Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

The big news for 2017 is the Thoreau Bicentennial. The sheer volume of quality scholarship appearing this year is truly remarkable. Among the many full-length studies and essay collections are Thoreau: A Life, the new definitive biography by Laura Dassow Walls; a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose edited by Richard J. Schneider; Henry David Thoreau in Context, edited by James S. Finley; and The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau's River Years, an important contribution to our understanding of Thoreau's science by Robert M. Thorson. Although outdone by his younger friend, Emerson receives strong contributions from Roger Thompson on rhetoric and John T. Lysaker on philosophy. After a few sleepy years, Transcendentalism as a movement experiences renewed attention with four full-length studies and numerous book chapters and articles. Such unfairly neglected individuals as Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Henry James Sr., and Jones Very receive fresh considerations as well.

i Emerson

a. Editions and Reference

Two new editions of Emerson's work appear this year. Editor Robert D. Habich's Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Broadview) includes texts that most clearly confront "the personal challenges of life with … 'practical power,'" a quality "of continuing relevance to readers who share with him the desire to live fully … in a compromised and changing world." Habich's introduction discusses Emerson's unwitting role as leader of the Transcendentalist movement and includes a careful assessment of his reception spanning from "iconoclast to cultural hero." For its fresh consideration of Emerson's life and career, Habich's book stands to garner broad interest among seasoned scholars, students, and general readers. Editors Michael P. Branch and Clinton Mohs offer a more specialized edition with "The Best Read Naturalist": Nature Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Virginia). While environmental critics typically acknowledge Emerson's inspiration for such indispensable nature writers as Thoreau and John Muir, they just as often find his own writing irredeemably anthropocentric. This edition is designed to change all that. It collects 13 sermons, lectures, and essays spanning most of Emerson's active career, including such noncanonical pieces as "God that Made the World" and "On the Relation of Man to the Globe." The Emerson that emerges is indeed something other than the detached intellectual coolly thinking through the pasteboard mask of nature; instead we see a man more akin to Thoreau, immersed in the materiality and immediacy of nature.

Habich has also updated "Ralph Waldo Emerson" for Oxford Bibliographies, available at oxfordbibliographies.com. My own annotated listing of Emerson scholarship, "An Emerson Bibliography, 2016," also appears this year (ESP 28, ii: 16–17).

b. Biography and Contemporaries

Two studies take up Emerson's career as lecturer. Bonnie Carr O'Neill includes a chapter on Emerson in her outstanding book Literary Celebrity and Public Life. The central tension for O'Neill is Emerson's desire to serve as a conduit for impersonal or transcendent wisdom in a lyceum community that valued personalities and embodied performances of selfhood. O'Neill concludes that Emerson, ironically, took great pains to cultivate a public self that would draw in such a community even while he hoped (perhaps naively) to transform it—to inspire its value in something greater than spectacle and hero worship. O'Neill's book will be of interest both to scholars of Emerson's lecturing career and of celebrity culture more generally. Tom F. Wright devotes a chapter to Emerson's "England" in Lecturing the Atlantic. Though rather long and given to minutiae, the chapter gives a fine analysis of the lecture's reception in New York City (newspapers approved Emerson's circumspect praise of England as a way to quell the city's Anglophobia in the wake of the Astor Palace Riot) and in Cincinnati (newspapers seized upon Emerson's visit to establish their interpretive independence from elite cultural centers in the Northeast).

Russell Sbriglia in "The Symptoms of Ideology Critique; or, How We Learned to Enjoy the Symptom and Ignore the Fetish," pp. 107–36 in Russell Sbriglia, ed., Everything You Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek (Duke), uses Slavoj Žižek...