Ermerson, Thoreau, Fuller and Transcendentalism

Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism
David M. Robinson
American Literary Scholarship, 2007, pp. 3-34 (Article)
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1 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and
Transcendentalism
David M. Robinson
Annus mirabilis ! The year 2007 brought important additions to the

Emerson Collected Works edition and the Princeton Thoreau edition;
notable biographies of Fuller and of Bronson and Louisa May Alcott;
a diverse and stimulating series of Emersonian intellectual genealogies;
and, of particular note, an excellent new history of Transcendentalism
and the welcome reissue of another.
i Scholarly Editions
Ronald A. Bosco and Douglas Emory Wilson’s edition of Society and
Solitude, volume 7 of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Har-
vard), adds further momentum to the interest in late Emerson. Bosco’s
comprehensive and insightful historical introduction and informative
annotations make a persuasive case for Society and Solitude as the prod-
uct of one of Emerson’s most active and vigorous periods as a public
intellectual, challenging the notion of the book as a genteel swan song.
Bosco shows its kinship to The Conduct of Life as an expression of
the pragmatically inflected ethical and social philosophy that Emerson
began to work out in the mid-1840s. Initial plans for the volume were
made in the early 1860s after the publication of The Conduct of Life, but
Emerson’s lecture commitments were prominent among several fac-
tors in delaying its publication until 1870. Bosco describes the book’s
autobiographical strands, citing “Old Age,” an accomplished though
American Literary Scholarship (2007)

doi 10.1215/00659142-2008-001 © 2009 by Duke University Press
4Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism
critically neglected essay, as a biographically revealing and intellectually

subtle translation of Emerson’s private experience into public instruc-
tion. This volume is founded on the textual work of the late Douglas
Emory Wilson, and I urge all Emersonians to read Bosco’s handsome
tribute to Wilson in the preface.
Joseph J. Moldenhauer’s edition of Thoreau’s Excursions, a volume
in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (Princeton), provides authoritative
texts and instructive annotations for a volume that includes several cru-
cial essays in the Thoreauvian canon. Moldenhauer’s informative discus-
sions of the sometimes complex textual and publication histories of the
essays and of the circumstances of their composition provide essential
biographical perspectives on Thoreau’s compositional processes and on
his sometimes trying efforts to publish his work. While Walden will
remain an inexhaustible work for Thoreauvians, I believe that increas-
ing interest will be devoted to works such as “Autumnal Tints” and
“Wild Apples,” and even to Thoreau’s last major work, “An Address on
the Succession of Forest Trees.” These essays, read within the context of
the Journal of the middle and late 1850s, show us a thinker engaged in a
remarkably creative and far-sighted fusion of natural history and ethical
theory. Jeffrey S. Cramer’s I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the
Journal of Henry D. Thoreau (Yale) provides a generous selection from
Thoreau’s Journal, with extensive annotations. Cramer draws from the
1906 Houghton Mifflin edition and incorporates several other entries
not included in that edition, including selections from the “lost” journal
of 1840–41 published by Perry Miller in 1958. The volume sets Cramer’s
annotations alongside Thoreau’s text for convenient reference. In his
introduction Cramer makes a cogent distinction between the private
diary and the semipublic nature of the 19th-century journal as Thoreau
and other Transcendentalists practiced it, and notes the emergence of
Thoreau’s Journal as “a work in its own right” in 1851.
Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller pioneered the oral genre of the
“conversation,” a close relative of the lyceum lecture that cultivated
audience participation in the formal discussion of a philosophical or
political theme. Karen English has edited a useful selection of Alcott’s
public conversations in Notes of Conversations, 1848–1875 (Fairleigh Dick-
inson), a partial realization of Alcott’s long-held desire to publish his
conversations. The most polished transcriptions of these conversations
are the work of Ednah Dow Cheney, who as English observes deserves
recognition as a coauthor of them. Of particular interest are the series
David M. Robinson 5
“Parliament on the Times” and “Reform Spirit in New England” from

early 1850 and 1851, with interactions among Alcott, Emerson, William
Lloyd Garrison, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, among others. Alcott
can be perceptive when describing the particular strengths of conversa-
tion: “All the beauty & advantage of Conversation is in its bold con-
trasts, & swift surprises; its large suggestiveness, its fine implications &
unexpectednesses.”
ii The Transcendentalist Movement

a. Histories of Transcendentalism For a very long time, the best avail-
able histories of Transcendentalism were O. B. Frothingham’s Transcen-
dentalism in New England (1876) and Perry Miller’s The Transcendental-
ists: An Anthology (1950), in which Miller’s lively introductory essays
constituted a kind of mininarrative of the movement. During those
dark years, Alexander Kern’s essay “The Rise of Transcendentalism”
(1954) was an important resource, and a dawn began to appear with
Lawrence Buell’s Literary Transcendentalism (see AmLS 1973, p. 4) and
Joel Myerson’s The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial (see
AmLS 1980, p. 4). But we did not have a comprehensive modern history
of the movement until 1994, when Barbara L. Packer’s “The Transcen-
dentalists” appeared in the second volume of The Cambridge History
of American Literature (see AmLS 1994, pp. 3–5). We now have another
excellent history in Philip F. Gura’s American Transcendentalism: A
History (Hill and Wang; see also “The Transcendentalist Commotion,”
NER 28, iii: 50–79), and Packer’s work has been reissued as The Transcen-
dentalists (Georgia). Daniel Walker Howe and Elisabeth Hurth have also
published important historical studies of the movement.
In American Transcendentalism Gura provides a persuasive narrative
of Transcendentalism as a dissenting or alternative social movement,
engaged in an attempt to remedy American provincialism and material-
ism. The Transcendentalists “cultivated a vibrant openness to social and
cultural ideals that directly challenged the materialism and insularity
that were already hallmarks of American culture.” This was the move-
ment’s strength, and also the basis for its somewhat tragic end. Gura
connects the movement’s birth to the impact of modern German biblical
criticism on such Unitarian intellectuals as Joseph Stevens Buckminster,
George Ticknor, and Edward Everett, a profound shift in religious out-
look that generated a “religious combustion” within Unitarianism in
the 1830s. This culminated in Emerson’s Divinity School Address and

the polemics that followed, which revealed a serious division within
Unitarianism. Gura argues that the “new views” embodied an impor-
tant tension between individualism and communitarianism. In the
1840s “the distance between the leadership of The Dial—Emerson and
Fuller—who valued individual spiritual growth and self-expression, and
social reformers like Brownson, Ripley, and, increasingly, Parker, contin-
ued to grow.” This split did not so much signal internal strife among the
Transcendentalists as a growing difference in intellectual orientations,
growing from the underlying tension between the principles of individu-
alism and cooperative social harmony. While this division was in some
ways overcome in the antislavery movement and the Civil War, these
intense intranational concerns constituted, in Gura’s view, an “inward
turn” in which the Transcendentalists’ “vision for cultural and social
renewal became more nationalistic and less concerned with the univer-
sal humanitarianism that hitherto had defined the faith of so many of
them.” After the war, he contends, “the Gilded Age was Emerson’s, as
he was canonized as America’s Philosopher.” Gura thus concludes that
Transcendentalism was “another in a long line of attempts to redirect the
still incomplete American experiment.” Despite its “catholic and univer-
sal” roots, the movement “eventuated in a discourse that promoted an
American exceptionalism based on self-interest.”
Gura’s narrative of emergence, division, and decline is accompanied
by an interpretive emphasis that decenters Emerson and Thoreau and
elevates such socially committed Transcendentalists as George Ripley,
Orestes Brownson, and Theodore Parker. Ripley is a central figure in
Gura’s reading. Discussing the movement’s larger cultural impact, he
also presents lively portraits of such obscure figures as William Batch-
elder Greene, Eliza Thayer Clapp, and Sylvester Judd, young thinkers
caught in the “pulsing, magnetic current” of the movement’s transfor-
mative energies. This current also swept up Thoreau, “only an appren-
tice in the movement,” who eventually “thought of himself as more
Emerson’s equal and less his disciple.” Gura’s penultimate chapter on
the Free Religion movement, with deft portraits of John Weiss, Caro-
line Healey Dall, and Samuel Johnson, is a valuable overview of this
underappreciated renaissance of innovative religious thinking in the
postbellum period.
The republication of Packer’s The Transcendentalists as a separate vol-
ume is, I think, a signal event, emphasizing the trend toward seeing
David M. Robinson 7
Transcendentalism as a “movement” rather than a marker for a few liter-

