Andrea Knutson
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195370928
- eISBN:
- 9780199870769
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195370928.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Chapter 3 examines the ways that Emerson aestheticizes the conversion process through the literary style of his essays and Nature, thereby inviting his readers to experience the effects of ...
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Chapter 3 examines the ways that Emerson aestheticizes the conversion process through the literary style of his essays and Nature, thereby inviting his readers to experience the effects of “transparency” in their search for meaning between the words, sentences, and paragraphs of his work. It looks at the ways that the currents of transcendentalism and natural philosophy, the idea of reason, and his visit to the Jardin des Plantes in 1833 informed his conceptualization of the workings of consciousness and argues that Emerson fosters a method of thinking, or habit of mind, through a style that compels readers to “minister” to themselves, to become natural philosophers of the soul in their search for meaning and stability in the universe. This chapter builds on the previous two by placing Emerson in line with Shepard and Edwards who saw the work of personal and cultural renewal as a matter of converting semantics and argues that in Emerson’s work we see (or experience) this connection most overtly in his troping of language because it provokes disorientation and the need to attach new meaning to particular words and ideas, the ministerial imperative taken on by Shepard after the Puritan migration to New England.Less
Chapter 3 examines the ways that Emerson aestheticizes the conversion process through the literary style of his essays and Nature, thereby inviting his readers to experience the effects of “transparency” in their search for meaning between the words, sentences, and paragraphs of his work. It looks at the ways that the currents of transcendentalism and natural philosophy, the idea of reason, and his visit to the Jardin des Plantes in 1833 informed his conceptualization of the workings of consciousness and argues that Emerson fosters a method of thinking, or habit of mind, through a style that compels readers to “minister” to themselves, to become natural philosophers of the soul in their search for meaning and stability in the universe. This chapter builds on the previous two by placing Emerson in line with Shepard and Edwards who saw the work of personal and cultural renewal as a matter of converting semantics and argues that in Emerson’s work we see (or experience) this connection most overtly in his troping of language because it provokes disorientation and the need to attach new meaning to particular words and ideas, the ministerial imperative taken on by Shepard after the Puritan migration to New England.
Jeffrey Einboden
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199397808
- eISBN:
- 9780199397822
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199397808.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Islam
The final chapter, reaching up to the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, mapping the wide expanse between his public image and private practice. Emerson, a ...
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The final chapter, reaching up to the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, mapping the wide expanse between his public image and private practice. Emerson, a celebrated icon of American exceptionalism and philosopher of American Romanticism, is here revealed also as America’s most prolific translator of Islamic verse, rendering more than two thousand lines of Persian poetry through German sources. Scribbled through diaries, letters, even on the backs of envelopes, Emerson’s early appeal to the Qur’ān, and his later translations of Sufi poets—especially Muḥammad Shamsuddīn Ḥāfiẓ—are shown to have shaped Emerson’s own poetic identity, while also promoting his posthumous legacy.Less
The final chapter, reaching up to the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, mapping the wide expanse between his public image and private practice. Emerson, a celebrated icon of American exceptionalism and philosopher of American Romanticism, is here revealed also as America’s most prolific translator of Islamic verse, rendering more than two thousand lines of Persian poetry through German sources. Scribbled through diaries, letters, even on the backs of envelopes, Emerson’s early appeal to the Qur’ān, and his later translations of Sufi poets—especially Muḥammad Shamsuddīn Ḥāfiẓ—are shown to have shaped Emerson’s own poetic identity, while also promoting his posthumous legacy.
John Gatta
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195165050
- eISBN:
- 9780199835140
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195165055.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a growing Romantic tendency to imagine Nature in religious terms--as a favored site of worship and a ...
