The Cambridge Companion To Ralph Waldo Emerson

A collection of newly commissioned essays provides a critical introduction to pastor and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In his 1837 speech "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, "life is our dictionary," encapsulating a body of work that reached well beyond the American 19th century. This comprehensive study explores Emerson as a preacher, poet, philosopher, lecturer, essayist and editor. There are nearly 100 entries on individual texts and their personal, historical and literary contexts. Emerson's work is placed within his relationships with family members, fellow Transcendentalists and transatlantic friends, and his commitment to ethics, self-culture and social change. This book provides the fullest possible exploration of Emerson's writing and philosophy. Far ahead of his own time, the man enthusiastically questioned institutions, communities, friendships, history, individuality and contemporaneous approaches to environmental stewardship.

This Companion is a valuable resource for historical and contextual material, whether on Thoreau's early writings like A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, on the monumental Walden, or on his assorted journals and later books. It also serves in some ways as a biographical guide, offering new insights into his turbid publishing career, and his brief but extraordinarily original life.

Ralph Ellison's classic 1952 novel Invisible Man is one of the most important and controversial novels in the American canon and remains widely read and studied. This Companion provides an introduction to this influential and significant novelist and critic and to his masterpiece. It features essays by leading scholars, a chronology and a guide to further reading. The essays reveal alternative dimensions of Ellison's art radiating out from Invisible Man into other domains - technology, political theory, law, photography, music, religion - and recover the compelling urgency and relevance of Ellison's political and artistic vision. Since Ellison's death his published oeuvre has been expanded by several major volumes - his collected essays, the fragment of a novel, Juneteenth (1999), letters and short stories - examined here in the context of his life and work. Students and scholars of Ellison and of American and African-American literature will find this an invaluable and accessible guide.

This collection explores the many intellectual and social contexts in which Emerson lived, thought and wrote.

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, A Political Companion to Emerson 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.

This collection explores the many intellectual and social contexts in which Emerson lived, thought and wrote.

A comprehensive introduction to novelist and critic Ralph Ellison and his masterpiece Invisible Man.