emerson. Such engagement should be further complemented by extensive indices and annotations. If we are still in doubt whether America has expressed itself philosophically, there is perhaps no better space for inquiry than reading Cavell reading Emerson.
Download or read book After Emerson written by John T. Lysaker and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Emerson & Self-Culture shares essays covering such themes as identity, experience, ethics, poetry, philosophy, history, and race. John T. Lysaker works between and weaves together questions and replies in philosophical psychology, Emerson studies, and ethics in this book of deep existential questioning. Each essay in this atypical, philosophical book employs recurring terms, phrases, and questions that characterize our contemporary age. Setting out from the idea of where we are in an almost literal sense, Lysaker takes readers on an intellectual journey into thematic concerns and commitments of broad interest, such as the nature of self and self-experience, ethical life, poetry and philosophy, and history and race. In the manner of Emerson, Cavell, and Rorty, Lysaker’s vibrant writing is certain to have a transformative effect on American philosophy today. “An original and stimulating book, manifesting a level of reflection and existential concern of the highest order. It is intellectually and personally honest.” —Robert E. Innis, author of Susanne Langer in Focus “There is something fresh and hence refreshing in the manner in which John T. Lysaker takes up familiar topics. He shows, with both arresting details and an evolving design, how the conduct of life (to use Emerson’s expression) demands a form of thought frequently at odds with contemporary fashions and preoccupations, with institutionally entrenched approaches and all too rigidly policed discourses.” —Vincent Colapietro, author of Experience, Interpretation, and Community “Acknowledged as one of his generations premier Emerson scholars, Lysaker goes beyond his earlier work, Emerson & Self-Culture . . . [T]he writing is stimulating, vibrant, challenging, risky, and fecund. Recommended.” —D. B. Boersma, Choice
Download or read book V L Parrington written by H. Lark Hall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: H. Lark Hall presents the first comprehensive biography of Vernon Louis Parrington (1871-1929). The recipient of the 1928 Pulitzer Prize in history for the first two volumes of his Main Currents in American Thought, Parrington remains one of the most influential literary and historical scholars of the early twentieth century.Parrington was a man in search of a personal myth. He found his self-image successively mirrored in Victorian novels, painting, poetry, populism, religion, the arts and crafts movement, American literature, and American history. These changes were also reflected in his teaching as a professor of English - at the College of Emporia, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Washington. Published late in his career, the two volumes of Main Currents represented the culmination of his search.Drawing upon his personal papers - including correspondence, diaries, and student course work, Main Currents chapter drafts, and other unpublished writings - Hall traces Parrington's intellectual development from his Midwestern childhood through his mid-life engagement with English poet and artist William Morris, then from the radical impact of "the new history" to the tempered post World War One reflection of his career at the University of Washington. Hall's reinterpretation of Main Currents emphasizes Parrington's concern with the drama of the life of the mind and links his historical viewpoint to his own personal history.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Social Theory written by George Ritzer and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2004-08-11 with total page 1053 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Click ′Additional Materials′ for downloadable samples The Encyclopedia of Social Theory is an indispensable reference source for anyone interested in the roots of contemporary social theory. It examines the global landscape of all the key theories and the theorists behind them, presenting them in the context needed to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Theories covered include • Critical Theory • Enlightenment • Ethnomethodology • Exchange Theory • Feminism • Marxist Theory • Multiculturalism • Phenomenology • Postmodernism • Rational Choice • Structural Fundamentalism Led by internationally renowned scholar George Ritzer, the Encyclopedia of Social Theory draws together a team of more than 200 international scholars covering the developments, achievements, and prospects of social theory from its inception in the 18th century to the present. Understanding that social theory can both explain and alter the social world, this two-volume set serves as not only a foundation for learning, but also an inspiration for creative and reflexive engagement with the rich range of ideas it contains. Key Themes • American Social Theory • British Social Theory • Comparative and Historical Theory • Cultural Theory • Economic Sociology • Feminist Theory • French Social Theory • German Social Theory • Macrosociological Theories • Marxist and Neo-Marxist Approaches • Method and Metatheory • Network and Exchange Theories • Other/Multiple National Traditions • Politics and Government • Postmodern Theory • Psychoanalytic Theory • Schools and Theoretical Approaches • Symbolic Interaction and Microsociology • Theorists • Topics and Concepts in Social Theory Key Features • More than 300 entries from fourteen countries • Master Bibliography • Reader′s Guide • Extensive biographical coverage of major theorists • Extensive cross-referencing
Download or read book The Arnoldian written by and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Emerson and Self Reliance written by George Kateb and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2002-04-09 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ralph Waldo Emerson was a great moral philosopher. One of his principle contributions is the theory of self-reliance, a view of democratic individuality. During much of his life, Emerson was considered a radical thinker, and his opposition to established religious opinion was scandalous. Emerson's deep commitment to individualism was at the root of his critique, and his articulation of individualism was constant, whether aimed against the group mind or against institutional constrictions. 'Nietzsche was Emerson's best reader,' and George Kateb provides an accessible reading of Emerson that is friendly to the interests of Nietzsche and to later Nietzscheans such as Weber, Heidegger, Arendt, and Foucault.