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By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a growing Romantic tendency to imagine Nature in religious terms--as a favored site of worship and a source of revelation largely superseding the Christian scriptures. Both literary artists and Hudson River painters highlighted their impressions of the sacred sublime in American landscapes. And as civilized settlements continued to replace the older freedom of life on the frontier, James Fenimore Cooper dramatized the problematic ethical consequences of this change in his Leatherstocking novels, above all in The Pioneers. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vision of the nonhuman world as divine “cosmos,” or “beauty” is most memorably presented in his book Nature (1836), which celebrates the intersection between Nature and Civilization he discovered on the “common” space of a village green in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson’s poem “The Adirondacs,” which describes a camping excursion interrupted by news of laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable, underscores the point that no part of nature could henceforth be wholly removed from human presence or influence.Less
By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a growing Romantic tendency to imagine Nature in religious terms--as a favored site of worship and a source of revelation largely superseding the Christian scriptures. Both literary artists and Hudson River painters highlighted their impressions of the sacred sublime in American landscapes. And as civilized settlements continued to replace the older freedom of life on the frontier, James Fenimore Cooper dramatized the problematic ethical consequences of this change in his Leatherstocking novels, above all in The Pioneers. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vision of the nonhuman world as divine “cosmos,” or “beauty” is most memorably presented in his book Nature (1836), which celebrates the intersection between Nature and Civilization he discovered on the “common” space of a village green in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson’s poem “The Adirondacs,” which describes a camping excursion interrupted by news of laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable, underscores the point that no part of nature could henceforth be wholly removed from human presence or influence.
Matthew Mutter
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195342536
- eISBN:
- 9780199867042
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195342536.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the ...
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This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the “moral sentiment.” Matthew Mutter argues that this dual expectation is made possible by a radicalization of the Puritan project of integrating the sacred and the secular. This radicalization ultimately placed the burden of sacred order on the vision of the perceiving individual, which in turn diminished the significance of outward social and political arrangements. Attention is given to Emerson's misapprehension of the actual trends in nineteenth‐century American religious life, to the differences between Emerson's prophetic stance and those of Whitman, Thoreau, Melville and Lincoln, and to the effects of the Civil War on Emerson's thought and American public religion in general. The conclusion looks at Emerson's legacy in American religious history.Less
This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the “moral sentiment.” Matthew Mutter argues that this dual expectation is made possible by a radicalization of the Puritan project of integrating the sacred and the secular. This radicalization ultimately placed the burden of sacred order on the vision of the perceiving individual, which in turn diminished the significance of outward social and political arrangements. Attention is given to Emerson's misapprehension of the actual trends in nineteenth‐century American religious life, to the differences between Emerson's prophetic stance and those of Whitman, Thoreau, Melville and Lincoln, and to the effects of the Civil War on Emerson's thought and American public religion in general. The conclusion looks at Emerson's legacy in American religious history.
Charles Capper
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195396324
- eISBN:
- 9780199852703
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195396324.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America’s most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Margaret Fuller ...
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Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America’s most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Margaret Fuller ever written, and one of the great biographies in American history. In this book, Volume II, the author illuminates Fuller’s “public years”, focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. He brings to life Fuller’s dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the movements of her time. He describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and how she strove to articulate a cosmopolitan vision for her nation’s culture and politics. The author also offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller’s friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini, in addition to many others.Less
Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America’s most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Margaret Fuller ever written, and one of the great biographies in American history. In this book, Volume II, the author illuminates Fuller’s “public years”, focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. He brings to life Fuller’s dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the movements of her time. He describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and how she strove to articulate a cosmopolitan vision for her nation’s culture and politics. The author also offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller’s friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini, in addition to many others.
Paul Grimstad
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199874071
- eISBN:
- 9780199345465
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199874071.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter looks in detail at the development of Emerson’s method of composition, and links this to different accounts of experience, from Unitarian empiricism to Kant’s transcendental idealism. It ...
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This chapter looks in detail at the development of Emerson’s method of composition, and links this to different accounts of experience, from Unitarian empiricism to Kant’s transcendental idealism. It concludes by looking closely at Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche.Less
This chapter looks in detail at the development of Emerson’s method of composition, and links this to different accounts of experience, from Unitarian empiricism to Kant’s transcendental idealism. It concludes by looking closely at Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche.
Randall Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195313925
- eISBN:
- 9780199787753
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313925.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century ...
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The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. It examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. Emerging from this research is an in-depth account of Emerson's cultural construction as well as an institutional history of American literary studies in the 20th century. This book is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between a scholar's individual perspective and prevailing cultural conditions merge together to impel critics to redirect the course of a present moment — often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled — toward a desired future. When an engaged but theoretical mind meets with an impassive history, the response that follows, for some of our most imaginative and brilliant critics, has led, often and suggestively, to a turn toward Emerson.Less
The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. It examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. Emerging from this research is an in-depth account of Emerson's cultural construction as well as an institutional history of American literary studies in the 20th century. This book is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between a scholar's individual perspective and prevailing cultural conditions merge together to impel critics to redirect the course of a present moment — often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled — toward a desired future. When an engaged but theoretical mind meets with an impassive history, the response that follows, for some of our most imaginative and brilliant critics, has led, often and suggestively, to a turn toward Emerson.
Kathleen Verduin
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199584628
- eISBN:
- 9780191739095
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199584628.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Poetry
This chapter considers how Dante as national poet was presented as a model for the American artist, and how Ralph Waldo Emerson's reading of the Italian poet reflected, on the one hand, a will to ...
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This chapter considers how Dante as national poet was presented as a model for the American artist, and how Ralph Waldo Emerson's reading of the Italian poet reflected, on the one hand, a will to assert national distinction and independence, and on the other, an impulse toward cultural continuity.Less
This chapter considers how Dante as national poet was presented as a model for the American artist, and how Ralph Waldo Emerson's reading of the Italian poet reflected, on the one hand, a will to assert national distinction and independence, and on the other, an impulse toward cultural continuity.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195181005
- eISBN:
- 9780199851010
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181005.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Pragmatist poetics offers a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the rhetoric, the obsessions, the tactics, and the ambivalences that operate in experimental American poetry, especially with regard to ...
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Pragmatist poetics offers a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the rhetoric, the obsessions, the tactics, and the ambivalences that operate in experimental American poetry, especially with regard to the three major themes: community, individualism, and an obsession with flux and mobility. However, unlike most other recent accounts of the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and pragmatism on American poetry, this chapter explores how this lineage extends beyond the modernist generation. The chapter's intention here is not to attempt to define or explain the enormous wealth and complexity of pragmatism itself, but rather to explore a set of far-reaching tropes, concepts, and paradoxes embedded in American philosophy that the poets perpetuate and challenge. It is worth mentioning here that this congruence between Emerson, pragmatism, and experimental poetry, “New American Poetry” has continued to the present moment.Less
Pragmatist poetics offers a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the rhetoric, the obsessions, the tactics, and the ambivalences that operate in experimental American poetry, especially with regard to the three major themes: community, individualism, and an obsession with flux and mobility. However, unlike most other recent accounts of the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and pragmatism on American poetry, this chapter explores how this lineage extends beyond the modernist generation. The chapter's intention here is not to attempt to define or explain the enormous wealth and complexity of pragmatism itself, but rather to explore a set of far-reaching tropes, concepts, and paradoxes embedded in American philosophy that the poets perpetuate and challenge. It is worth mentioning here that this congruence between Emerson, pragmatism, and experimental poetry, “New American Poetry” has continued to the present moment.
Sharon Cameron
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226091310
- eISBN:
- 9780226091334
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226091334.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
In his essay “Experience,” Ralph Waldo Emerson asks: “Where do we find ourselves?” The place Emerson finds himself is one where no light is (“night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree”). And ...
