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Argues Emerson's representatives both as an American writer of his time and as a comprehensive human spirit. Emerson appears here in all his vital contradictions.
'Becoming Who We Are' clarifies the political and existential aspects of Stanley Cavell's understanding of ordinary language and of skepticism, and shows the close connection between his reception of Kant, Heidegger, and Austin and his exploration of what Emersonian Perfectionism offers to democracy and modern life.
Emerson and Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also be seen as bitter rivals: America’s foremost literary statesman, protective of his reputation, and an ambitious and sometimes refractory protégé. The truth, Joel Porte maintains, is that Emerson and Thoreau were complementary literary geniuses, mutually inspiring and inspired. In this book of essays, Porte focuses on Emerson and Thoreau as writers. He traces their individual achievements and their points of intersection, arguing that both men, starting from a shared belief in the importance of “self-culture,” produced a body of writing that helped move a decidedly provincial New England readership into the broader arena of international culture. It is a book that will appeal to all readers interested in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau.
"The life of a literary work depends on readers whose existence it confirms or (the valuable possibility) augments," writes Monroe Engel. The essays collected here concern the related thesis that "the vitality of the literary enterprise is related to its usability, its capacity to strengthen or alter our options." The first group of essays is theoretical--discussion of habit, originality, religious perspectives, and self-evaluation. The second group approaches specific issues and authors within the American context. The collection concludes with five essays on teaching literature to students whose previous literary exposure has been limited.
A collection of newly commissioned essays provides a critical introduction to pastor and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
This 1991 book examines nineteenth-century literature, focusing on the general question of the American Romantic ego.
Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called “the great and crescive self,” he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes. Here are all the indispensable and most renowned works, including “The American Scholar” (“our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes called it), “The Divinity School Address,” considered atheistic by many of his listeners, the summons to “Self-Reliance,” along with the more embattled realizations of “Circles” and, especially, “Experience.” Here, too, are his wide-ranging portraits of Montai...
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Gothic: Origins and Innovations brings together nineteen papers from an international group of scholars currently researching in the field of the Gothic which take a fresh, contemporary look at the tradition from its eighteenth-century inception to the twentieth century. Topics and authors include the current usage and definition of the term 'Gothic'; the eighteenth-century rise of the genre; the Sublime; Victorian sensation fiction, and authors such as Coleridge, Mary Shelly, Maturin, LeFanu, Washington Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, John Neale, Jack London, Herman Melville, Dickens, Henry James and the movie version of his Turn of the Screw, The Innocents. This wide-ranging s...
The Undiscovered Dewey explores the profound influence of evolution and its corresponding ideas of contingency and uncertainty on John Dewey's philosophy of action, particularly its argument that inquiry proceeds from the uncertainty of human activity. Dewey separated the meaningfulness of inquiry from a larger metaphysical story concerning the certainty of human progress. He then connected this thread to the way in which our reflective capacities aid us in improving our lives. Dewey therefore launched a new understanding of the modern self that encouraged intervention in social and natural environments but which nonetheless demanded courage and humility because of the intimate relationship ...