ary figures. In reviewing it here earlier, I praised Packer’s adept presenta-
tion of the changing or evolutionary nature of Transcendentalism, its
growth from a Unitarian-rooted religious demonstration to a movement
with important social and political implications. Packer’s work is also
one of recovery, including a wider cast of characters than we ordinarily
encounter. Many interpretive problems in the field have arisen from
attempts to freeze the movement or its adherents at a particular historical
or ideological moment, when in fact they were voraciously consuming
new sources, endlessly discussing and adjusting their views, and tirelessly
willing to experiment intellectually. Packer captures that dynamism and
reminds us Transcendentalism was something larger than Emerson and
Thoreau, while giving them, and Fuller, important reconsiderations.
Reading Gura and Packer together thus provides a good overview of
the field of Transcendentalism at the present. They both focus, as does
Hurth (see below), on the Unitarian reaction to the German biblical
criticism as the intellectual catalyst of Transcendentalism, providing
rich detail on the process by which this rarefied scholarship set in
motion a relentless series of revisions to received religious opinion.
Packer emphasizes the movement’s literary development with telling
discussions of the impact of Carlyle and the Edinburgh Review, of
Emerson’s transition from lecturer to essayist, and of the full range of
Thoreau’s literary development. Packer’s narrative of the impact of the
antislavery movement on Transcendentalism is also one of the finest
contributions of her study. Gura presents the movement within a larger
sweep of American social and political history and links its end both to
the war and to the Gilded Age, the era that follows and seems in many
ways to repudiate transcendental ideals. At the center of his narrative is
the ideological challenge that Brook Farm and utopian social theories
posed to antebellum American culture, and of course, the challenge
that the culture posed to such social theorizing and experimentation.
Both histories give less weight to William Ellery Channing’s role as an
intellectual forebear than has been the case in previous scholarship,
and both make persuasive cases for Fuller’s significance. Both also
bring Brownson forward as a forceful thinker and important catalyst.
The impact of these studies will undoubtedly be to recharge Transcen-
dentalism as a term of significance, a sign for a set of relationships and
shared pursuits shaped by not two or even three important figures but,
as Gura puts it, “many prime movers.”
We can add to these two comprehensive histories Daniel Walker

Howe’s cogent chapter “American Renaissance” in his What Hath God
Wrought, an analysis of the significant impact of Transcendentalism
on antebellum culture. Howe does emphasize Channing’s influence in
formulating an “ethos of self-improvement” both central to Transcen-
dentalism and influential to antebellum culture as a whole. For Howe,
Fuller is “the ‘most modern’ ” figure in the movement: “Versatile and
passionate, she made her impact felt on journalism, feminism, criticism
(literary, music, and art), and revolution.” In addressing “questions about
American liberty,” Howe insightfully explains that the Transcendental-
ists supported wider inclusion of excluded and oppressed groups and also
pressed the often overlooked question, “What should Americans do with
their freedom?” Their answer, to a culture enthralled with technologi-
cal advance and material wealth, was vital: “They urged Americans to
introspection and integrity, to the exercise of independent judgment, to
the rejection of competitive display, to the realization of their full human
potential, to lives in harmony with nature.”
Elisabeth Hurth’s Between Faith and Unbelief: American Transcen-
dentalists and the Challenge of Atheism (Brill) is not a comprehensive
history of Transcendentalism like Gura’s or Packer’s texts but a focused
investigation of one of the movement’s central concerns: the possibility
of religious belief. Hurth traces the response of religious thinkers such
as Emerson, Parker, Ripley, Brownson, and Hedge to the challenges
of evolving German theology noting that the initial impact of Johann
Gottfried Eichhorn and other biblical scholars was augmented by mod-
ern recastings of Christian tenets by David Friedrich Strauss, Ernest
Renan, Ludwig Feuerbach, Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher,
and Arthur Schopenhauer. As Hurth explains, the Transcendentalists
rejected conventional Christian dogma for the innovative “newness”
of German theology but simultaneously struggled against the threat
that such new ideas posed to belief in a God that could be an object of
worship. From this perspective, Parker, Ripley, and Hedge play central
roles in Transcendentalism, as does Brownson, largely through his later
charges that Transcendentalism was the latest form of infidelity. Hurth
undercuts the received notion that Parker, Ripley, Emerson, and others
accepted theological modernism without qualification, noting instances
in which “theological oppositions between ‘old’ and ‘new school’ ” think-
ers in New England were “bypassed” in a consensus against the radical
aspects of Strauss or Feuerbach. Hurth concludes, in a thesis counter
David M. Robinson 9
to much theorizing about Emerson’s modernity, that “to some extent,

Emerson’s work—in fact Transcendentalism itself—constituted a
refutation of atheism.”
b. Transcendentalist Ideas For an illuminating discussion of the cur-

rents of associationism and other early versions of socialism aired by the
New-York Tribune in the late 1840s, see Adam-Max Tuchinsky’s “ ‘The
Bourgeoisie Will Fall and Fall Forever’: The New-York Tribune, the 1848
French Revolution, and American Social Democratic Discourse” (JAH
92 [2005]: 47–97). Tuchinsky analyzes the connection between Brook
Farmer Charles A. Dana’s Fourierism and his later Tribune writings on
labor reform. Günter Leypoldt traces the Transcendentalists’ idealiza-
tion of Beethoven in “Beethoven als Ikone der amerikansichen Spätro-
mantik,” pp. 265–94 in Bernd Engler and Isabell Klaiber, eds., Kulturelle
Leitfiguren—Figurationen und Refigurationen (Duncker). Fuller found
in Beethoven an expression of American cultural progress, a premise
that was further refined by John Sullivan Dwight, who saw Beethoven
as a spiritual prophet, giving voice to universal laws. Reconciling an
elite art form with American democratic aspirations was problematic,
but Dwight argued for an analogy between musical harmony and the
development of an ultimate social accord. Joe B. Fulton, “Reason for a
Renaissance: The Rhetoric of Reformation and Rebirth in the Age of
Transcendentalism” (NEQ 80: 383–407), considers “renaissance” and
“reformation” as explanatory tropes for Transcendentalism, and adduces
evidence that the Transcendentalists understood their movement as a
new instance of religious reformation in the tradition of the Puritans.
This “ongoing reformation in religion” was closely connected to “a
renaissance in letters,” themes that have been used widely in the histo-
riography of Transcendentalism. Sterling F. Delano and Myerson, “Let-
ters from Brook Farm: A Comprehensive Checklist of Surviving Cor-
respondence” (RALS 31: 95–123), have compiled a useful chronological
catalog of “the 337 surviving letters” from Brook Farm with information
on their location and publication.
c. Transcendentalist Biography John Matteson’s Eden’s Outcasts: The

Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (Norton) is an insightful
and well-crafted narrative of the intertwining lives of Bronson and
Louisa May Alcott that emphasizes the powerful familial context for
the creative achievement of both father and daughter. Matteson makes
clear Louisa’s resistance to the intensity of her father’s paternal interest

in her and her sisters, and details her growing anger with his failure as
a familial provider. But Matteson encloses this conflict within a larger
picture of a supportive family whose identities and purposes in life are
profoundly intertwined. Matteson’s discerning account of the Fruitlands
episode—central to the life experience of both father and daughter
and the point at which the family bond was most under threat—is the
book’s high point. Matteson also adeptly recounts the unexpected liter-
ary success that both Alcotts experienced in 1868, when Louisa’s Little
Women and Bronson’s Tablets were published in the same month. But
Matteson, whose work is well researched historically, is not inclined to
pursue depth psychology or feminist theory, or to examine in detail
the religious, philosophical, or political ideologies that swirled around
the family during the age of Transcendentalism and had a formative
shaping effect on both Bronson and Louisa. Indeed, many readers may
leave the book with little sense of what was at issue in the Transcenden-
talist movement in which Bronson was so central a figure. The book’s
strength, however, is in its portrayal of two distinctive personalities
bound to each other through the potency of family, which threatened
and strengthened them by turns. It is a book that casts a new light on
the current academic recovery of Louisa May Alcott as a major literary
figure, and it will undoubtedly bring new attention to Bronson Alcott’s
remarkable personality and career.
Another significant work of recovery is Nancy Stula’s At Home and
Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch
(1813–1892) (Allyn/New England), the catalogue to the first exhibition,
curated by Stula, of Cranch’s paintings, which are now widely dispersed
in museums and private collections. In telling the little known story of
Cranch’s career as a painter, Stula has made a significant addition to the
historiography of Transcendentalism and added a new dimension to our
understanding of the connection of transcendental ideas to 19th-century
American painting. Cranch has been known principally through his
Emerson caricatures, his Western Messenger and Dial poems, and his
close friendship with Brook Farmer and musical critic John Sullivan
Dwight. In “Transcendentalism: The Path from Preaching to Painting”
(pp. 15–55) Stula describes Emerson’s profound influence on Cranch,
noting that “the forest became Cranch’s pulpit” as he developed an
“alignment of religion with landscape painting.” While his landscapes
of the 1840s show “the philosophical debts he owed Emerson,” he did
David M. Robinson 11
not share the “luminist” fascination with meditative tranquility and