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In his essay “Experience,” Ralph Waldo Emerson asks: “Where do we find ourselves?” The place Emerson finds himself is one where no light is (“night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree”). And it is more oppressive than that because he can't see where he is and he can't see his way out. What he attests to is stupor. In the essay's most frequently cited passage, Emerson states: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.” True to the double pattern of assertion thus far, the grammatical reference for “this evanescence” is not only the life of the child but also the evasiveness of the grief occasioned by the child's death. This chapter argues that what is at stake in “Experience” is not a question of logic but rather a question of the elegiac, and that Emerson is creating a powerful and systematic representation of grief.Less
In his essay “Experience,” Ralph Waldo Emerson asks: “Where do we find ourselves?” The place Emerson finds himself is one where no light is (“night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree”). And it is more oppressive than that because he can't see where he is and he can't see his way out. What he attests to is stupor. In the essay's most frequently cited passage, Emerson states: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.” True to the double pattern of assertion thus far, the grammatical reference for “this evanescence” is not only the life of the child but also the evasiveness of the grief occasioned by the child's death. This chapter argues that what is at stake in “Experience” is not a question of logic but rather a question of the elegiac, and that Emerson is creating a powerful and systematic representation of grief.
Ann Lee Bressler
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195129861
- eISBN:
- 9780199834013
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195129865.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Universalist movement gained both momentum and attention. Although still a small minority, Universalists stirred up widespread controversy with ...
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In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Universalist movement gained both momentum and attention. Although still a small minority, Universalists stirred up widespread controversy with their improved version of Calvinism. They faced massive opposition, even persecution, with almost all who denounced them united in a single fundamental criticism: their teaching ignored the basic lesson that all people were responsible before God for their actions, that goodness would be rewarded, and evil punished. Universalists responded by trying to show that “the larger hope” of their faith transcended such “carnal”concerns and was conducive to social concord, and for at least a generation after the turn of the century, the Universalist vision represented a genuine challenge to the religious and moral norms that accommodated the needs of a burgeoning capitalist society. However, the movement as a whole did not continue to sustain and develop the sort of spirituality that was reflected in Hosea Ballou’s teaching; the communal piety of early Universalism proved an unsatisfactory foundation, and the movement ultimately moved toward the moralism against which its early adherents had struggled. Ironically, the form of non-moralistic spirituality that gained lasting recognition in American religious history was not the popular preaching of Universalism but the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which while sharing certain themes with early Universalism, ultimately reflected a profoundly different orientation that was more closely in line with the broader tendencies of nineteenth-century American culture.Less
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Universalist movement gained both momentum and attention. Although still a small minority, Universalists stirred up widespread controversy with their improved version of Calvinism. They faced massive opposition, even persecution, with almost all who denounced them united in a single fundamental criticism: their teaching ignored the basic lesson that all people were responsible before God for their actions, that goodness would be rewarded, and evil punished. Universalists responded by trying to show that “the larger hope” of their faith transcended such “carnal”concerns and was conducive to social concord, and for at least a generation after the turn of the century, the Universalist vision represented a genuine challenge to the religious and moral norms that accommodated the needs of a burgeoning capitalist society. However, the movement as a whole did not continue to sustain and develop the sort of spirituality that was reflected in Hosea Ballou’s teaching; the communal piety of early Universalism proved an unsatisfactory foundation, and the movement ultimately moved toward the moralism against which its early adherents had struggled. Ironically, the form of non-moralistic spirituality that gained lasting recognition in American religious history was not the popular preaching of Universalism but the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which while sharing certain themes with early Universalism, ultimately reflected a profoundly different orientation that was more closely in line with the broader tendencies of nineteenth-century American culture.
John J. McDermott
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823226627
- eISBN:
- 9780823235704
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823226627.003.0008
- Subject:
- Philosophy, American Philosophy
This chapter presents an essay on the importance of Ralph Waldo Emerson for classical American philosophy. It explains that despite the differences and disagreements among ...
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This chapter presents an essay on the importance of Ralph Waldo Emerson for classical American philosophy. It explains that despite the differences and disagreements among several classic American philosophers including William James, Josiah Royce and John Dewey, they have one influence in common, and that is the thought of Emerson. Even George Santayana, another major figure of the American classical period, had an abiding interest in Emerson's thought and he frequently referred to Emerson in his own writings.Less
This chapter presents an essay on the importance of Ralph Waldo Emerson for classical American philosophy. It explains that despite the differences and disagreements among several classic American philosophers including William James, Josiah Royce and John Dewey, they have one influence in common, and that is the thought of Emerson. Even George Santayana, another major figure of the American classical period, had an abiding interest in Emerson's thought and he frequently referred to Emerson in his own writings.
