Emerson's Ghosts Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists

by Fuller, Randall

• ISBN13: 9780195313925
• ISBN10: 0195313925
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-09-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

It is increasingly commonplace to find scholars who circle back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and his intellectual heirs as a way of better understanding contemporary social and aesthetic contexts. Why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? In this innovative study, Randall Fuller examines the way pivotal twentieth-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. He examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. An engaging institutional history of American literary studies in the twentieth century, Emerson's Ghosts reveals the unexpected convergent forces that have shaped American cultural history in lasting ways.

Author Biography

Randall Fuller is Associate Professor of English at Drury University and editor of the Gingko Tree Review.

Table of Contents

Preface

The Haunting of American Literature

Emerson in the Gilded Age

How to Dismantle American Culture: Van Wyck Brooks and Oppositional Criticism

F. O. Matthiessen and the Tragedy of the American Scholar

Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness

Sacvan Bercovitch as "American" Scholar

Emerson's Ghosts End

Notes

Bibliography

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.