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Overview
This edition of Representative Men is reproduced from the fourth volume of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, text established by Douglas Emory Wilson.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781542768474 |
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Publisher: | CreateSpace Publishing |
Publication date: | 01/26/2017 |
Pages: | 184 |
Product dimensions: | 5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.39(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
"Emerson is a writer who grows restless if he stays too long with any proposition. And so, as one of his most intelligent modern readers, Judith Shklar, has pointed out, he built Representative Men around the principle of 'rotation,' which had become a political axiom in Jacksonian Americathe idea that no man, no matter how imposing, should be accorded permanent authority. Representative Men honors the language of democracy in its very title, and it employs political metaphors throughout. 'We are multiplied,' the opening chapter declares, 'by our proxies.' "
From the Introduction by Andrew Delbanco
Table of Contents
Historical Introduction
Statement of Editorial Principles
Textual Introduction
REPRESENTATIVE MEN: SEVEN LECTURES
1. Uses of Great Men
2. Plato, or the Philosopher
Plato: New Readings
3. Swedenborg, or the Mystic
4. Montaigne, or the Skeptic
5. Shakspeare, or the Poet
6. Napoleon, or the Man of the World
7. Goethe, or the Writer
Notes
Textual Apparatus
Annex A: The Manuscript
Appendix 1: The 1850 Compositors
Appendix 2: Revisions in the Manuscript
Annex B: Parallel Passages
Index
Preface
"Emerson is a writer who grows restless if he stays too long with any proposition. And so, as one of his most intelligent modern readers, Judith Shklar, has pointed out, he built Representative Men around the principle of 'rotation,' which had become a political axiom in Jacksonian Americathe idea that no man, no matter how imposing, should be accorded permanent authority. Representative Men honors the language of democracy in its very title, and it employs political metaphors throughout. 'We are multiplied,' the opening chapter declares, 'by our proxies.' "
From the Introduction by Andrew Delbanco
Andrew Delbanco is Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. Among his many publications are The Puritan Ordeal and The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (both from Harvard).