“strong, almost palpable light.” This complicates the received view of
luminism as the painterly expression of Transcendentalism. As Barbara
Novak, the leading scholar of luminism, observes in her foreword (pp.
12–13), “Stula has opened up a new dialogue that may cause us to expand
the way we use the word Transcendental in relation to the artist of
the Emerson era.” My essay “Christopher Pearse Cranch and the New
England Transcendentalists” (pp. 57–73) traces Cranch’s education and
ministerial career and notes the importance of his involvement with the
Western Messenger, the first of the Transcendentalist literary magazines.
While working in the west with James Freeman Clarke, Cranch created
the long-legged “eyeball” and other humorous illustrations of the “New
Philosophy” for which he has chiefly been remembered. Throughout
his ministry Cranch struggled with motivation, self-confidence, and
ostracism as a “dangerous” Emersonian; painting and his marriage
to Elizabeth DeWindt finally freed him from the pulpit. In the essay
“ ‘Like a Great Picture Always Before Us’: Christopher Pearse Cranch
and Italy” (pp. 75–109) Stula chronicles Cranch’s three-year stay in Italy,
placing him among notable American expatriate artists such as William
Wetmore Story, Asher B. Durand, and John F. Kensett. Stula explains:
“Italy haunted Cranch,” giving him “images and memories” with “a
potency that was never to be diluted much less forgotten.” In “At Home
and Abroad: Cranch and American Landscape Painting” (pp. 111–64)
Stula provides an extensive assessment of Cranch’s career as a landscape
painter, noting the important influences of Durand and landscape archi-
tect Andrew Jackson Downing, Cranch’s brother-in-law. Confirmation
of Cranch’s achievement came in the middle 1850s when the Paris Salon
accepted his paintings for three consecutive years, a rare honor for an
American of that era and a success that greatly enhanced the demand
for his work. In the later 1850s, Cranch developed connections with
the French Barbizon painters, whose theories of direct, outdoor paint-
ing tallied with those he had learned from Durand. Returning to the
United States in 1863, Cranch lived and worked principally in New York,
continuing to paint and write well into the 1880s.
In a much-needed revaluation of the career of Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, Ethan J. Kytle (“From Body Reform to Reforming the
Body Politic: Transcendentalism and the Militant Antislavery Career
of Thomas Wentworth Higginson,” ANCH 8: 325–50) explains how
Higginson “formulated a militant abolitionist philosophy that built
upon Transcendentalist foundations.” Higginson’s growing discomfort

with Garrisonian pacifism pushed him to “extralegal solutions to the
problem of slavery” that were “rooted in higher law doctrine,” includ-
ing support of John Brown and eventually the command of an African
American regiment. Martha Schoolman, “White Flight: Maroon Com-
munities and the Geography of Antislavery in Higginson and Stowe,”
pp. 259–78 in American Literary Geographies, explores Higginson’s and
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s discussions of rebelling slave communities,
seeing them as “an imaginative resource for abolitionist politics” in the
1850s and 1860s.
Two essays take up John Burroughs’s relation to his transcendental
forerunners. In “Emerson’s Natural Theology: John Burroughs and the
‘Church’ of Latter Day Transcendentalism” (ATQ 21: 191–205) Daniel
G. Payne discusses Burroughs’s effort to craft a religious outlook that
“reconciled” Emerson’s “Natural Theology” with “modern science,”
providing protection from “the ‘cosmic chill’ ” of an empty universe.
Michael G. Buckley, “ ‘The Footsteps of Creative Energy’: John Bur-
roughs and Nineteenth-Century Literary Natural History” (ATQ 21:
261–72), describes Burroughs as the first in a line of literary naturalists
to address Darwinism, noting a “secularization of language and philo-
sophical ambiguity” and an avoidance of “grand philosophical claims”
that distance him from Thoreau.
iii Emerson
a. Emersonian Genealogies While there is still much interest in Emer-
son’s politics, the emphasis of Emerson studies seems to have moved
to the question of his intellectual progeny and the extent to which we
can discern elements of modernity in his work. In Emerson and Eros:
The Making of a Cultural Hero (SUNY) Len Gougeon identifies the
mid-20th-century “psychomythic humanists”—Joseph Campbell, Erich
Neumann, Mircea Eliade, and Norman O. Brown—as important suc-
cessors of Emersonian Transcendentalism. “Emerson’s understanding
of the structure and potentialities of the psyche is remarkably similar to
that articulated by the psychomythic humanists,” Gougeon maintains,
noting the affinities of the Emersonian Over-Soul with the Jungian col-
lective unconscious that was adapted and explicated by Campbell and
others. Gougeon links both sets of terms with the mythical conception of
eros, Emerson’s “dynamic spirit” of creative energy, the power by which
the chaotic is transformed into meaning and harmony. Psychomythic

theories of personal regeneration and emotional balance grounded in the
power of the unconscious provide a convincing framework for Emerson’s
“effort to establish a new, unified, and balanced psyche” after the loss of
his first wife, Ellen. Gougeon employs Campbell’s archetype of heroic
self-liberation to underline Emerson’s emergence into “human history”
as an advocate of spiritual self-confidence and a prophetic spokesman for
social justice, and highlights the 1840s as the period in which Emerson
brought his “experience of transcendent regeneration . . . to bear directly
on the worst evils of American society.” Emerson and Eros is a salient
reconsideration of Emerson’s career and his philosophical heritage and
bridges quite effectively the division between the “transcendental” and
the “political” Emerson.
Emerson also continues to be read instructively through pragma-
tist and modernist lenses. In her innovative Natural History of Prag-
matism Joan Richardson proposes a pragmatism that enfolds Darwin
and Whitehead into a philosophical tradition beginning with Jona-
than Edwards, centered in Emerson and William James, and extend-
ing through Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein. Positing that “both
thinking and language are life forms, subject to the same laws as other
life forms,” Richardson traces the “evolution” of pragmatism through
a series of writers whose “ministerial mission” was to respond to “the
expanding void opened by the gradual disappearance of God.” Rich-
ardson offers one of the strongest accounts I have seen for the affinities
between Emerson and William James, a central focus of recent Emerson
scholarship. She argues that Emerson transformed Swedenborg’s mys-
tical symbolism into a theory of the mind as an active “participant,”
through the imagination, of an evolving universal intelligence. In this
sense “the aesthetic” assumes for Emerson the role of a creative energy
that can be viewed in evolutionary terms, suggesting important corre-
spondence with the thinking of both Darwin and James. Emerson and
Darwin shared an understanding that natural objects must be perceived
“simultaneously as products of transient conditions and of constant,
though evolving laws and principles.” James inherited this world in
transition, or this reality of process, as Whitehead would term it, and
came to understand imagination as “the organ through which chance
operates on the human scale; its function, to effect variability.” This
sense of the complex organic relation between mind and world, a process
through which each member shapes the other, was crucial to James’s
work as a founder of psychology. Richardson’s analysis of Emerson in

a context of evolutionary thought is strengthened by her reference to
Whiteheadian process theory as a system that encompasses both Emer-
sonian Transcendentalism and Jamesian pragmatism. Robert Milder
(“From Emerson to Edwards,” NEQ 80: 96–133), like Richardson, also
engages Miller’s Edwards-to-Emerson paradigm, using Edwards less as
an influence on Emerson than as a marker for a “Calvinist” determin-
ism that shadowed Emerson’s transcendental affirmations. Emerson’s
experience of the “recalcitrance” and elusiveness of spiritual experience,
Milder argues, produced “a chastened acknowledgment of what he came
to regard as the living psychological (not theological) truths at the heart
of Calvinism.” Emerson’s “First Philosophy,” the core of his visionary
“ur-religion,” did not account for “the fitfulness of spiritual energies”
or the sense “of being commandeered by a power outside of himself.”
This lack of spiritual will or agency constituted what Milder calls an
“ur-skepticism that would receive its full and systematic articulation
in ‘Experience.’ ” In “Fate,” with its affirmation of the necessity of uni-
versal law, Emerson “arrived at that state of mind Calvinists identified
with a willingness to be damned for the greater glory of God.” Milder’s
version of Emerson’s capitulation to determinism is less a Whicherian
narrative of “acquiescence” than a story of a long-protracted, though
ultimately unsuccessful, battle to assert the capacity of the will. His well-
documented analysis of Emerson’s struggle with fading access to direct
spiritual experience is important; that was, after all, a major catalyst for
his later emphasis on ethical purpose. But “freedom is necessary,” as
Emerson put the paradox in “Fate,” a declaration that seems Edwardsean
in only a limited sense.
A number of literary modernists have also been seen in an Emersonian
light. Herwig Friedl traces a path from Emerson through pragmatism and
into modernism in “Kunstvoll einfache Denk-Bewegungen: Ein ameri-
kanistischer Prolog zu einem Dialog zwischen Europa und Amerika,”
pp. 17–44 in Astrid Böger, Georg Schiller, and Nicole Schröder, eds.,
Dialoge zwischen Amerika und Europa: Transatlantische Perspektiven in
Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Musik (Francke). Friedl identifies Emer-
son’s transitional self, which discovers itself through seeking interchange
with “other men, and the otherest,” as a conceptual basis for transnational
dialogue. His insightful and wide-ranging essay associates Emerson’s
declaration that “the way of life is wonderful” with the classical philo-
sophical tradition of the “way” of wonderment, and also with the open,
cosmopolitan conception of an “American” identity in Whitman, Wil-