Randall Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195313925
- eISBN:
- 9780199787753
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313925.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the way in which Emerson has exerted tremendous imaginative influence over 20th-century literary critics, causing them to place his “American Scholar” at the center of their ...
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This chapter examines the way in which Emerson has exerted tremendous imaginative influence over 20th-century literary critics, causing them to place his “American Scholar” at the center of their intellectual and cultural projects to remake America by redirecting the way it considered its past. Emerson's little-known involvement with the 1834 New York elections reveals how he assimilates political language so as to trope it. This innovative troping resists coercive and conventional modes of thought and discourse, but has also led to critical misreadings as to the social efficacy of Emerson's writing.Less
This chapter examines the way in which Emerson has exerted tremendous imaginative influence over 20th-century literary critics, causing them to place his “American Scholar” at the center of their intellectual and cultural projects to remake America by redirecting the way it considered its past. Emerson's little-known involvement with the 1834 New York elections reveals how he assimilates political language so as to trope it. This innovative troping resists coercive and conventional modes of thought and discourse, but has also led to critical misreadings as to the social efficacy of Emerson's writing.
David Dowling
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780300197440
- eISBN:
- 9780300206760
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300197440.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This book examines the professional fates of an idealistic group of young talented writers in whom Ralph Waldo Emerson invested generous time, energy, creativity, and capital for their literary ...
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This book examines the professional fates of an idealistic group of young talented writers in whom Ralph Waldo Emerson invested generous time, energy, creativity, and capital for their literary success. It explores the broader and richer historical context of the literary market that mitigated the material consequences of the careers of Emerson's protégés, which included Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Samuel Ward, Jones Very, Ellery Channing, and Charles Newcomb. It shows how Emerson sought to engender these collegians to carry the torch for “The Newness,” the name given to the transcendentalist movement in Concord. The book also places the significance of the protégés' apprenticeships within the conceptual framework of the social role of literary vocation in transcendental authorship, together with the concept of genius as the framework for Emerson's mentorship.Less
This book examines the professional fates of an idealistic group of young talented writers in whom Ralph Waldo Emerson invested generous time, energy, creativity, and capital for their literary success. It explores the broader and richer historical context of the literary market that mitigated the material consequences of the careers of Emerson's protégés, which included Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Samuel Ward, Jones Very, Ellery Channing, and Charles Newcomb. It shows how Emerson sought to engender these collegians to carry the torch for “The Newness,” the name given to the transcendentalist movement in Concord. The book also places the significance of the protégés' apprenticeships within the conceptual framework of the social role of literary vocation in transcendental authorship, together with the concept of genius as the framework for Emerson's mentorship.
Christopher Hanlon
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190842529
- eISBN:
- 9780190842550
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190842529.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter examines Emerson’s 1870–71 lecture series Natural History of Intellect, which formed as Emerson’s experience of memory loss became profound, and registers its author’s shifting protocols ...
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This chapter examines Emerson’s 1870–71 lecture series Natural History of Intellect, which formed as Emerson’s experience of memory loss became profound, and registers its author’s shifting protocols for producing texts as he contended with changing patterns of cognition. Natural History of Intellect reflects upon Emerson’s increasing reliance upon his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson, who assisted Emerson as he lectured and who eventually reshaped Emerson’s manuscript materials. Entering into conversation with other literary historians who challenge an account of Emerson’s thought that enshrines Emersonian individualism to the exclusion of more communal dimensions of transcendentalism, this chapter contends that the lecture series theorizes the terms of his collaboration with Ellen in ways that break with Emerson’s earlier tendency to lionize insular consciousness and to isolate the body from the mind, offering instead an account of first-person thought as if always interpenetrated with the thinking of other people.Less
This chapter examines Emerson’s 1870–71 lecture series Natural History of Intellect, which formed as Emerson’s experience of memory loss became profound, and registers its author’s shifting protocols for producing texts as he contended with changing patterns of cognition. Natural History of Intellect reflects upon Emerson’s increasing reliance upon his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson, who assisted Emerson as he lectured and who eventually reshaped Emerson’s manuscript materials. Entering into conversation with other literary historians who challenge an account of Emerson’s thought that enshrines Emersonian individualism to the exclusion of more communal dimensions of transcendentalism, this chapter contends that the lecture series theorizes the terms of his collaboration with Ellen in ways that break with Emerson’s earlier tendency to lionize insular consciousness and to isolate the body from the mind, offering instead an account of first-person thought as if always interpenetrated with the thinking of other people.
