"To confront American culture is to feel oneself encircled by a
thin but strong presence. I call it Emersonian, an imprecise term
but one that directs us to a dominant spirit in the national
experience." Thus Irving Howe, America's distinguished social
critic and a longtime reader of the Sage of Concord, begins this
illuminating discussion of Emerson and his disciples and doubters.
What is the Emersonian spirit? What inspired it, what propelled it?
And what does it mean to us today?
History gave Emerson his opportunity and then took it away.
Coming to manhood during the 1830s and 1840s, the time of "the
newness" when Americans beheld the world with unbounded
expectations, Emerson became the spokesman for the self-reliant new
man he believed had arisen, ready to thrust aside mossy traditions
and launch a new revolution of freewheeling thought. But the rapid
pace of the American experience overtook the Emersonian vision; in
the 1850s, the rising problems of slavery, a boom-and-bust economy,
the vulgarity of mass culture overwhelmed the idealist. His
satellite spirits wavered and shrouded the Emersonian optimism:
Hawthorne, with his stories of moral breakdown; Thoreau, rooted in
nature yet inclined to the cranky and fanatical; Melville, his
fathomless blackness waiting beneath archetypal fables of innocence
and evil also Walt Whitman, Orestes Brownson, Twain--all were
influenced by, yet reacted against, the Emersonian "newness."
Howe identifies three kinds of response: the literature of work
(Melville and Mark Twain), the literature of Edenic fraternity
(James Fenimore Cooper, Whitman, Twain again), and the literature
of loss (all the post-Civil War writers). He lays before us the
intellectual and personal tragedy of the first great American man
of letters, yet also shows that Emerson's belief in the untapped
power of free men pervades not only the lives and works of his
contemporaries but is also a permanent part of the American
psyche.
General
Imprint: |
Harvard University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Ci, 1986 |
Release date: |
September 2014 |
First published: |
October 2013 |
Authors: |
Irving Howe
|
Dimensions: |
234 x 156 x 8mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover - Sewn / Cloth over boards
|
Pages: |
99 |
Edition: |
Reprint 2014 ed. |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-674-18267-7 |
Categories: |
Books >
Language & Literature >
Literature: texts >
Essays, journals, letters & other prose works >
General
|
LSN: |
0-674-18267-7 |
Barcode: |
9780674182677 |
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