liam James, Stein, and E. L. Doctorow. Ross Posnock (“Planetary Circles:
Philip Roth, Emerson, Kundera,” pp. 141–67 in Shades of the Planet)
describes a “Nietzschean” Emerson whose “antagonistic energy” and
resistance to “ideology” and “bourgeois piety” foreshadows the work of
Roth, Havel, and Kundera. In “Wurzeln der amerikanischen Moderne:
William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound et al. vor dem Hintergrund des
Transzendentalismus,” pp. 373–93 in Carsten Dutt and Roman Luck-
scheiter, eds., Figurationen der literarischen Moderne (Winter), Dieter
Schulz describes the striking similarities between Williams’s concept of
the empty or natural symbol, the natural object itself, and Thoreau’s aspi-
ration toward an unmediated language of nature. Despite the modernist
animosity to Romanticism, Schulz observes, the aspiration to merge the
idea with the thing had been anticipated by George Berkeley, whose
ideas reached Emerson and Thoreau by way of Coleridge. The modern-
ist most cognizant of this legacy was Charles Ives, who embraced “the
radicalism of Emerson” and propounded a place-centered theory of art
closely akin to Williams’s localism. Ronald Bush, “Pound, Emerson,
and Thoreau: The Pisan Cantos and the Politics of American Pastoral”
(Paideuma 34 [2005]: 271–92), illustrates Pound’s debt to Emerson’s and
Thoreau’s principle of the emblematic qualities of language and natural
objects. Bush finds a “Jeffersonian aesthetics” in Pound, grounded in the
pastoral, which supported the Transcendentalists’ “campaign of cultural
resistance” to modernity. These affinities can be seen in the Pisan Can-
tos, which reproduce “Walden’s mix of self-reflection, close observation,
natural piety, and fury against the modern world.”
In Der Sündenfall der Nachahmung: Zum Problem der Mittelbarkeit
im Werk Ralph Waldo Emersons (Schöningh), a work of great scope
and interpretive grasp, Jan Stievermann also finds important modern
analogues for Emerson, emphasizing, however, the continuing impor-
tance of Emerson’s religious project. Stievermann presents the search
for direct, unmediated spiritual experience, acquaintance at “first hand”
with Deity, as a central spiritual struggle in three phases of Emerson’s
career. Inheritor during his ministerial apprenticeship of a Christian tra-
dition anchored in the imitation of Christ and modified by Channing’s
aspiration to a “Likeness to God,” Emerson confronted the imitative
or derivative as the nemesis of spiritual authenticity. He constructed in
response a Romantic theology of presence during a high transcendental
period (1836–41), drawing on Coleridge and Carlyle to advocate the
poet as the modern exemplar for authentic religious experience. Emer-

son’s insistence on direct revelation also conditioned an extended later
period (1841–75) that prefigures the post-theistic existentialism of mod-
ern thinkers such as Karl Jaspers. For Stievermann, Emerson’s later work
is best characterized not by Whicher-like retreat or a turn to pragmatism
but by affirmation of faith in a monistic cosmos and a willingness to take
a Jasperian step into the unknowable. While Stievermann’s Emerson
of process and self-transcendence resembles the protopragmatist and
proto-Nietzschean figure of recent criticism, he retains a commitment
to “Unity” and cosmic law, a foundationalism quite unlike postmodern
skepticism. Stievermann adduces impressive evidence for Emerson’s
continuing affirmations of universal law from the later works, includ-
ing extensive references to Bosco and Myerson’s edition of the Later
Lectures, and calls attention to the shaping role of Hindu and Buddhist
texts in confirming Emerson’s monistic vision. If we ordinarily consider
“Experience” and “Montaigne” to be quintessential “late” Emerson,
Stievermann calls attention to what we might call the “late, late” Emer-
son of the 1850s and 1860s as a continually vital thinker. At some 900
pages, Stievermann’s work is far too lengthy to summarize adequately
here, nor am I in full command of all aspects of his complex narrative.
But the book is a significant intervention into Emerson studies and
decidedly warrants an abridged English translation. In “Traditions of
Pragmatism and the Myth of the Emersonian Democrat” (TCSPS 43:
154–84) Randy L. Friedman criticizes readings of a “secular, skeptical,
relativist, anti-realist, and anti-metaphysical” Emerson maintaining that
“there is a necessary and substantial relationship between self-reliance
and the Over-soul” in Emerson’s thought. Emerson’s “natural religion
or natural religiosity,” Friedman argues, underlies “a great many of the
characteristics we find in pragmatism.”
In At the Brink of Infinity James E. von der Heydt identifies a series
of “poets of the horizon,” beginning with Emerson and including Emily
Dickinson, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill. These
poets respond to an Emersonian “vision of a space of pure possibility”
but also struggle with “the inability to know limits,” the paradoxical
conviction that “anything is possible, but nothing can be delineated.”
Modes of limitation, exemplified in Dickinson’s focus on confinement,
thus become essential poetic responses to Emerson. Von der Heydt
locates Emerson’s hunger for vastness in the transparent eyeball pas-
sage and in “the trope of ever-unfolding knowledge” in “Circles.” Such
infinitely expanding knowledge can mean “power” but also “constant

redisappointment.” He argues that “the simple master narrative of
expanding knowledge” must be replaced by “narratives of constant
readjustment and linguistic skepticism.”
In Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists
(Oxford; see also “Aesthetics, Politics, Homosexuality: F. O. Matthies-
sen and the Tragedy of the American Scholar,” AL 79: 363–91) Randall
Fuller describes Emerson’s haunting impact on the architects of Ameri-
can literary history, making them victims of the American Scholar’s
“impression of endless potential.” Van Wyck Brooks and other mod-
erns at first rejected Emerson with some disdain. Yet Brooks signaled
Emerson’s durability by later recasting him as “a thinker intensely alive
to the social environment surrounding him,” thereby establishing the
terms by which Matthiessen “internalized the model of the American
Scholar.” For Matthiessen the scholar was inseparable from Emerson
himself, “a robust and compelling model of human agency and pro-
gressive action.” But he also encountered “radical contradictions” in
Emerson “symptomatic of his own position as public intellectual—and
private homosexual—in American society.” Fuller offers a discerning
portrait of Matthiessen’s effort to fit Emerson’s form-deficient essays into
a larger theory of an organic society and his struggle to find accord at
an institution, and in a society, that would not accept openly his sexual
identity. Equally compelling is Fuller’s narrative of Perry Miller’s ulti-
mately disappointing attempt to make the “dangerous” Emerson of the
1830s relevant to American politics a century later. Though he aspired to
the same public power that he found in Emerson, Miller never secured a
feeling of relevance to a larger public, and finally came to rest, during the
mid-1950s, in the naively hopeful contention that “the scholar was one
of the most subversive forces in American society.” Sacvan Bercovitch
like Miller came to Emerson after a deep immersion in the Puritans,
seeing him as “a test case for the possibilities of dissent in American
culture” and “a cautionary reminder of the fatal—and ultimately unsus-
tainable—allure of transcendence when confronted with the traps of
culture.” Fuller recognizes the importance of Bercovitch’s distinction
between “individualism and individuality” in Emerson, seeing in the
first the constraining context of the American business ethic and in the
second the liberating possibilities of French socialist thought. Fuller’s
thoughtful book will have a lasting impact on the way that we consider
Emerson’s canonical place in literary studies and his cultural influence.
b. Emerson and His Contemporaries Joseph C. Schöpp’s “ ‘The Powers

