The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (8) ◽  
pp. 896
Author(s):  
Stephen E. Whicher ◽  
William H. Gilman ◽  
Alfred R. Ferguson ◽  
George P. Clark ◽  
Merrell R. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Context Mediated

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-63
Author(s):  
Benjamin Pickford
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Economic Relation ◽  
Economic Agency

Benjamin Pickford, “Context Mediated: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Political Economy of Plagiarism” (pp. 35–63) Context has long been a critical determiner of methodologies for literary studies, granting scholars the tools to make objective claims about a text’s political or economic relation to the situation of its genesis. This essay argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson anticipatively criticizes our commitment to such practices through his use of plagiarism—a literary mode that exemplifies the denial of the sovereignty of context. I focus on two core principles that underlie Emerson’s conception of literature’s civic role in Essays: Second Series (1844): first, that literature is driven by an impulse to decontextualize; second, that this means that it has a deep affinity with the deterritorializing logic of capital. Provocatively proposing Emerson as a theorist of the relation between literature and economics, I argue that Essays: Second Series shows how the literary text can negotiate its ineluctable culpability with capitalism, but this does not mean that it can presume to possess a privileged point of vantage that might deny such culpability. Given that this is precisely what much historicizing or contextualizing scholarship implies, I contend that Emerson gives us a case study in the limits of literature and criticism’s economic agency.

“Henry's brilliant sister”: The Pivotal Role of Sophia Thoreau in Her Brother's Posthumous Publications

2016 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-256
Author(s):  
Kathy Fedorko
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Cape Cod ◽  
Maine Woods

Ever since the publication of Henry Thoreau's four posthumous essay collections, bibliographers and biographers have credited Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the case of Excursions (1863), or William Ellery Channing, in the case of The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in Canada (1866), with either editing the collections or co-editing them with Sophia Thoreau, Henry's younger sister. This essay provides evidence from letters, books, diaries, and articles, as well as from the essay manuscripts themselves, that Sophia Thoreau alone edited her brother's essay collections for publication after his death from tuberculosis in 1862. She alone also chose the editor for her brother's Journal before her death in 1876.

LIDIAN EMERSON, WIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON, ON THE DEATH OF HER FIVE-YEAR-OLD SON (1842)

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-192
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
Scarlet Fever ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Large Circle ◽  
Parental Partiality ◽  
Better Than ◽  
As If

Lidian Jackson Emerson (1802-1892), the second wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson, corresponded with a large circle of relatives and friends between 1826 and 1876. In a letter to her sister, dated February 4, 1842, she described her grief on the death of her five-year-old son who had died a week before of scarlet fever. Dear Lucy, What shall I say—I feel at this moment almost comfortless—but I will write on and better hopes and feelings will return, so that I shall not make you grieve the more by my letter. My faith that all is yet well—all is better than ever—never quite leaves me—and sometimes I am cheerful, and no one would think one of my greatest sources of happiness had so lately stopped. . . . Such another bud of lovliest promise we may not hope for. I find it was not parental partiality that made us believe Waldo [her son] to be an uncommonly interesting child. Others have felt his loveliness, and now speak of him and of the impression he made upon them, in terms which surprise as much as they gratify us. Indeed it seems as if wherever he went the eyes that saw him have witness to him—the ear that heard him, bless him. He was an angel with wings but half concealed. But his body and mind were so healthful—he was far from any thing like precocity—that it had never occurred to us that Earth would be but a little while his home.... Mr. Emerson is very sorrowful. He has an unwavering faith that all is right; but sees not how the departure of the child is to be more to us than his presence would have been. I tell him I am sure, though I too, see not how—that greatly as he was blessed in the possession of such a treasure he is still more high blessed in its recall. I can give you no idea of the joy and hope the pride—the rapture, with which he regarded Waldo; he was always his companion and his best society. . . . I did not imagine till Waldo was taken from us, how deeply I loved him. He died in the evening and after all was over we sat together (Mr. Emerson, Mother and myself) and talked of our loss—and I then felt able to endure my bereavement. But after we had separated for the night and I was left alone with the baby—and Ellen [a three-year-old daughter] who was to take her father's place in my bed that I might take care of her, grief desolating grief came over me like a flood—and I feared that the charm of earthly life was forever destroyed. I saw not how I could ever feel happy again. I thought of the words "Time brings such wondrous easing" and believed Time could bring no easing to us. I lived over my life with the child and recalled all his sweet and lovely traits. His innocence, his wisdom, his generosity, his love for his mother I wished I could forget them all. . . . I was not worthy to be his mother—except my love for him made me worthy.

The American Art of Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-98
Author(s):  
John Michael Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Interior Space

Abstract This article provides a genealogy of the architectural figuration of human cognition from the ancient world to Renaissance Europe and, finally, to the American Renaissance where it came to possess a striking cultural and literary potency. The first section pursues the two-fold task of elucidating this archetypal trope for consciousness, both its ancient moorings and its eventual transmission into Europe. The second section shows that three of the most prominent writers of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—engaged this mystically inspired architectonic symbolism, employing far older techno-cultural suppositions about interior space. I thereby offer an account of the intellectual and spiritual heritage upon which Romantic writers in the United States drew to articulate cognitive interiority. These Romantics did more than value creativity in contradistinction to Enlightenment rationalism; they were acknowledging themselves as recipients of the ancient belief in cosmogenesis as self-transformation.

W. Cameron Forbes in the Philippines: A Study in Proconsular Power

1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Spector
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Family Firm ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Family ◽  
The One

On his mother's side, W. Cameron Forbes was the grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and on his father's, the grandson of John Murray Forbes, who made his fortune in the China clipper trade. He carried in his heredity the shrewd business ability of the one and the liberalism of the other. In Hofstadter's turn of phrase, he was the patrician as liberal. His wealth, his education — the best available (Milton Academy, Hopkinson School, Harvard) — would have entitled him to admittance to the innermost recesses of post-Civil War Republicanism. Yet he remained at best only affiliated with that party, and at heart an outspoken Independent. In 1892, on graduation from Harvard, he joined Stone and Webster, later gained experience in business as officer and director of several Boston banks, and then, just before the turn of the century, joined the family firm of J. M. Forbes and Co., Merchants.

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