Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

This was an especially significant year for Emerson and for Transcendentalism studies, featuring major critical studies of Emerson by Johannes Voelz and Branka Arsić, along with the authoritative edition of Letters and Social Aims and no less than three important essay collections. Scholarship on Transcendentalism was both consolidated and advanced by the monumental Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, while the story of Transcendentalist utopianism was further enriched by the publication of Richard Francis's second book on the subject, a collective biography of the Alcott family and Fruitlands.

i Emerson

a. Scholarly and Reader Editions

For Emersonians one of the year's most important events was the appearance of Letters and Social Aims, volume 8 of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Harvard), ed. Joel Myerson. In addition to elegant production and indispensable annotations (prepared by Glen M. Johnson), the extended historical introduction by Ronald A. Bosco and Myerson's textual introduction clarify Emerson's deteriorating physical and mental states during his last decade as well as questions about his role in assembling a book he felt trapped into producing. Drawing on published and unpublished primary documents unavailable to previous biographers, Bosco and Myerson revise the standard narrative of Emerson's decline, substantiating the parts played by the Emerson children (especially Ellen Tucker Emerson) and the collaboration with James Elliot Cabot that led to the book's publication in December 1875. The extent of this collaboration, together with Emerson's more or less passive acquiescence and progressive incapacity, necessitated a different textual policy than has governed previous volumes of the Harvard Collected Works. Although, as Cabot said later, "There is nothing [in Letters and Social Aims] that he did not write," Emerson no longer exercised exclusive control over his text. Of eleven pieces collected in the volume, Cabot with assistance from Ellen Emerson shaped seven previously unpublished ones from lecture into essay form, including "Poetry and Imagination," "Eloquence," and "Immortality."

A two-volume edition of Emerson's journals, Selected Journals, 1820-1877, ed. Lawrence Alan Rosenwald (Library of America), reprints about one-third of Harvard's Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks. In place of the JMN editors' genetic text, Rosenwald has made a clear text that silently incorporates Emerson's revisions. This decision, together with the exclusion of notebook material and very early and very late journal entries, is designed to represent Emerson's mature journal as a distinctive kind of literary work, "more intimate, conversational, spontaneous, aleatoric, and indecorous" than the lectures and essays he made from it.

b. Philosophical Emerson

This year saw the publication of two major critical studies of Emerson: Johannes Voelz's Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson's Challenge (New England) and Branka Arsić's On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Harvard). Despite important differences in methodology, critical stance, and theoretical framework, the authors present arguments that, while not quite complementary at all points, nonetheless indicate a significant shift in the way Emerson is being read.

An ambitious book with a two-pronged agenda, Transcendental Resistance undertakes a rigorous, sustained critique of the theoretical assumptions underlying New Americanist criticism of the last three decades, including both empire criticism and the more recent transnational turn. While Voelz's central critical and textual interest resides in what he calls "Emerson's challenge," Emerson also figures as "exemplary interpretive object" in the book's wider theoretical and disciplinary critique. This double purpose is reflected in the structure of dialectically paired chapters—critique followed by alternative interpretation—organized around three topics: representation, identity, and nation. Emerson has continued to fascinate, Voelz argues, because of the fundamental ambiguity of his individualist conception of radical change. Depending on one's critical angle of vision, this conception may seem reactionary or radical, an open invitation to ideological complicity or a source of resistance. The reception of this ambiguity is reflected in the oftentimes mutually exclusive structure of the critical debate over whether Emerson's thought, writing, and public actions have served to foster radical change or to reinforce the status quo. In its most recent incarnations during the last 30 years, these opposed positions have derived not only...