Tag: Emerson

Revisioning Emerson as a Theorist of Reading


Free Download Michael Boatright, "Revisioning Emerson as a Theorist of Reading "
English | ISBN: 303176241X | 2025 | 175 pages | EPUB | 629 KB
Pushing beyond the anthologized writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson frequently taught in American literature courses, this book examines the corpus of his published work to cultivate a unique understanding of his ideas in relation to reading. By following the history of Emersonian criticism over the years, including research surrounding Emerson and reading theory, these chapters provide a persuasive and accessible exploration of Emerson that highlight the value of his work for both literary and reading scholars. Boatright argues that while Emerson predates the research in reading studies that emerged in the early twentieth century, his ideas around reading engagement, shared reading experiences, and experimentation with reading are exceedingly relevant for encouraging healthy reading practices in the literature classroom.

(more…)

Emerson’s Emergence Self and Society in the Transformation of New England, 1800-1845


Free Download Mary Kupiec Cayton, "Emerson’s Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of New England, 1800-1845"
English | 1992 | ISBN: 080784392X, 0807818704 | EPUB | pages: 322 | 3.3 mb
As the culture of commercial capitalism came to dominate nineteenth-century New England, it changed people’s ideas about how the world functioned, the nature of their work, their relationships to one another, and even the way they conceived of themselves as separate individuals. Drawing on the work of the last twenty years in New England social history, Mary Cayton argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s work and career, when seen in the context of the momentous changes in the culture and economics of the region, reveal many of the tensions and contradictions inherent in the new capitalist social order. In exploring the genesis of liberal humanism as a calling in the United States, this case study implicitly poses questions about its assumptions, its aspirations, and its failings.

(more…)

Emerson’s Metaphors


Free Download David Greenham, "Emerson’s Metaphors"
English | ISBN: 1666901571 | 2023 | 242 pages | EPUB, PDF | 519 KB + 2 MB
Emerson’s Metaphors is a fundamental reinterpretation of the major American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson and an interdisciplinary intervention in literary criticism. This book draws on the methods and conclusions of the paradigm shifting Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which recognizes that metaphor is a cognitive form rather than a rhetorical or ornamental feature. Closely reading Emerson’s journals, lectures and reassessing the major essays, Emerson’s Metaphors demonstrates that Emerson’s prose ‘thinks’ through its figurative language, enabling the vital symbolic reconceptualizations of nature, man and God that would prove so crucial for the emergence of American literature. This monograph does not just have implications for Emerson scholarship, but as the first full-length study of a canonical writer to use CMT, it provides a model for the interpretation of all literary works.

(more…)

Writing beyond Prophecy Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville after the American Renaissance


Free Download Martin Kevorkian, "Writing beyond Prophecy: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville after the American Renaissance"
English | 2013 | pages: 280 | ISBN: 0807147605 | EPUB | 2,4 mb
Writing beyond Prophecy offers a new interpretation of the American Renaissance by drawing attention to a cluster of later, rarely studied works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Identifying a line of writing from Emerson’s Conduct of Life to Hawthorne’s posthumously published Elixir of Life manuscript to Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Martin Kevorkian demonstrates how these authors wrestled with their vocational calling.

(more…)