and Duties of the Scholar or Writer’: Emersons Selbstenwurf im Lichte
Goethes,” pp. 91–106 in Dialoge zwischen Amerika und Europa, analyzes
Emerson’s growing recognition of Goethe as the modern of the moderns,
an exemplar of continual self-remaking. The Goethe of Representative
Men is the philosopher of metamorphosis, the transitory condition of
the self that Emerson defined, and sought, as power. Kathleen Law-
rence, “ ‘The Dry-Lighted Soul’ Ignites: Emerson and his Soul-Mate
Caroline Sturgis as Seen in Her Houghton Manuscripts” (HLB 16, iii
[2005]: 37–67), describes Sturgis as “the embodiment of self-reliance”
and Emerson’s “soul-mate and feminine counterpart.” While she has
been minimized in biographical work on Emerson, he “noticed and
sought out Sturgis earlier than previously known” and established a
friendship “separately from what each one shared with Margaret Fuller.”
Lawrence interweaves the correspondence between Emerson and Sturgis
with journal entries, poems, and Sturgis’s paintings, portraying Sturgis
as a woman of “unusual artistic gifts and bold personality” whose ini-
tially powerful impact on Emerson established a bond that continued
throughout their lives. In “Aesthetic Specialists and Public Intellectu-
als: Ruskin, Emerson, and Contemporary Professionalism” (MLQ 68:
417–36) Günter Leypoldt describes Ruskin and Emerson as expositors
of a cultural criticism that sought “to demonstrate the social relevance of
formal beauty without giving up its privilege as a self-contained ‘music.’ ”
Ruskin’s claim “that the core values of a culture are ‘legible’ to him in
the gestalts of architectural form” is affirmed in Emerson’s conception of
the poet or scholar as a figure “who discerns and diagnoses the nation’s
spiritual and cultural health.” Thomas Constantinesco traces a gallery
of self-portraits in the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence in “Portraits à la
Lettre: La Correspondance d’Emerson et de Carlyle” (RFEA 112: 16–31).
He contrasts Emerson’s ethereal and self-effacing gestures with the
forceful self-presentation and embodied language of Carlyle.
Lucy Pearce, “Re-Visioning History: Countering Emerson’s Alleged
Ahistoricity” (EJAC 26, i: 41–56), disputes the notion that Emerson
lacked historical awareness. According to Pearce, Emerson advocated “a
practical philosophy for the advancement of the individual” influenced
by historical theories of both the New England Puritans and the Ger-
man idealists. Pearce cites Herder as a key influence, noting his empha-
sis on the human capacity “of achieving wholeness through a process
of self-education” and his vision of history as “a continuous, coherent
development” expressing the relationship of all events. In “Medieval

American Literature: Emerson, Longfellow and the Longue Durée”
(REALB 23: 113–32) Paul Giles also contends that Emerson was not a
spokesman for an ahistorical American cultural nationalism, arguing
that Emerson’s 1835 lectures on Chaucer and medieval romance and his
later essay on Montaigne are built around “a dialectic between past and
present.” Longfellow, a “much more innovative” poet than we have real-
ized, also resisted “the cultural nationalists of his own day” in complex
historically grounded works that suggest his “understanding of literature
as a ‘continuation’ ” of the work of past eras. Leslie E. Eckel, “Symbols
‘Mystical and Awful’: Emerson’s and Longfellow’s Primitive Poetics”
(ESQ 52 [2006]: 45–74), also compares Emerson with Longfellow. Eckel
explains the influence of Emerson’s theories of “picture-language” and
“primitive poetics” on Longfellow’s Hiawatha, finding Longfellow “the
more socially conscious writer, who dared to apply the linguistic con-
cepts in circulation among intellectuals directly to what he understood
as the contemporary concerns of the Native American population.”
Ulf Schulenberg, “ ‘Strangle the Singers Who Will Not Sing You Loud
and Strong’—Emerson, Whitman, and the Idea of a Literary Culture”
(ArAA 31 [2006]: 39–61), reads Emerson and Whitman as exemplars of
Richard Rorty’s conception of a “liberal, poeticized culture,” stressing
their commitment as “strong poets” to “redescription” of the world and
to “the importance of (Nietzschean) self-creation and contingency.”
Gerald F. Vaughan, “Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Mentor at Harvard” (HJM
35: 789–96), notes the influence of Levi Frisbie, a disciple of Dugald
Stewart, on Emerson’s second Bowdoin Prize essay. Bill R. Scalia,
“Sampson Reed: A Swedenborgian at Harvard and Early Emerson Col-
league” (ESP 18, i: 1, 11–12), provides a sketch of Reed. Lest we become
too reverential, Dale Patrick Brown, Brilliance and Balderdash: Early
Lectures at Cincinnati’s Mercantile Library (Mercantile Library), provides
some vivid details on Emerson’s lecture visits to Cincinnati in the early
1850s. One newspaper described the Sage of Concord as “a New England
country school teacher: tall, slender, and bony in a plain, ill-fitting black
suit.” Another portrayed an audience who “sat for ‘two mortal hours,’
still and rapt, ‘like Patience on a monument, smiling at Grief.’ ”
c. Emersonian Concepts In Emerson’s Nonlinear Nature (Missouri)

Christopher J. Windolph shows that Emerson’s “understanding of sci-
ence (knowledge) and cognition (perception) was at odds with the linear
paradigms dominating nineteenth-century thought.” Emerson consis-

tently resisted linear forms of scientific thinking, writing “Circles” as a
kind of manifesto for metamorphosis and the “flowing law.” Windolph
proposes chaos theory as a guide to Emerson’s philosophy of nature,
noting that chaotic systems, marked by dynamism, flux, variation, and
complex interrelation, are “distinct from truly random systems because
they develop according to underlying rules.” In Listening on All Sides:
Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford) Richard Deming
provides a thoughtful exploration of the dynamics of reading Emerson,
drawing from Stanley Cavell and Richard Poirier to analyze Emer-
son’s refusal of a rhetoric of settled authority. “By negotiating the text’s
meaning—actually participating in its potentialities—the reader is able
to transgress the inexorability of programmatic meaning and sense.”
Deming works out this concept of “active reading” in “Fate,” an essay
that “gives no resolution—and thus no solace—but only asks of us a
further response.” In Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America,
1722–1872 (Stanford, 2006) Eric Wertheimer considers the evolution of
Emerson’s thinking about the accidental, focusing on his reactions to the
loss of his son and to the burning of his house. Wertheimer concludes
that “uncertainty presents an emotionally and theoretically exacting
test of symbolic validity for one of the preeminent philosophers of
representation.”
Two critics provided readings of Emerson as a delocalized writer. Paul
Giles, “The Deterritorialization of American Literature,” pp. 39–61 in
Shades of the Planet, describes a “planetary” Emerson whose “weight-
less” prose “remaps nineteenth-century American culture in relation to
the classical monuments of the past.” For Emerson, “location itself is
always relative and arbitrary.” Theo Davis, Formalism, Experience, and
the Making of American Literature in the 19th Century, discusses the
critical problems of “how to experience and identify with Emerson” and
“how to see him as a part of an American tradition and identity.” Such
efforts overlook Emerson’s removal of “everything local, personal—and
American” from the images that he intends to transform into vehicles of
the spirit, a strategy and sensibility that he shared with Bronson Alcott.
These readings mesh well with von der Heydt’s emphasis (see above) on
Emerson’s orientation toward vast spaces.
Although Emerson’s exposure to the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in
Paris is generally recognized as the signal event of his 1833–34 European
tour, Susan Dunston (“The Italian Alembic: Emerson in the Cathedral,
1833,” ESQ 52 [2006]: 193–225) argues effectively that Italy’s “complex

fusion” of “art, imagination, morality, sexuality, pleasure, and spiritual-
ity” had the crucial impact of broadening Emerson’s sensibilities. “The
full-bodied experience of Catholic Italy, its art, architecture, pomp,
and devotion, washed over Emerson’s rocky New England habits of
thought,” reinforcing his allegiance to “the infinite range of human
endeavor and capacity.” In “Appreciating the Impersonal in Emerson
(That’s What Friends Are For)” ( JSP 21: 91–105) Todd Lekan writes that
Emerson “whole-heartedly celebrates friends as exemplars that inspire
excellence” but notes some attendant problems in “cultivating an appre-
ciation for impersonal values” embodied in the lives of others. Emerson’s
view of friendship would be “more plausible” if it acknowledged “the
sheer vulnerability of human ideals.” James Bell, “Absolve You to Your-
self: Emerson’s Conception of Rational Agency” (Inquiry 50: 234–52),
argues that Emerson challenges the Kantian idea that “self-governance”
requires a willed “submission to the law” with a conception of autonomy
linked to “spontaneity” and attention to an inner voice that speaks as
the “ideal image” of the self. Richard Poirier, “An Approach to Unap-
proachable America” (Raritan 26: 1–13), provides a convincing rereading
of a key passage from “Experience.” Earlier readings have established
its significance, but Poirier notes the important relation between the
earlier “pastoral” imagery and the more frequently analyzed expres-
sions of ecstasy. “The passage must include far more than ecstasy in
the desert,” he writes, an ecstasy best understood through “the com-
paratively tame pastoral vision that precedes it.” Todd H. Richardson,
“Emerson Iconography and the Free Religious Index” (RALS 31: 11–29),
describes the Free Religious Association’s determination to claim a radi-
cal legacy in Emerson, centered on his Divinity School Address. Con-
tention over Emerson’s political identity flared in the early 1880s when
Oliver Wendell Holmes and others emphasized his moderation as a
thinker. Wesley T. Mott (“Lucy Stone Reviews Emerson,” ESP 18, i: 4–5)
describes the recent discussions of Emerson’s attitude toward women’s
rights and reprints an unrecorded 1878 review of Emerson’s Fortune of
the Republic by the prominent feminist Lucy Stone. Mikayo Sakuma,
“Emerson’s Proto-Evolutionary Idea: Its Formation and Transatlantic
Contexts” (SELit 48: 21–39), describes Emerson’s early acceptance of
evolutionary ideas. In “The Silence of the Secular” (L&T 21: 66–81) J.
Heath Atchley describes Emerson’s belief that “sincere conversation” is
a form of acknowledgment of the Over-Soul, connecting this form of
conversation to a conception of the “the secular” as we find in the film

