Author: Len Gougeon Publisher: State University of New York Press ISBN: 0791480186 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
This critical biography traces the spiritual, psychological, and intellectual growth of one of America's foremost oracles and prophets, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). Beginning with his undergraduate career at Harvard and spanning the range of his adult life, the book examines the complex, often painful emotional journey inward that would eventually transform Emerson from an average Unitarian minister into one of the century's most formidable intellectual figures. By connecting Emerson's inner life with his outer life, Len Gougeon illustrates a virtually seamless relationship between Emerson's Transcendental philosophy and his later career as a social reformer, a rebel who sought to "unsettle all things" in an effort to redeem his society. In tracing the path of Emerson's evolution, Gougeon makes use of insights by Joseph Campbell, Erich Neumann, Mircea Eliade, and N. O. Brown. Like Emerson, all of these thinkers directly experienced the fragmentation and dehumanization of the Western world, and all were influenced both directly and indirectly by Emerson and his philosophy. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how Emerson's philosophy would become a major force of liberal reformation in American society, a force whose impact is still felt today.
Author: Len Gougeon Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820334693 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 434
Book Description
In Virtue's Hero, Len Gougeon draws on a huge array of primary documents--unpublished speeches, the correspondence of abolitionists, family papers, records of abolition society meetings, and more--to offer a detailed and comprehensive account of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: Thomas M. Alexander Publisher: Fordham Univ Press ISBN: 0823252299 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 625
Book Description
In these philosophical essays, a leading John Dewey scholar presents a new conceptual framework for exploring human experience as it relates to nature. The Human Eros explores themes in classical American philosophy, primarily the thought of John Dewey, but also that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Santayana, and Native American traditions. Using these works as a critical base, Thomas M. Alexander suggests that human beings have an inherent need to experience meaning and value, what he calls a “Human Eros.” Our various cultures are symbolic environments or “spiritual ecologies” within which the Human Eros seeks to thrive. This is how we inhabit the earth. Encircling and sustaining our cultural existence is nature, yet Western philosophy has not provided adequate conceptual models for thinking ecologically. Alexander introduces the idea of “eco-ontology” to explore ways in which this might be done, beginning with the primacy of Nature over Being but also including the recognition of possibility and potentiality as inherent aspects of existence. He argues for the centrality of Dewey’s thought to an effective ecological philosophy. Both “pragmatism” and “naturalism,” he shows, need to be contextualized within an emergentist, relational, nonreductive view of nature and an aesthetic, imaginative, nonreductive view of intelligence.
Author: Roger Sedarat Publisher: State University of New York Press ISBN: 1438474873 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
Emerson in Iran is the first full-length study of Persian influence in the work of the seminal American poet, philosopher, and translator, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Extending the current trend in transnational studies back to the figural origins of both the United States and Iran, Roger Sedarat's insightful comparative readings of Platonism and Sufi mysticism reveal how Emerson managed to reconcile through verse two countries so seemingly different in religion and philosophy. By tracking various rhetorical strategies through a close interrogation of Emerson's own writings on language and literary appropriation, Sedarat exposes the development of a latent but considerable translation theory in the American literary tradition. He further shows how generative Persian poetry becomes during Emerson's nineteenth century, and how such formative effects continue to influence contemporary American poetry and verse translation.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674496019 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 335
Book Description
Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry presents a selection of definitively edited texts that remind us why Emerson’s poetry matters and why he remains one of our most important theoreticians of verse. Drawn chiefly from the multivolume Collected Works, each poem is accompanied by a headnote for the student and general reader.
Author: Catherine L. Albanese Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226823342 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 371
Book Description
An ambitious history of desire in Anglo-American religion across three centuries. The pursuit of happiness weaves disparate strands of Anglo-American religious history together. In The Delight Makers, Catherine L. Albanese unravels a theology of desire tying Jonathan Edwards to Ralph Waldo Emerson to the religiously unaffiliated today. As others emphasize redemptive suffering, this tradition stresses the “metaphysical” connection between natural beauty and spiritual fulfillment. In the earth’s abundance, these thinkers see an expansive God intent on fulfilling human desire through prosperity, health, and sexual freedom. Through careful readings of Cotton Mather, Andrew Jackson Davis, William James, Esther Hicks, and more, Albanese reveals how a theology of delight evolved alongside political overtures to natural law and individual liberty in the United States.
Author: Alan M. Levine Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813140471 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 393
Book Description
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: Yale University Press ISBN: 9780300094022 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
A comprehensive collection of Emerson's writings against slavery and the subjugation of American Indians - writings that reveal Emerson's deep commitment to social reform. Included are 18 works by Emerson, including speeches and lectures, on the subject of slavery, written between 1838 and 1863.
Author: Len Gougeon
Author: Len Gougeon
Author: Thomas M. Alexander
Author: Roger Sedarat
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Author: Catherine L. Albanese
Author: Alan M. Levine
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson