Download or read book Emerson Prospect and Retrospect written by Joel Porte and published by Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published to mark the centenary of his death, this book helps us take measure of the work and influence of one of America's foremost thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson. These nine essays attempt both to come to terms with Emerson's modernity and to look back at his origins and development. They suggest how extensively Emerson is linked to the present and show how firmly he was rooted in America's past. Though Transcendentalism has often been considered synonymous with aloofness and high-minded abstraction, the essays show that Emerson in fact aimed at the greatest possible inclusiveness in his own thought and writing. His work constitutes a great storehouse of reflection on every subject conceivable to a capacious nineteenth-century imagination; it continues to invite criticism proportionate to its own scope.
Download or read book The Emerson Dilemma written by T. Gregory Garvey and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This gathering of eleven original essays with a substantive introduction brings the traditional image of Emerson the Transcendentalist face-to-face with an emerging image of Emerson the reformer. The Emerson Dilemma highlights the conflict between Emerson’s philosophical attraction to solitary contemplation and the demands of activism compelled by the logic of his own writings. The essays cover Emerson’s reform thought and activism from his early career as a Unitarian minister through his reaction to the Civil War. In addition to Emerson’s antislavery position, the collection covers his complex relationship to the early women’s rights movement and American Indian removal. Individual essays also compare Emerson’s reform ethics with those of his wife, Lidian Jackson Emerson, his aunt Mary Moody, Henry David Thoreau, John Brown, and Margaret Fuller. The Emerson who emerges from this volume is one whose Transcendentalism is explicitly politicized; thus, we see him consciously mediating between the opposing forces of the world he “thought” and the world in which he lived.
Download or read book Prospects for the Study of American Literature written by Richard Kopley and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1997-08 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can there possibly be left to say about . . .? This common litany, resonant both in and outside of academia, reflects a growing sense that the number of subjects and authors appropriate for literary study is rapidly becoming exhausted. Take heart, admonishes Richard Kopley in this dynamic new anthology--for this is decidedly not the case. While generations of literary study have unquestionably covered much ground in analyzing canonical writers, many aspects of even the most well-known authors--both their lives and their work-- remain underexamined. Among the authors discussed are T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, Willa Cather, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain.
Download or read book A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson written by Joel Myerson and published by Historical Guides to American Authors. This book was released on 2000 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerson has maintained his place as one of the seminal figures in American history and literature. He was the acknowledged leader of the Transcendentalist movement. These essays discuss Emerson's life as well as women's rights, slavery and religion.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson written by Joel Porte (ed) and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-04-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of newly commissioned essays provides a critical introduction to pastor and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Download or read book Emerson and Self Culture written by John T. Lysaker and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-10 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do I live a good life, one that is deeply personal and sensitive to others? John T. Lysaker suggests that those who take this question seriously need to reexamine the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In philosophical reflections on topics such as genius, divinity, friendship, and reform, Lysaker explores "self-culture" or the attempt to remain true to one's deepest commitments. He argues that being true to ourselves requires recognition of our thoroughly dependent and relational nature. Lysaker guides readers from simple self-absorption toward a more fulfilling and responsive engagement with the world.
Download or read book Philosophy Americana written by Douglas R. Anderson and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this engaging book, Douglas Anderson begins with the assumption that philosophy—the Greek love of wisdom—is alive and well in American culture. At the same time, professional philosophy remains relatively invisible. Anderson traverses American life to find places in the wider culture where professional philosophy in the distinctively American tradition can strike up a conversation. How might American philosophers talk to us about our religious experience, or political engagement, or literature—or even, popular music? Anderson’s second aim is to find places where philosophy happens in nonprofessional guises—cultural places such as country music, rock’n roll, and Beat literature. He not only enlarges the tradition of American philosophers such as John Dewey and William James by examining lesser-known figures such as Henry Bugbee and Thomas Davidson, but finds the theme and ideas of American philosophy in some unexpected places, such as the music of Hank Williams, Tammy Wynette, and Bruce Springsteen, and the writings of Jack Kerouac. The idea of “philosophy Americana” trades on the emergent genre of “music Americana,” rooted in traditional themes and styles yet engaging our present experiences. The music is “popular” but not thoroughly driven by economic considerations, and Anderson seeks out an analogous role for philosophical practice, where philosophy and popular culture are co-adventurers in the life of ideas. Philosophy Americana takes seriously Emerson’s quest for the extraordinary in the ordinary and James’s belief that popular philosophy can still be philosophy.
