The Critical Reception of Emerson

Unsettling All Things
Erscheinungsjahr 2000
ISBN: 978-1-57113-166-9
Verlag: Boydell & Brewer

Buch, Englisch, Band 20, 249 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 158 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 522 g

Reihe: Studies in English and American Literature and Culture

A history of the most important scholarly criticism of Emerson from his time down to the present.

Since the 1820s, Ralph Waldo Emerson has provoked an unsettled response from his readers and contentiousness among critics. Critics still contest Emerson's position: Was he poet or philosopher? Did he liberate American literatureor narrow it to a one-dimensional idea? Is his signature concept of self-reliance the most profound contribution to democratic individualism or the epitome of capitalism's impoverished thought? But by the mid 20th century the swing between condemnation and celebration of Emerson had given way to the familiar story of his bisected career, which provided a neat structure for viewing his life and work, and shaped our thought about him. Now that story is beingchallenged by the application of poststructuralism and textual editing, and with the publication of an amazing repertoire of editions, the Emerson canon is changing. The result is that Emerson criticism now faces a far more complex group of writings than before. One hundred and fifty years after Emerson styled himself an 'experimenter' who would 'unsettle all things,' this new critical history illustrates the continuing, thought-provoking success of thatexperiment.

Sarah Ann Wider is Professor of English at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wider, Sarah Ann

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophie: Allgemeines, Methoden
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

"Only Biography": Emerson's Peculiar Life
"Our Age is Retrospective": Genres of Reception
Contesting the Poet: Emerson in the Nineteenth Century
The Philosopher's Millstone: New Humanism, Modernism, and the Marxist Frontier
Emerson and the Dilemma for New Criticism
Imagining a New Emerson: The Power of the Editions
The Philosophers' Stone: Emerson Between Centuries