The Emerson Dilemma

Author : T. Gregory Garvey
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 9780820322414
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Ralph Waldo Emerson
Publisher : Beacon Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807077238
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Political Emerson written by Ralph Waldo Emerson and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2004-09-23 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) never considered himself a political thinker. And yet he rose to prominence during one of the most turbulent times in U.S. history. As a result, political questions grew in importance for him, becoming by the 1860s one of his chief concerns as a public intellectual. In The Political Emerson, David M. Robinson has brought together for the first time the best of Emerson's numerous writings on politics and social reform.

Author : Len Gougeon
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820334693
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Virtue's Hero written by Len Gougeon and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Virtue's Hero, Len Gougeon draws on a huge array of primary documents--unpublished speeches, the correspondence of abolitionists, family papers, records of abolition society meetings, and more--to offer a detailed and comprehensive account of Emerson's antislavery position. --from publisher description

Author : Alan M. Levine
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813140471
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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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.

Author : Ralph Waldo Emerson
Publisher : Beacon Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807077191
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Spiritual Emerson written by Ralph Waldo Emerson and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2004-04-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) is known best in the twenty-first century as a literary innovator and early architect of American intellectual culture, but his writings still offer spiritual sustenance to the thoughtful reader. The Spiritual Emerson, originally published on the two hundredth anniversary of the writer's birth, brings together the writings that articulate Emerson's spiritual vision and promise the greatest relevance to today's reader.

Author : Barry Tharaud
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
ISBN 13 : 0874130913
Total Pages : 623 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Emerson for the Twenty-first Century written by Barry Tharaud and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 623 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While previous collections of Emerson essays have tended to be a sort of 'stock-taking' or 'retrospective' look at Emerson scholarship, this collection follows a more 'prospective' trajectory for Emerson studies based on the recent increase in global perspectives in nearly all fields of humanistic studies.

Author : John Michael
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 0816651434
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Identity and the Failure of America written by John Michael and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Thomas Jefferson to John Rawls, justice has been at the center of America’s self-image and national creed. At the same time, for many of its peoples-from African slaves and European immigrants to women and the poor-the American experience has been defined by injustice: oppression, disenfranchisement, violence, and prejudice. In Identity and the Failure of America, John Michael explores the contradictions between a mythic national identity promising justice to all and the realities of a divided, hierarchical, and frequently iniquitous history and social order. Through a series of insightful readings, Michael analyzes such cultural moments as the epic dramatization of the tension between individual ambition and communal complicity in Moby-Dick, attempts to effect social change through sympathy in the novels of Lydia Marie Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s antislavery activism and Frederick Douglass’s long fight for racial equity, and the divisive figures of John Brown and Nat Turner in American letters and memory. Focusing on exemplary instances when the nature of the United States as an essentially conflicted nation turned to force, Michael ultimately posits the development of a more cosmopolitan American identity, one that is more fully and justly imagined in response to the nation’s ethical failings at home and abroad. John Michael is professor of English and of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values and Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World.

Author : Randall Fuller
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780198042822
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Emerson's Ghosts written by Randall Fuller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-07 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is increasingly commonplace to find scholars who circle back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and his intellectual heirs as a way of better understanding contemporary social and aesthetic contexts. Why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? In this innovative study, Randall Fuller examines the way pivotal twentieth-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. He examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. An engaging institutional history of American literary studies in the twentieth century, Emerson's Ghosts reveals the unexpected convergent forces that have shaped American cultural history in lasting ways.

Author : Wesley Mott
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107028019
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Emerson in Context written by Wesley Mott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the many intellectual and social contexts in which Emerson lived, thought and wrote.

Author : Kenneth S. Sacks
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691223688
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Understanding Emerson written by Kenneth S. Sacks and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A seminal figure in American literature and philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson is considered the apostle of self-reliance, fully alive within his ideas and disarmingly confident about his innermost thoughts. Yet the circumstances around "The American Scholar" oration--his first great public address and the most celebrated talk in American academic history--suggest a different Emerson. In Understanding Emerson, Kenneth Sacks draws on a wealth of contemporary correspondence and diaries, much of it previously unexamined, to reveal a young intellectual struggling to define himself and his principles. Caught up in the fierce dispute between his Transcendentalist colleagues and Harvard, the secular bastion of Boston Unitarianism and the very institution he was invited to honor with the annual Phi Beta Kappa address, Emerson agonized over compromising his sense of self-reliance while simultaneously desiring to meet the expectations of his friends. Putting aside self-doubts and a resistance to controversy, in the end he produced an oration of extraordinary power and authentic vision that propelled him to greater awareness of social justice, set the standard for the role of the intellectual in America, and continues to point the way toward educational reform. In placing this singular event within its social and philosophical context, Sacks opens a window into America's nineteenth-century intellectual landscape as well as documenting the evolution of Emerson's idealism. Engagingly written, this book, which includes the complete text of "The American Scholar," allows us to appreciate fully Emerson's brilliant rebuke of the academy and his insistence that the most important truths derive not from books and observation but from intuition within each of us. Rising defiantly before friend and foe, Emerson triumphed over his hesitations, redirecting American thought and pedagogy and creating a personal tale of quiet heroism.