Download or read book Thinking in Search of a Language written by Herwig Friedl and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking in Search of a Language explores American literary and philosophical traditions, and their intimate connections, by focusing on two defining strands in the intellectual history of the United States. The first half of the book offers a multifaceted interpretation of Emerson's constantly shifting early-modernist thought-“I liked everything by turns and nothing long,” he said memorably-and its legacy in American writing. The second half turns to the modernists themselves and the pluralistic and radical-empiricist ways in which they engaged the world philosophically. Herwig Friedl's broad and deep examination of American thought, which also incorporates the international context and response, illuminates the global significance of the American intellectual tradition. Tying together all of these essays is the persistent question and problem of an adequate language or terminological framework as one kind of interpretive leitmotif. This reflects the fact that Friedl's sensibility is steeped in a cross-pollination of continental and American thought, a combination that recalls-and is as revelatory as-the work of Stanley Cavell.
Download or read book American Literature and Science written by Robert Scholnick and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature and science are two disciplines are two disciplines often thought to be unrelated, if not actually antagonistic. But Robert J. Scholnick points out that these areas of learning, up through the beginning of the nineteenth century, "were understood as parts of a unitary endeavor." By mid-century they had diverged, but literature and science have continued to interact, conflict, and illuminate each other. In this innovative work, twelve leaders in this emerging interdisciplinary field explore the long engagement of American writers with science and uncover science's conflicting meanings as a central dimension of the nation's conception of itself. Reaching back to the Puritan poet-minister-physician Edward Taylor, who wrote at the beginning of the scientific revolution, and forward to Thomas Pynchon, novelist of the cybernetic age, this collection of original essays contains essential work on major writers, including Franklin, Jefferson, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Hart Crane, Dos Passos, and Charles Olson. Through its exploration of the ways that American writers have found in science and technology a vital imaginative stimulus, even while resisting their destructive applications, this book points towards a reconciliation and integration within culture. An innovative look at a neglected dimension of our literary tradition, American Literature and Science stands as both a definition of the field and an invitation to others to continue and extend new modes of inquiry.
Download or read book Lives Out of Letters written by Robert N. Hudspeth and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though the efficacy of literary biography has been widely contested by academic theorists, artention to the lives of authors remains an enduring fact of our literary history. Dedicated to Robert N. Hudspeth, editor of the Letters of Margaret Fuller and the Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, the eleven essays in this collection address from a practitioner's perspective the relationship between American literary biography, documentation, and interpretation.
Download or read book Dead Letters to the New World written by Michael McLoughlin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-10-16 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contextualises and details Herman Melville's artistic career and outlines the relationship between Melville and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Michael McLoughlin divides Melville's professional career as a novelist into two major phases corresponding to the growth and shift in his art. In the developmental phase, from 1845 to 1850, Melville wrote his five Transcendental novels of the sea, in which he defended self-reliance, attacked conformity, and learned to employ Transcendental symbols of increasing complexity. This phase culminates in Moby-Dick , with its remarkable matching of Transcendental idealism with tragic drama, influenced by Hawthorne. After 1851, Melville endeavoured to find new ways to express himself and to re-envision human experience philosophically. In this period of transition, Melville wrote anti-Transcendental fiction attacking self-reliance as well as conformity and substituting fatalism for Emersonian optimism. According to McLoughlin, Moby-Dick represents an important transitional moment in Herman Melville's art, dramatically altering tendencies inherent in the novels from Typee onward; in contrast to Melville's blithely exciting and largely optimistic first six novels of the sea, Melville's later works - beginning with his pivotal epic Moby-Dick - assume a much darker and increasingly anti-Transcendental philosophical position.
