The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson

by Christopher Hanlon (Editor)

Overview

The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most expansive collection of critical essays on Emerson to date, a survey that approaches Emerson from the vantages of climate change, racial justice, print culture, the digital humanities, the new religious studies, hemispheric American Studies, health humanities, and affect theory among other critical perspectives. Curated between a forward by editor Christopher Hanlon--who makes the case for a capacious and contemporary Emerson--and Cornel West--the activist-scholar whose influential work on Emerson merges with a career of advocacy for economic and racial justice?this collection assesses the history and state of Emerson scholarship while charting pathways for new work on this most essential American writer. Comprised of new works by leading figures in nineteenth-century Americanist literary studies, the volume suggests directions into underexamined facets of Emerson's writing, life, and reputation. From Emerson's engagements with energy infrastructure and the processes of extraction that undergirded the locomotives he rode and the energy economies he sometimes extolled; to the vicissitudes of age he experienced alongside the romantic tropes of youthful vigour he both re-circulated and re-tooled; to Emerson's poetry, both in its philosophical formulations and in its reflections of the material circumstances of nineteenth-century print culture; to Emerson's resonance beyond the United States, elsewhere in the western hemisphere; to the Black press and its refractions of Emersonian transcendentalism in the midst of ante- and post-bellum justice struggles; to the legacies of Emerson to be found in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Rachel Carson, and in the versions of ?Emerson? to be found in children's literature; to his often-fraught and often-fruitful engagements with reform movements of various sorts; to the prospects for digital processes of re-reading Emerson and his contemporaries' styles of textual production and engagement, The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson is a necessary resource for students, scholars, and general readers committed to the study of Emerson, transcendentalism, and current critical approaches to United States literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192647092
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	07/04/2024
Series:	Oxford Handbooks
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	656
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Christopher Hanlon is Professor of United States literature at Arizona State University. He is the author of America's England: Atlantic Sectionalism and Antebellum Literature (Oxford, 2013) and Emerson's Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style (Oxford, 2018) as well as numerous essays on American literature and culture published in outlets such as The New York Times, The L.A. Review of Books, American Literary History, American Literature, J19, and Nineteenth-Century Literature.

Table of Contents

Forward, Christopher HanlonPart 1Climate, or, Emerson and the Environmental HumanitiesEmerson, Energy, Infrastructure, Jeffrey InskoEmerson Undersea, Michele Navakas and Dominic Mastroianni'Up again, old heart!': Emerson in the Athropocene, Michelle NeelyThe 'Mute Music' in Emerson's Polarity: Generating Practical Power, Christina KatopodisTranscendental Geologies: Emerson, Anti-slavery, and the Kairos of Deep Time, Patrick Morgan'The Seed of the World': Emerson's Transatlantic Transcendentalist First Philosophy”, David GreenhamPart 2American Civilization, or, Hemispheric EmersonsEmerson, Martí, and a Cosmopolitanism for the Americas, Timothy DonahueEmersonian Figurations in Modern Hispanic Poetics, Ricardo Miguel-AlfonsoEmerson and Caribbean Emancipation, Martha SchoolmanPart 3Race, or, Emancipation and ResistanceSpeaking for 'the Indian', Drew Lopenzina and Laura L. Mielke'The calamity of the next ages': Emerson and Reconstruction, Christopher HanlonEmerson and Carlyle: Race and (Anti-)Slavery, Tim SommerNature's President: Emerson on Emancipation and Executive Power, Michael StancliffEmersonian Legacies of Black Resistance, Anita PattersonThe 'arch-abolitionist': Emerson, Love, and Social Justice, Prentiss ClarkPart 4Wealth, or, Capitalism and its AlternativesEmerson and Capitalism, Benjamin PickfordEmerson's Market Forces, Andrew KopecEmerson and the Socialists: American Renaissance in the Age of Fourier, Holly JacksonPart 5Worship, or, Religion and the SecularEmerson among the Methodists, Claudia StokesEmerson and Secularism, Justine MurisonPart 6Prospects, or, Computational Approaches to EmersonExperimenting with Emerson: A Quantitative Approach, Brad Rittenhouse and Maurice S. LeeEmerson's Unoriginality and the Commonplace Books of Mary Moody Emerson and Margaret Fuller, Noelle BakerPart 7Quotation and Originality, or, Emerson's EditorsEditing Emerson, Ronald Bosco and Joel MyersonEmerson, Nature, and Networks in the Black Press, Brigitte FielderEllen Tucker Emerson: Portrait of a Daughter as Secretary, Editor, and Biographer, Kate CulkinPart 8The Man of the World, or, Readers, Interlocutors, Networks'Fleeing to fables': Reading Emerson in Literature for Children, Kristina WestEmerson, Melville, Futility, Rachel BannerEmerson, Rhetoric, and Oratorical Culture, Roger ThompsonLydia Jackson Emerson, Randall FullerPart 9The Poet, or, From Commonplacing Verse to Poetic Print CultureMetamorphosis and Transcription: Emerson's 'The Poet' and the Question of Form, Meredith McGillEmerson's Muses, Poets, and Persons from The Dial to The Atlantic Monthly, Eliza RichardsPart 10"Me" and "Not-Me," or, Emersonian Embodiments, Affects, Intimacies'Nature Abhors the Old': Emerson's Transcendental Ageism, Sari EdelsteinAphasic Etymology: A Disability Poetics and the Emerson-Whitman Connection, Don James McLaughlinFrom Iconoclast to Icon: The Public Intellectual as Celebrity, Bonnie O'NeilEmerson, Reluctant Feminist, Leslie Elizabeth EckelEmerson and the Wildness of Friendship, Eduardo CadavaAfterward: Ralph Waldo Emerson Transfigured, Cornel WestBibliographyIndex