Lost in Translation. Harold Bloom has added Emerson’s Essays (Chelsea,
2006), a selection of 11 previously published critical essays from a variety
of scholars, to his series Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations, adding
a wide-ranging introductory essay, “The American Sublime” (pp. 1–25).
d. Antislavery Writings, Political Thought, and Social Criticism Bar-

bara Packer provides a fresh and enlightening examination of the con-
nections between Emerson’s religious and political identities in “Signing
Off: Religious Indifference in America,” pp. 1–22 in There Before Us.
Packer reads Emerson’s lack of interest in the Lord’s Supper and impa-
tience with the preaching of Barzillai Frost as symptoms of a widely
shared American religious indifference noted by Tocqueville and others.
“Sheer boredom,” Packer argues, played a major role in Emerson’s reli-
gious rebellion. This indifference grew until Emerson finally recognized
the moral imperative of abolition. “What the struggle against the Fugi-
tive Slave Law, and against slavery itself, restored to Emerson,” Packer
contends, “was not belief in a divine principle, for that he had never lost,
but a sense that he could once again claim to belong to a community
of believers.”
The dimensions of Emerson’s antislavery commitment are explored in
two important essays, which diverge in their explanations of the process
of Emerson’s politicization. In a well-considered reading of the slavery
subtext of two key essays, Donald E. Pease (“ ‘Experience,’ Antislavery,
and the Crisis of Emersonianism,” Boundary2 34, ii: 71–103) describes
Emerson’s dismissal of the “angry” abolitionist in “Self-Reliance” as
a refusal to acknowledge the social order. This stance fails when he
confronts his son’s death in “Experience.” “The trauma of Emerson’s
son’s death quite literally turned the speaker’s prose in the direction of
the order of historical trauma, which his aversion to abolitionism had
formerly removed from his view.” Emerson’s West Indies emancipation
address gives voice to this imperative to “bear witness to this historical
trauma,” though Pease notes that Emerson excluded it, with other anti-
slavery essays, from his major essay collections. In “Emerson’s Doctrine
of Hatred” (ArQ 63, ii: 1–26) Martha Schoolman argues that “far from
representing Emerson’s criticism of abolitionism, the passage from ‘Self-
Reliance’ embodies Emerson’s abolitionism.” While the essay “is not to
be mistaken for an abolitionist declaration of sentiments,” Schoolman
finds in Emerson’s “doctrine of hatred” a performance of “a Garrisonian
politics of affront.” He employs this abrasive and confrontational strat-

egy in his address on West Indies emancipation, through the expres-
sion of Garrisonian “harsh truths” like those which eventuated in “the
gradual turning of British public opinion” against slavery. While “Self-
Reliance” praises “the autonomy of the agitator,” Schoolman concludes,
“the emancipation address assumes a more process-oriented focus on
interaction between the agitator and the legislator.”
In “ ‘The Old Race Are All Gone’: Transatlantic Bloodlines and Eng-
lish Traits” (AmLH 19: 800–23) Christopher Hanlon makes an enlight-
ening connection between Emerson’s treatment of New England’s racial
lineage and a broader discourse on Normans and Saxons as “antagonistic
racial groups” that permeated British and American historical writing in
the 1840s and 1850s. Emerson’s “liberty-loving Saxon” was part of this
discourse, as was an alternative conception of “piratical” Saxons whose
barbarism was overcome by the more civilized Normans. This line of
analysis “would evolve to a form of propaganda serving an emergent
Confederate national and racial ethos.” Emerson ultimately rejected
fixed racial categories and affirmed “biological principles of melioration
and admixture,” seeing racial amalgamation as “the principle guarantor
of America’s futurity as a national entity.” In “ ‘A Strong Present Tense’:
Emerson and The Times of London” (ATQ 21: 95–110) Jonathan Imber
Shaw discusses Emerson’s interest in the Times during his 1847–48 stay
in Great Britain and his later discussion of the newspaper in English
Traits (1856). Emerson saw the Times as a potentially “democratizing
force” but also admired the rhetorical skills of its “reactionary elements”
that undermined the Chartist movement and other forms of “progressive
social change.” Shaw takes Emerson’s publication of English Traits at a
moment of intense political conflict in the United States as “a deliberate
evasion, a recursion into the past of America’s European heritage.”
iv Thoreau
a. A Week and Walden Thoreau’s conception of place and the local
was a focus of several significant essays. Lawrence Buell, “Ecoglo-
balist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination
on a Planetary Scale,” pp. 227–48 in Shades of the Planet, considers
the inherent tension between the localized character of much envi-
ronmental writing and larger transglobal concerns but observes that
“Thoreau cannot think locally without bringing in the rest of the
world.” His “local cosmopolitanism” prefigures a “contemporary eco-

globalist imagination.” In a related essay Buell interrogates “a mystique
of American nature” (“Religion and Environmental Imagination in
American Literature,” pp. 216–38 in There Before Us), characterizing
“the synergy of religion, literature, environment, [and] America” as
ultimately inconsistent and misleading. While the task of explain-
ing “what makes cultural practice in the U.S. distinctive—pas-
toral tradition, mystique of land or nature or wilderness—is tricky
if not quixotic,” Buell believes that “American environmental con-
cerns . . . will likely continue to be energized by religious insights
and commitment.” John Gatta, “ ‘Rare and Delectable Places’: Tho-
reau’s Imagination of Sacred Space at Walden,” pp. 23–48 in There
Before Us, argues that “Thoreau’s spirituality of place transcends . . .
romantic wilderness worship” through a Coleridgean sense of the power
of imagination to create “a place’s hierophantic power” and thus to read
“the world as sacramental.” In The Philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau:
Orientals Meet Occidentals (Mellen) Shoji Goto approaches Thoreau
and Emerson as global authors “without geographical and historical
borders.” Emerson’s attempt to balance the imperatives of solitude and
society has important points of congruence with modern European
philosophers such as Heidegger, Buber, and Levinas, and also responds
to the thought of Plato and Mencius. Similarly, Emerson’s philosophy
of unity reflects strains of Zoroastrianism and Buddhism; Thoreau’s
conception of citizenship and political responsibility reveals a role
played by Confucius; and Thoreau’s response to sound and music can
be illuminated by Kant and ancient Chinese philosophy. Meredith L.
McGill, “Common Places: Poetry, Illocality, and Temporal Dislocation
in Thoreau’s A Week of the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (AmLH 19:
357–74), argues that Thoreau intersperses poems throughout A Week
to interrupt “present-tense narration” with “moments of meditative
rest.” These interludes reshape A Week into a commonplace book of
extracts and reveal Thoreau’s resolute commitment “to the illocality
of place.” In “(Un)Framing the Mind: Where on Earth Is Walden?”
(ESQ 52 [2006]: 319–58) François Specq argues that Thoreau’s decision
to drop the original subtitle (Life in the Woods) from the 1862 edition
of Walden emphasized the book’s “experimental” over its “experiential”
dimension. Striving to “produce awareness” in his readers, Thoreau
challenged “the rational utilitarian relation to space” by representing
place “situated outside the consumerist economy.”
Matthew Peters, “Individual Development and the American Auto-

biography: Franklin, Thoreau, Adams” (PQ 84 [2005]: 241–57), observes
that Franklin serves as “exempla,” while Thoreau sees imitation as con-
tradictory to “his belief in self-reliance.” Thoreau instead models an
“active reception of tradition,” dependent on experimentation and first-
hand experience. Working from her experience in translating The Senses
of Walden into Japanese, Naoko Saito (“Truth Is Translated: Cavell’s
Thoreau and the Transcendence of America,” JSP 21: 124–32) describes
Cavell’s revitalization of “the idea of perfection without perfectibility, a
process-oriented notion of perfectionism” that carries the potential for
“cross-cultural understanding” in a global era. In “Thoreau’s ‘Sounds’
as Linguistic Dialectic and Cultural Critique” (AmStScan 39, ii: 85–96)
Henrik Otterberg reconsiders “Sounds” as Thoreau’s portrayal of a “cri-
sis of writing” to achieve an authentic expression of nature. “Thoreau
increasingly realizes his task as one of re-naturalization,” a “yielding” to
the process by which “Nature literally engulfs” his house and himself
within. Ronald Wesley Hoag and Malcolm M. Ferguson’s “Knowing
the Means That Move Us: Of Planetary Motion, the Comet, and the
Morning Star” (TSB 256 [2006]: 1–4; and 257: 1–3) uses “Sounds” to
explore Thoreau’s interest in 19th-century railroad technology, including
“sun and planet gearing” and the celestial naming of engines. William
Jolliff notes the parallels between Quakerism and Thoreau’s philosophy
of inwardness and simplicity in “The Economy of the Inward Life: John
Woolman and Henry Thoreau” (CS 15: 91–111). Brian Treanor, “The
Virtue of Simplicity: Reading Thoreau with Aristotle” (CS 15: 65–90),
employs Aristotle to argue that Thoreauvian simplicity can be consid-
ered a moral virtue if it is understood as “a tool for human flourishing”
rather than an end in itself. Responding to Jeffrey S. Cramer’s recent
annotated edition of Walden (see AmLS 2004, p. 15) Henrik Otterberg
surveys the history of scholarly annotations of Thoreau’s work in “Anno-
tating Thoreau” (NCP 34: 295–329). In the same issue of NCP, Otterberg
provides two Thoreau-focused review essays: “On the Aims and Objects
of Ecocriticism” (pp. 331–58) and “Fabricating the Self” (pp. 347–58).
b. “Walking,” the Journal, and Other Works Dieter Schulz considers

