Nineteenth-Century Prose

Emerson's antislavery lectures of 1844-1863 would seem an unlikely place to look for Emerson's scientific ideology, but in fact these lectures are some of that ideology's most compelling expressions. To combat the American crime of slavery, Emerson...

Emerson's second Phi Beta Kappa Address at Harvard, now little known, was delivered in 1867, and has been regarded both in his day and ours as a conspicuous failure. In "Progress of Culture" Emerson spoke as a prominent, even revered, public figure,...

This essay attempts to contribute to the current debate over Emerson's "dilemma" as a public intellectual increasingly, and somewhat reluctantly, drawn into what he himself calls "turmoils of the earth" in the essay "Experience." Synthesizing recent...

The historicizing tendency in contemporary criticism of Emerson often leads scholars to interpret the American landscapes in his writing as pointedly political: Emerson is seen as complicit in American imperialism. This paper balances those interpretations...

This introduction examines the fifteen essays from the perspective of three categories: those that are involved in constructing a new Emerson who generally displays more consistency and continuity than the model provided by Stephen Whicher in the early...

In a boldly unconventional structure, original verse epigraphs frequently preface Emerson's essays. Readers, however, most often ignore the epigraphs, and scholarship has given them virtually no extended consideration. I explore the generic and theoretical...

In "The Emerson Enigma" the thought of Emerson is interpreted as a form of perspectivalism. Three perspectives are examined in detail: transcendentalism, existential individualism, and fatalism. An attempt is made to show that transcendentalism, as...

For those who see Emerson as a seminal figure in American pragmatism, 2003 marks not only the bicentennial of Emerson's birth, but a century since William James and John Dewey delivered addresses that constitute their most explicit public pronouncements...