Terryl L. Givens
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195313901
- eISBN:
- 9780199871933
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313901.003.0011
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
Romanticism brings back the twinned concepts of preexistence and theosis. The revival of Plato (under Thomas Taylor's influence) sparks revival of interest in preexistence especially. William Blake, ...
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Romanticism brings back the twinned concepts of preexistence and theosis. The revival of Plato (under Thomas Taylor's influence) sparks revival of interest in preexistence especially. William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Coleridge are only the most prominent names among the Romantics, as is Alfred, Lord Tennyson among the Victorians, and Ralph Waldo Emerson among the Transcendentalists, to espouse preexistence.Less
Romanticism brings back the twinned concepts of preexistence and theosis. The revival of Plato (under Thomas Taylor's influence) sparks revival of interest in preexistence especially. William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Coleridge are only the most prominent names among the Romantics, as is Alfred, Lord Tennyson among the Victorians, and Ralph Waldo Emerson among the Transcendentalists, to espouse preexistence.
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226709635
- eISBN:
- 9780226709659
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226709659.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
This chapter poses the question of what the transcendentalist movement would look like if we placed McLean Asylum as the central institution against which the group defined its relation to New ...
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This chapter poses the question of what the transcendentalist movement would look like if we placed McLean Asylum as the central institution against which the group defined its relation to New England culture. The key figures in the story are Ralph Waldo Emerson and his acolyte Jones Very, the self-proclaimed Second Coming of Christ and writer of visionary poetry, who was confined in McLean Asylum shortly after hearing Emerson's infamous “Divinity School Address” in 1838. Through the writings on Very by Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and others in this philosophical-literary movement, the chapter examines the transcendentalists' guarded accommodation to early psychiatry—a profession that would seem to cut against the core of their anti-institutional thinking, their emphasis on non-conformism, and their radical individualism, but that intersected with the movement in surprisingly frequent and intimate ways. What emerges is a glimpse of the uneasily shared ground of American literary romanticism and psychiatry, both of which movements saw themselves as fortifying the individual against the threats of modernization and social atomization. The chapter concludes with a reading of Emerson's essay “Self-Reliance.”Less
This chapter poses the question of what the transcendentalist movement would look like if we placed McLean Asylum as the central institution against which the group defined its relation to New England culture. The key figures in the story are Ralph Waldo Emerson and his acolyte Jones Very, the self-proclaimed Second Coming of Christ and writer of visionary poetry, who was confined in McLean Asylum shortly after hearing Emerson's infamous “Divinity School Address” in 1838. Through the writings on Very by Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and others in this philosophical-literary movement, the chapter examines the transcendentalists' guarded accommodation to early psychiatry—a profession that would seem to cut against the core of their anti-institutional thinking, their emphasis on non-conformism, and their radical individualism, but that intersected with the movement in surprisingly frequent and intimate ways. What emerges is a glimpse of the uneasily shared ground of American literary romanticism and psychiatry, both of which movements saw themselves as fortifying the individual against the threats of modernization and social atomization. The chapter concludes with a reading of Emerson's essay “Self-Reliance.”
Sharon Cameron
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226091310
- eISBN:
- 9780226091334
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226091334.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
When Ralph Waldo Emerson in “The Over-soul” writes “We do not yet possess ourselves,” he means that we live out of synch with the truth of impersonality. This chapter examines formulations which ...