Download or read book Going Abroad written by William W. Stowe and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a nation struggling to establish its own identity, all kinds of Americans, for all kinds of reasons, were enchanted with Europe. A European trip, whether extravagant or modest, could serve social advancement, aesthetic enrichment, or personal curiosity. Travel allowed men and women, the descendants of European settlers or African slaves, to shed their familiar surroundings and comfortable personas, adopt new roles, and measure themselves against the European experience. These travelers were often also writers. Throughout the nineteenth century, celebrated authors and beginners alike published newspaper columns, magazine articles, guidebooks, travel essays, letters, and novels based on their European journeys. In Going Abroad, Stowe examines not only classic works by such writers as Irving, Fuller, Twain, James, and Adams, but also lesser-known works by African-American authors, journalists, feminist writers, and diarists. Travel and the writing of it were important, Stowe argues, in molding a peculiarly democratic, yet essentially class-based, sense of personal and group identity. Combining literary and cultural analysis, he suggests new ways of understanding nineteenth-century Americans' concept of their nation and its place in the world. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Society and Solitude and Other Essays written by Ralph Waldo Emerson and published by . This book was released on 1871 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Emerson s Metaphysics written by Joseph Urbas and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-10-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives the first complete, fully historicized account of Emerson's metaphysics of cause and effect and its foundational position in his philosophy as a whole. Urbas tells the story of the making of a metaphysician and in so doing breaks with the postmodern, anti-metaphysical readings that have dominated Emerson scholarship since his philosophical rehabilitation began in late 1970s. This is an intellectual biography of Emerson the metaphysician but also a chapter in the cultural life-story of a concept synonymous, in the Transcendentalist period, with life itself, the story of the principle at the origin of all being and change. Emerson's Metaphysics proposes an account of Emerson's metaphysical thought as it unfolds in his writings, as it informs his philosophy as a whole, and as it reflects the intellectual and religious culture in which he lived and moved and had his being. This book will be of interest to philosophers, literary scholars, and students of English, philosophy, and intellectual and religious history who are interested in Emerson and the American Transcendentalist movement.
Download or read book Composition Theory for the Postmodern Classroom written by Gary A. Olson and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Composition Theory for the Postmodern Classroom is a collection of the most outstanding articles published in the Journal of Advanced Composition over the last decade. Together these essays represent the breadth and strength of composition scholarship that has fruitfully engaged with critical theory in its many manifestations. In drawing on the critical discourses of philosophers, feminists, literary theorists, African Americanists, cultural theorists, and others, these compositionists have enriched discourse in the field, broadened intellectual conceptions of the multiple roles and functions of discourse, and opened up an infinite number of questions and new possibilities for composition theory and pedagogy.
Download or read book History Abolition and the Ever Present Now in Antebellum American Writing written by Jeffrey Insko and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing examines the meaning and possibilities of the present and its relationship to history and historicity in a number of literary texts; specifically, the writings of several figures in antebellum US literary historysome, but not all of whom, associated with the period's romantic movement. Focusing on nineteenth-century writers who were impatient for social change, like those advocating for the immediate emancipation of slaves, as opposed to those planning for a gradual end to slavery, the book recovers some of the political force of romanticism. Through close readings of texts by Washington Irving, John Neal, Catharine Sedgwick, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville, the book argues that these writers practiced forms of literary historiography that treat the past as neither a reflection of present interests nor as an irretrievably distant 'other', but as a complex and open-ended interaction between the two. In place of a fixed and linear past, these writers imagine history as an experience rooted in a fluid, dynamic, and ever-changing present. The political, philosophical, and aesthetic disposition Insko calls 'romantic presentism' insists upon the present as the fundamental sphere of human action and experience-and hence of ethics and democratic possibility.