Download or read book Emersonian Circles written by Joel Myerson and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The enormous critical resurgence of interest in Ralph Waldo Emerson over the past fifteen years has restored the `Sage of Concord' to his former role as an American icon. At the same time, this renewed interest raises old historical and critical questions about his place in American Transcendentalism, and in American culture generally. This collection of essays seeks to address the variety of critical questions about Emerson and to reevaluate his significance through his own metaphors of insight and influence, particularly that of the `circle'.ROBERT E. BURKHOLDER is Associate Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University; WESLEY T. MOTTis Professor of English at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Contributors: ROBERT A. GROSS, ALBERT J. VON FRANK, LEN GOUGEON, RONALD A. BOSCO, FRANK SHUFFELTON, PHYLLIS COLE, ROBERT D. RICHARDSON JR, DAVID M. ROBINSON, DANIEL SHEALY, HELEN R. DEESE, KENT P. LJUNGQUIST, GARY L. COLLISON, PHILIP F. GURA
Download or read book Encyclopedia of American Poetry The Nineteenth Century written by Eric L. Haralson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions from over 100 scholars, the Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Centry provides essays on the careers, works, and backgrounds of more than 100 nineteenth-century poets. It also provides entries on specialized categories of twentieth-century verse such as hymns, folk ballads, spirituals, Civil War songs, and Native American poetry. Besides presenting essential factual information, each entry amounts to an in-depth critical essay, and includes a bibliography that directs readers to other works by and about a particular poet.
Download or read book Emerson s Nonlinear Nature written by Christopher J. Windolph and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines Emersonian naturalism from the standpoint of nonlinearity, offering new ways of reading and thinking about Emerson's stance toward nature and the influence of science on his thought. Windolph breaks new ground by exploring how considerations of shape and the act of seeing underpin all of Emerson's theories about nature"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Life Writing written by Margaretta Jolly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 3905 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2001. This is the first substantial reference work in English on the various forms that constitute "life writing." As this term suggests, the Encyclopedia explores not only autobiography and biography proper, but also letters, diaries, memoirs, family histories, case histories, and other ways in which individual lives have been recorded and structured. It includes entries on genres and subgenres, national and regional traditions from around the world, and important auto-biographical writers, as well as articles on related areas such as oral history, anthropology, testimonies, and the representation of life stories in non-verbal art forms.
Download or read book Making Nature Sacred written by John Gatta and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since colonial times, the sense of encountering an unseen, transcendental Presence within the natural world has been a characteristic motif in American literature and culture. American writers have repeatedly perceived in nature something beyond itself-and beyond themselves. In this book, John Gatta argues that the religious import of American environmental literature has yet to be fully recognized or understood. Whatever their theology, American writers have perennially construed the nonhuman world to be a source, in Rachel Carson's words, of "something that takes us out of ourselves." Making Nature Sacred explores how the quest for "natural revelation" has been pursued through successive phases of American literary and intellectual history. And it shows how the imaginative challenge of "reading" landscapes has been influenced by biblical hermeneutics. Though focused on adaptations of Judeo-Christian religious traditions, it also samples Native American, African American, and Buddhist forms of ecospirituality. It begins with Colonial New England writers such Anne Bradstreet and Jonathan Edwards, re-examines pivotal figures such as Henry Thoreau and John Muir, and takes account of writings by Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, and many others along the way. The book concludes with an assessment of the "spiritual renaissance" underway in current environmental writing, as represented by five noteworthy poets and by authors such as Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson, Peter Matthiessen, and Barry Lopez. This engaging study should appeal not only to students of literature, but also to those interested in ethics and environmental studies, religious studies, and American cultural history.
Download or read book Poetry and Pragmatism written by Richard Poirier and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Poirier, one of America's most eminent critics, reveals in this book the creative but mostly hidden alliance between American pragmatism and American poetry. He brilliantly traces pragmatism as a philosophical and literary practice grounded in a linguistic skepticism that runs from Emerson and William James to the work of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, and on to the cultural debates of today. More powerfully than ever before, Poirier shows that pragmatism had its start in Emerson, the great example to all his successors of how it is possible to redeem even as you set out to change the literature of the past. Poirier demonstrates that Emerson--and later William James--were essentially philosophers of language, and that it is language that embodies our cultural past, an inheritance to be struggled with, and transformed, before being handed on to future generations. He maintains that in Emersonian pragmatist writing, any loss--personal or cultural--gives way to a quest for what he calls "superfluousness," a kind of rhetorical excess by which powerfully creative individuals try to elude deprivation and stasis. In a wide-ranging meditation on what James called "the vague," Poirier extols the authentic voice of individualism, which, he argues, is tentative and casual rather than aggressive and dogmatic. The concluding chapters describe the possibilities for criticism created by this radically different understanding of reading and writing, which are nothing less than a reinvention of literary tradition itself. Poirier's discovery of this tradition illuminates the work of many of the most important figures in American philosophy and poetry. His reanimation of pragmatism also calls for a redirection of contemporary criticism, so that readers inside as well as outside the academy can begin to respond to poetic language as the source of meaning, not to meaning as the source of language.