Thoreau’s stylistic innovations in “Der ‘extravagante’ Diskurs Henry
David Thoreaus,” pp. 151–60 in Angelika Redder, ed., Diskurse und
Texte: Festschrift für Konrad Ehlich zum 65. Geburtstag (Stauffenburg).
Thoreau developed a rhetoric of extravagance as a counterstrategy to
the utilitarian orientation of the “plain style” of the 17th and 18th cen-
turies, linking linguistic extravagance to wildness, primitive purity,
and a metaphoric way of thinking. The richly metaphorical discourse
of Walden and “Walking” and other essays enables him to transgress
and transcend fixed patterns of speech and thought in an expression
analogous to nature itself. This essay supplements Schulz’s important
recent readings of “Walking” (see AmLS 2004, p. 16) and “Wild Apples”
(see AmLS 2006, p. 20) in establishing the aesthetic achievement and
philosophical reach of Thoreau’s late essays. Specq brings together a
collection of essays on 19th-century American art and literature in Tran-
scendence: Seekers and Seers in the Age of Thoreau (Higganum Hill, 2006).
The volume includes well-considered analyses of “Chesuncook” and
Thoreau’s Journal, among other subjects. A leading figure in the rising
scholarly interest in Transcendentalism in France, Specq explores how
“the literature of Antebellum America” was able to renew and enhance
“awareness in its readers.” In pursuing “an authentically poetic relation
to the world,” Thoreau broke with a “Platonist or Neo-Platonic supra-
reality” that he found in Emerson, in order “to engage ever more deeply
with the litanies of the visible and the tangible.” Specq emphasizes the
importance of the late Journal in Thoreau’s practice of a revised concep-
tion of a poetry of natural description. In “Pencil of Nature: Thoreau’s
Photographic Register” (Criticism 48 [2006]: 7–38) Sean Ross Meehan
contends that Thoreau recognized in the photographic process an anal-
ogy for the way “the writer registers the nature of his world.” This new
“technology of inscription,” like entries in Thoreau’s Journal, produced
a record of “memory unfinished by nature and potentially unnoticed by
most.” Rick Anthony Furtack (“Skepticism and Perceptual Faith: Henry
David Thoreau and Stanley Cavell on Seeing and Believing,” TCSPS
43: 542–61) maintains that through his Journal, Thoreau responded to
philosophical skepticism by establishing an “emotional orientation or
attunement toward the world” characterized by “trust or acceptance.”
The aspiration for “awareness,” cultivated through the observant entries
in the Journal, constitutes “the cardinal virtue of Thoreau’s philosophy,”
an aspiration that can also be linked to Kierkegaard and Cavell. In
“The Journal of Henry David Thoreau 1906–2006” (PULC 67 [2006]:
635–58) William Howarth marks the centenary of Houghton Mifflin’s
publication of the Journal, tracing the provenance of the manuscripts
and describing the editorial process of Bradford Torrey and Francis
H. Allen. Bliss Perry recognized the value of the Journal and was an
influential advocate for its publication.
David Scott (“Rewalking Thoreau and Asia: ‘Light from the East’
for ‘A Very Yankee Sort of Oriental,’ ” PE&W 57: 14–39) argues that
Thoreau’s knowledge of Buddhism has been overstated and that he had
deeper involvement with Hindu, Persian, and Confucian texts and ideas.
Thoreau was drawn to “the more meditative observational side of yoga”
as opposed to “severe Hindu asceticism,” and he was also drawn to “the
ethical side of the Confucian tradition” with its principles of “friend-
ship, virtue, social harmony, and rectitude.” In “Ethics and Observation:
Dewey, Thoreau, and Harman” (Metaphilosophy 38: 591–611) Andrew
Ward adduces concurrence between Thoreau and John Dewey on ethi-
cal and scientific inquiry. Both believed a rigorous “process of inquiry”
was required “to discover those practices that permitted people to live
successfully,” and both held that “the practice of science is both ethi-
cal and transformational.” In National Melancholy Mitchell Breitweiser
characterizes Cape Cod as “a book in which many sorrowful things are
described but in which there is little sorrow.” He finds “some outright
cruelty in the narrator’s attraction to the sublimity of the sea’s murdering
force.” Sam Pickering (“An Unseen Stream,” CS 15: 112–22) calls atten-
tion to an overlooked nature writer, Charles Conrad Abbott, author of
In Nature’s Realm (1900), among other works.
c. Antislavery Writings Contributing to recent interest in Thoreau’s

reactions to John Brown (see AmLS 2005, pp. 12–14) James J. Dona-
hue (“ ‘Hardly the Voice of the Same Man’: ‘Civil Disobedience’ and
Thoreau’s Response to John Brown,” MQ 48: 247–65) argues that the
contradictions between the nonviolent resistance of “Civil Disobedi-
ence” and Thoreau’s adulation of the violent Brown can be understood
by considering the historical development of his antislavery thinking
in the 1850s. Brown became a “fulfillment of Thoreau’s developing
Transcendental moral and political ethic.” Deak Nabers, Victory of Law:
The Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil War, and American Literature,
1852–1867 (Hopkins, 2006; see also his “Thoreau’s Natural Constitu-
tion,” AmLH 19: 824–48), explores Thoreau’s contention that “natural
law is an essentially legal institution” subject to the loss of “either its
moral or political authority.” He thereby contributed to Charles Sum-
ner’s strategy of revising the understanding of the Constitution as a
legal basis for the opposition to slavery. In “The Scarlet Lever: Hester’s
Civil Disobedience” (ESQ 53: 31–55) Michael Pringle views “Hester’s
resistance” in The Scarlet Letter as “a lever to exert ‘a counter friction to
stop the machine,’ ” as Thoreau had advocated in “Civil Disobedience.”
Hester thus exemplifies “an apparently powerless individual” pitted
“against a repressive social order,” and her fate illustrates “the high
cost of resisting civil government.” In “Henry D. Thoreau’s Political
Writing: The Author and His Audience in ‘Monday’ and ‘Resistance
to Civil Government’ ” (Tocqueville Review 28: 153–80) Hélène Thiercy
notes that these essays, revised for publication in 1849, reveal Thoreau’s
sense of his differing audiences. He employs “an elitist tone” aimed at “a
restricted and scholarly readership” in “Monday,” but “clearly aspires to
be understood” in “Resistance.” In De l’esclavage en Amérique (Éditions
Rue d’Ulm, 2006) Specq has translated Frederick Douglass’s “What to
the Slave Is the Fourth of July” and Thoreau’s “Slavery in Massachusetts”
and accompanied them with a historical and interpretive essay.
d. Thoreauvian Source Material James Dawson, “Recently Discovered

Revisions Made by Thoreau to the First Edition Text of ‘Civil Disobe-
dience’ ” (CS 15: 1–23), describes a newly discovered copy of Aesthetic
Papers containing Thoreau’s holographic corrections to “Resistance to
Civil Government,” later retitled “Civil Disobedience.” Dawson adduces
persuasive descriptive evidence and authoritative opinion (from Bradley
P. Dean and Elizabeth Witherell) to establish that the corrections are in
Thoreau’s hand (photographs of the revisions are also included). While,
as Dawson notes, only 3 of the 13 revisions in this copy appeared in the
1866 edition, this discovery adds further weight to the argument that
the posthumously published version of “Civil Disobedience” largely
reflects Thoreau’s intentions. Steve Grice, “A Leaf from Thoreau’s Fire
Island Manuscript” (TSB 258: 1–4), provides a transcription, photo-
graphic reproduction, and well-informed explanation of an unpublished
two-sided manuscript fragment with details of Thoreau’s search for
information on Margaret Fuller after the Fire Island shipwreck that
took her life. The manuscript had been tipped into set 588 of the noto-
rious Manuscript Edition of Thoreau’s works. In “Thoreau’s ‘Indian
Books’ and Bradley P. Dean’s ‘Broken Task’: A Personal Remembrance”
(TSB 260: 1–3) Brianne Keith describes the late Brad Dean’s unfinished
editorial work on Thoreau’s Indian notebooks, providing an informa-
tive description of this enormous set of manuscripts. In “Teaming Up
with Thoreau” (Smithsonian 38, vii: 60–65) Michelle Nijhuis describes

