Ralph Waldo Emerson in Context

Description

This collection of newly commissioned essays maps the vital contextual backgrounds to Ralph Waldo Emerson's life and work. The volume begins with a detailed chronology of Emerson's life and publishing history, setting the stage for a wide-ranging discussion of his geographic and environmental contexts from early and later life, including his travels and intellectual encounters with the United States, Europe and Asia. It goes on to survey the intellectual terrain of the nineteenth century, exploring Emerson's relationship with key philosophical, aesthetic, theological, scientific, familial, social and political contexts and issues. Finally, it assesses the popular and critical receptions that have solidified Emerson's legacy as a towering figure in American literature, criticism and culture today. Fans, students and scholars will turn to this reference time and again for a fuller understanding of this seminal American writer.

Wesley T. Mott is Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He organized the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society in 1989 and served as president for two terms. Author of 'The Strains of Eloquence': Emerson and His Sermons (1989), he edited the fourth volume of The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as several reference works, including the Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism (1996) and the Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism (1996), and the three-volume American Renaissance in New England (2000-1). He is the recipient of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society Distinguished Achievement Award.