Synopses & Reviews
"An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote and in this book, the leading scholar of New England literary culture looks at the long shadow Emerson himself has cast, and at his role and significance as a truly American institution. On the occasion of Emerson's 200th birthday, Lawrence Buell revisits the life of the nation's first public intellectual and discovers how he became a "representative man."
Born into the age of inspired amateurism that emerged from the ruins of pre-revolutionary political, religious, and cultural institutions, Emerson took up the challenge of thinking about the role of the United States alone and in the world. With characteristic authority and grace, Buell conveys both the style and substance of Emerson's accomplishment in his conception of America as the transplantation of Englishness into the new world, and in his prodigious work as writer, religious thinker, and philosopher. Here we see clearly the paradoxical key to his success, the fierce insistence on independence that acted so magnetically upon all around him. Steeped in Emerson's writings, and in the life and lore of the America of his day, Buell's book is as individual and as compelling as its subject. At a time when Americans and non-Americans alike are struggling to understand what this country is, and what it is about, Emerson gives us an answer in the figure of this representative American, an American for all, and for all times.
Review
"The great virtue of Lawrence Buell's Emerson lies in its attempt to do justice to Emersonian process, as well as to the way he has been appropriated by various cultural agendas and actively engaged by writers ranging from Whitman and Ralph (Waldo) Ellison to Nietzsche and Matthew Arnold." B. Kite, Village Voice
Review
"Lawrence Buell has made it his business to set forth exciting new lines of inquiry. He has done so once again: bringing Emerson up to date, moving him away from a nation-based paradigm, and firing him up as an entry point to a global, cross-lingual circuit." Wai Chee Dimock, author of Empire for Liberty
Review
"This book is a literary-cultural event: the harvest of the past half-century of Emersonian revaluations and the harbinger, guide, and provocation for the next generations of Emerson scholars and critics. One cannot call a work on Emerson definitive, even provisionally, but I cannot imagine that any Americanist or for that matter, anyone interested in America, specialist or non-specialist will be able to do without this book in the foreseeable future." Sacvan Bercovitch, author of The American Jeremiad, and The Puritan Origins of the American Self
About the Author
Lawrence Buell is John P. Marquand Professor of English at Harvard University.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations Used in This Book
Introduction
1. The Making of a Public Intellectual
2. Emersonian Self-Reliance in Theory and Practice
3. Emersonian Poetics
4. Religious Radicalisms
5. Emerson as a Philosopher?
6. Social Thought and Reform: Emerson and Abolition
7. Emerson as Anti-Mentor
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index