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When Ralph Waldo Emerson in “The Over-soul” writes “We do not yet possess ourselves,” he means that we live out of synch with the truth of impersonality. This chapter examines formulations which elaborate the mechanics of impersonality, in order to specify how persons come in contact with the impersonal. It focuses on Emerson's analysis of the way in which body and mind, counterintuitively, exemplify attributes of impersonality, as well as the way in which that “law,” outside of body and mind, is equally said to epitomize it. The chapter also considers the features of the person who is expounding impersonality. It argues that there is a connection between the anonymous voice of the speaker, the essay's stylistic singularity, and the compensating features of the erasure of personality. Although public power appears to require an indifference to persons, specifically to the distinction among persons, and especially to the particular status of the person who is writing, the chapter claims that it does so at the peril of calling its own authority into question.Less
When Ralph Waldo Emerson in “The Over-soul” writes “We do not yet possess ourselves,” he means that we live out of synch with the truth of impersonality. This chapter examines formulations which elaborate the mechanics of impersonality, in order to specify how persons come in contact with the impersonal. It focuses on Emerson's analysis of the way in which body and mind, counterintuitively, exemplify attributes of impersonality, as well as the way in which that “law,” outside of body and mind, is equally said to epitomize it. The chapter also considers the features of the person who is expounding impersonality. It argues that there is a connection between the anonymous voice of the speaker, the essay's stylistic singularity, and the compensating features of the erasure of personality. Although public power appears to require an indifference to persons, specifically to the distinction among persons, and especially to the particular status of the person who is writing, the chapter claims that it does so at the peril of calling its own authority into question.
Stephen Cushman and Gary W. Gallagher
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781469618777
- eISBN:
- 9781469618791
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469618791.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, American History: Civil War
This chapter describes interactions between Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson, providing important details on their conversations. It describes Emerson's initial impression of the president, ...
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This chapter describes interactions between Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson, providing important details on their conversations. It describes Emerson's initial impression of the president, looking closely at Lincoln's mind habits as a lawyer. Furthermore, it examines Lincoln's two most famous speeches, attempting to balance new thoughts about both thinkers' verbal artistry with attention to their military historical background.Less
This chapter describes interactions between Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson, providing important details on their conversations. It describes Emerson's initial impression of the president, looking closely at Lincoln's mind habits as a lawyer. Furthermore, it examines Lincoln's two most famous speeches, attempting to balance new thoughts about both thinkers' verbal artistry with attention to their military historical background.
Carol J. Singley
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199779390
- eISBN:
- 9780199895106
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199779390.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Competing impulses toward biological and adoptive kinship appear in the writings of Benjamin Franklin and Ann Sargent Gage. The self-made Franklin chose to acknowledge his illegitimate son, William, ...
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Competing impulses toward biological and adoptive kinship appear in the writings of Benjamin Franklin and Ann Sargent Gage. The self-made Franklin chose to acknowledge his illegitimate son, William, risking social approbation and demonstrating an attachment to blood; whereas the prominent Bostonian Daniel Sargent disowned his illegitimate daughter, Ann, and arranged for her adoption. Gender as well as social class played a role in each man’s decision. Ironically, Franklin lost his connection to William when the latter became a Loyalist during the American Revolution, whereas Ann, who struggled to reclaim her patrimony, eventually found her voice and gained a modicum of recognition. Both stories document the stigmas attached to illegitimacy during the early republic and offer new representations of adoptive kinship in relation to genealogy.Less
Competing impulses toward biological and adoptive kinship appear in the writings of Benjamin Franklin and Ann Sargent Gage. The self-made Franklin chose to acknowledge his illegitimate son, William, risking social approbation and demonstrating an attachment to blood; whereas the prominent Bostonian Daniel Sargent disowned his illegitimate daughter, Ann, and arranged for her adoption. Gender as well as social class played a role in each man’s decision. Ironically, Franklin lost his connection to William when the latter became a Loyalist during the American Revolution, whereas Ann, who struggled to reclaim her patrimony, eventually found her voice and gained a modicum of recognition. Both stories document the stigmas attached to illegitimacy during the early republic and offer new representations of adoptive kinship in relation to genealogy.
