Project MUSE®: The Dial: A Journal of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/881
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Dial: A Journal of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2024) through current issueLatest Articles: The Dial: A Journal of the Ralph Waldo Emerson SocietyTWOProject MUSE®The Dial: A Journal of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society3065-5447Latest articles in The Dial: A Journal of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Reclaiming The Vote from The Manosphere: Louisa May Alcott, Ednah Dow Cheney, and the Case for Recovering Municipal Suffrage
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984503
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Moms for Liberty is far from the first organization of American women to recognize the potential of school boards to direct political reform across the country. In some ways, the misogynist, racist, white nationalist groups responsible for the rise of book bans in K–12 schools have leveraged/appropriated strategies popularized by white, first-wave suffragists a century and a half ago to secure the franchise. In the 1870s and 1880s, a generation of women once removed from High Transcendentalism revolutionized conversations about voting rights in Massachusetts by advocating for municipal suffrage. Page through any issue of The Woman’s Journal, the weekly organ for the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/881/image/coversmallReclaiming The Vote from The Manosphere: Louisa May Alcott, Ednah Dow Cheney, and the Case for Recovering Municipal Suffrage2026-03-02text/htmlen-USReclaiming The Vote from The Manosphere: Louisa May Alcott, Ednah Dow Cheney, and the Case for Recovering Municipal Suffrage2026-03-022026TWOProject MUSE®420412026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-02Cluster Essay: Expanding the Bright Circle
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984504
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It is safe to say that the writers Kate Chopin, Pauline Hopkins, and Molly Brodak have not been written about together before now. While Chopin and Hopkins are at least of the same mid-nineteenth-century generation—though from different racial, class, and geographic backgrounds and each possessed of her own artistic and intellectual sensibilities—Brodak was a contemporary twenty-first century poet and memoirist. Nor is it quite true that in the review cluster that follows these three women are written about together. Rather, my fellow contributors and I have gathered them to examine how their writings may each be considered as traversing a particular literary-historical orbit that predates each of their lifetimes:
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/881/image/coversmallCluster Essay: Expanding the Bright Circle2026-03-02text/htmlen-USCluster Essay: Expanding the Bright Circle2026-03-022026TWOProject MUSE®689762026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-02Contributors to The Dial 2.2
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984505
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Rachel Banner is Associate Professor of English at West Chester University, where she teaches courses in early U.S. literature and first-year writing. She is also a departmental union representative for APSCUF-AFT Local 1421. Most recently, her work has been published in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, American Gothic Studies, and The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2024).Mollie Barnes is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, Vice President of the Margaret Fuller Society, and Vice President of Organizational Matters for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her first book—Paper Heroines: Women Writers in Conversation and Community
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/881/image/coversmallContributors to The Dial 2.22026-03-02text/htmlen-USContributors to The Dial 2.22026-03-022026TWOProject MUSE®48672026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-02Elizabeth Oakes Smith, America’s Mountaineering Transcendental Poetess
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984506
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“To go into solitude,” writes Emerson at the start of Nature (1836), “a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.”1 In other words, before entering a solitary encounter with the world and its divinity, one must cut ties to the social realm that begins with the bedroom. This is the Emerson we know and love, or perhaps the one we love to hate. This vision of solitude has been deemed central to his intellectual innovation for much of his reception history. But today, that supposed desire to transcend the confinement of daily life reads as misogynist. Since the late twentieth century, the flavor of Emerson’s idealism has been taken as a sign of his white male privilege. In the words of David
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/881/image/coversmallElizabeth Oakes Smith, America’s Mountaineering Transcendental Poetess2026-03-02text/htmlen-USElizabeth Oakes Smith, America’s Mountaineering Transcendental Poetess2026-03-022026TWOProject MUSE®596002026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-02Margaret Fuller’s Bodily Politics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984507
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In July 1847 Margaret Fuller, after having toured Europe at length with Marcus and Rebecca Spring, her Quaker friends who, in exchange of her tutoring their son Eddie, were paying for part of her travel and lodging expenses, found herself finally parting ways with them. While in Venice, in fact, the Springs announced that they were going to continue their travels north, visit Germany, and then return to the U.S. This new itinerary did not sit well with Fuller, as she did not want to leave Italy, and did not feel it was time to return home. After some deliberations, Fuller chose independence over the security of traveling with her more affluent friends, who could guarantee her a chaperon as well as material and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/881/image/coversmallMargaret Fuller’s Bodily Politics2026-03-02text/htmlen-USMargaret Fuller’s Bodily Politics2026-03-022026TWOProject MUSE®294642026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-02Charles Gordon Ames: Taking Emersonian Transcendentalism Forward
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984508
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When Charles Gordon Ames was born in 1828, Emerson was twenty-five, engaged in supply preaching and courting his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker. Emerson had yet to leave the pulpit for the lecturn and to publish the essays that would so influence the soul-searching, self-questioning Ames in the late 1850s. Ames, who was as troubled by narrow-minded, disengaged orthodoxy as Emerson had been but younger than Emerson by a generation, thus came to Emersonian Transcendentalism as a cultural dynamic through the polished, published form of Emerson’s essays. Via his own experience, Ames forged “an original relation” with Emerson’s work, one that represents a second generation of Emersonian language and applied philosophy
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/881/image/coversmallCharles Gordon Ames: Taking Emersonian Transcendentalism Forward2026-03-02text/htmlen-USCharles Gordon Ames: Taking Emersonian Transcendentalism Forward2026-03-022026TWOProject MUSE®451752026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-02Forum on the Times: Unsettling the Transcendental Manosphere
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984509
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Three recent books from 2025—Kate Culkin’s Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy; Randall Fuller’s Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism; and David Robinson’s Transcendent Woman: Margaret Fuller’s Art and Achievement—enjoin the critical project most powerfully described by Phyllis Cole and Jana Argersinger in their introduction to Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism.1 There Cole and Argersinger call out for a greater detailing of “the map of women as generators and receivers of transcendentalist thought” than existed in 2014, the year of Megan Marshall’s Pulitzer-winning biography of Margaret Fuller.2 Other scholarly work
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/881/image/coversmallForum on the Times: Unsettling the Transcendental Manosphere2026-03-02text/htmlen-USForum on the Times: Unsettling the Transcendental Manosphere2026-03-022026TWOProject MUSE®143552026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-02Glimpsing Goethe’s Corpse
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984510
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We start with an anachronism, which can be as useful as a simile. The Transcendental period may be “like” our moment without being identical with it and the differences are often as interesting as the similarities. If we think “manosphere” means male control of public discourse, then of course we could say the men of the Transcendental period freely engaged in that sort of activity. But the deeply conservative if not reactionary tendencies on display in our present understanding of the word manosphere prompt me to add that normal levels of prejudice against women among Transcendentalists tended to be more structural than (sometimes) consciously chosen. Or if we consider how today opinions formed in the manosphere
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/881/image/coversmallGlimpsing Goethe’s Corpse2026-03-02text/htmlen-USGlimpsing Goethe’s Corpse2026-03-022026TWOProject MUSE®446172026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-02