how Thoreau’s botanical charts, assembled by Dean, are aiding current
research in bird migration and global warming. Patrick Barron, “Spa-
tial Knowledge in ‘The Dispersion of Seeds’: Thoreau as Geographer”
(ILS 8, i [2006]: 94–109), discusses Thoreau in the context of modern
“biogeography,” noting that “he incorporates ecology, social dynamics,
and personal/metaphoric comment” in his “holistic approach to seed
dispersal.” Two essays provide information on Thoreau’s little-studied
vocation of surveying. Leslie Perrin Wilson (“Thoreau’s Manuscript Sur-
veys: Getting Beyond the Surface,” CS 15: 24–36) calls attention to the
Concord Free Public Library’s collection of some 200 property surveys
in Thoreau’s hand and an accompanying manuscript volume of field
notes, a promising and underused scholarly resource. Patrick Chura’s
“Economic and Environmental Perspectives in the Surveying ‘Field-
Notes’ of Henry David Thoreau” (CS 15: 37–64) provides a detailed
description of the surveying notebook, with discussions of Thoreau’s
surveying near Walden Pond and his procedures for surveying by the
“True Meridian” of the polestar. Edmund A. Schofield, “The Date(s)
and Context of Thoreau’s Visit to Brook Farm” (TSB 258: 8–10), makes
use of 19th-century meteorological data and newspaper reports to clarify
Thoreau’s time at Brook Farm. Readers interested in the history of Con-
cord will want to consult Leslie Perrin Wilson’s In History’s Embrace: Past
and Present in Concord, Massachusetts (Hollis), which ranges through
the town’s rich past and includes a portrait of Thoreau’s grandmother,
Mary Minot, and an account of the 1872 fire at Emerson’s home and
its aftermath. Thoreauvians will also want to see David F. Wood’s An
Observant Eye: The Thoreau Collection at the Concord Museum (Con-
cord Museum, 2006), with photographs from the outstanding artifact
collection at the Concord Museum.
v Fuller
a. Biography With Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, The
Public Years (Oxford) Charles Capper completes his definitive biographi-
cal work on Fuller (see also AmLS 1992, p. 18), detailing her emergence
as a central figure in Transcendentalism, describing the importance
of her brief and brilliant career as a New York journalist, and dis-
closing the moving stories of her marriage and motherhood in Italy
and her engagement with the Italian Risorgimento. Capper’s work is
exhaustively researched, commanding in its handling of the various

intellectual and social contexts in which Fuller’s career took shape, and
written with deep sympathy and sound judgment about his subject.
Capper argues that Fuller’s accomplishments as Dial editor and author
of Woman in the Nineteenth Century were in part the result of a process
of self-rebuilding after the loss of her father and her recognition of the
limits of Emerson’s “chilling spiritual stoicism.” Capper offers a percep-
tive account of Fuller’s friendship with Emerson and an illuminating
portrait of her highly charged friendship circle that included Emerson,
Caroline Sturgis, Anna Barker, and Samuel Gray Ward. The breakup
of this group catalyzed the emotional crisis that eventually bore fruit
in Fuller’s public emergence in the roles of author and journalist. These
initial acts of self-furtherance were accelerated by her experience in New
York, where very different mentors—Horace Greeley, William Henry
Channing, and the city itself—sharpened her political sensibility and
“widened her class horizons,” contributing to the “Romantic cosmo-
politanism” that is a key to her modern appeal. On Fuller’s experience
in Italy—an increasingly important aspect of Fuller studies—Capper
is superb. He traces her growing radicalism, describing her embrace of
democratic socialism as “enthusiastic, militant, and prophetic, yet also
frank, self-aware, and subtle.” As she underwent this dramatic political
education, she also grappled with new identities as a wife and mother.
As interest in this feminist, cosmopolitan, politically engaged Tran-
scendentalist continues to grow—and it will—Capper’s work will be
the authoritative reference.
b. Early Career Jeffrey Steele provides an illuminating overview of

Fuller’s poetry, a neglected aspect of her work, in “ ‘The Glorious Secrets
of Sad Love’: The Development of Margaret Fuller’s Poetry,” pp. 125–41
in Teaching 19th-Century American Poetry. Noting Fuller’s key themes
as “female friendship and love, the pain of solitude, spiritual illumina-
tion, and personal transformation,” Steele links Fuller’s poetry to her
creation of “idealized images of female power” that arose from “her
spiritual crisis of 1840–41.” He offers cogent readings of the poems in
this biographical context, calling attention to many overlooked texts.
Important new information on Fuller’s teaching in Providence is now
available in Granville Ganter and Hani Sarji’s “ ‘May We Put Forth Our
Leaves’: Rhetoric in the School Journal of Mary Ware Allen, Student
of Margaret Fuller, 1837–1838” (PAAS 117: 61–142). Ganter and Sarji
describe Allen as one of Fuller’s “most intellectually mature and literate

students,” who responded deeply to Fuller’s Socratic or conversational
pedagogy. Through Allen, we see Fuller “at play with ideas, joking with
her students, and making wry commentaries about the course reading.”
In “Good Observers of Nature” Tina Gianquitto delineates the impact of
Goethe’s Theory of Colors on Summer on the Lakes. Goethe’s theory of the
analytic and synthetic phases of perception helped Fuller see the frontier
through shifting frames of reference and to represent events in her text
that she had experienced but not fully assimilated. Fuller’s “failed sub-
lime reaction” to Niagara Falls is a key example of this extended process
of learning. Susan L. Roberson also comments on the Niagara Falls
passage in “Geographies of the Self in Nineteenth-Century Women’s
Travel Writing,” pp. 281–95 in American Literary Geographies. Fuller’s
meditation on the fluency of the falls signals her travels “along and over
the fluid boundaries of waterways,” thus exploring “a geography of the
possible” in the Western landscape.
c. New York Fuller’s later journalistic and activist career in New York
and Italy seems to be the current focus of Fuller scholarship. Two essays
consider the New York period (1844–46) in Fuller’s career, during which
she became increasingly committed to issues of social reform. In “Puri-
fying America: Purity and Disability in Margaret Fuller’s New York
Reform Writing” (ESQ 52 [2006]: 271–99) Jeffrey Steele describes how
Fuller’s idealistic conception of purity was “challenged by the seemingly
intractable bodies of recent immigrants, the institutionalized, and the
disabled.” In response, she “began imagining the reform of America
as the curing of a diseased body politic” and “articulating an inclusive
model of purity that folded many members of outcast groups into the
body politic.” Her awareness of exclusion, Steele maintains, was sharp-
ened by the disability of her brother Lloyd and her own impaired health.
In my essay “Margaret Fuller, New York, and the Politics of Transcen-
dentalism” (ESQ 52 [2006]: 301–17) I argue that Fuller’s move to New
York took her away from Emerson but also took her closer to William
Henry Channing, the most politically engaged of the Transcendental-
ists. Fuller’s move signaled the politicization of Transcendentalism in
the middle 1840s, also evident in the careers of Emerson, Parker, Alcott,
and others who remained in the Boston area. Of particular importance
were Fuller’s visits to New York prisons, asylums, and other social insti-
tutions, which she wrote about extensively for the Tribune. Such visits
opened her eyes to class division and convinced her of the value of a
secure institutional and educational framework for egalitarian reform.
Fuller’s interest in Pliny Earle’s progressive theories for the treatment of
mental illness was particularly important to her thinking about social
compassion and educative justice.
d. Italy Fuller’s political education continued and accelerated in Italy,

where she encountered at first hand a society in revolution. In “Margaret
Fuller’s Conversational Journalism: New York, London, Rome” (ArQ 63,
ii: 27–50) Leslie E. Eckel makes a persuasive case for Fuller as “a writer
at once emphatically national and deliberately transnational.” Seeing
in her dispatches from Italy a “fusion of patriotism and cosmopolitan
humanism,” Eckel stresses the importance of Fuller’s friendships with
Giuseppe Mazzini and Adam Mickiewicz, exiles engaged in nationalist
revolutions, as important in reconciling “the conflicting demands of
nation and globe.” Writing of America from Italy, Fuller was able to
address “the ‘spirit’ of the country” now “ ‘more alive’ ” in revolutionary
Europe. Charles Capper and Cristina Giorcelli have compiled a wide-
ranging collection of essays on Fuller in Italy, Margaret Fuller: Transat-
lantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age (Wisconsin; see also AmLS 2001,
pp. 20–24, for earlier versions of some of these essays). In “Getting from
Here to There: Margaret Fuller’s American Transnational Odyssey” (pp.
3–26) Capper describes Fuller’s development of a cosmopolitan intellec-
tual stance that reflects “four sites of transnational American cultural
reform: New England Transcendentalism, women’s rights discourse,
Western settlement, and New York literary journalism.” Capper calls
attention to the importance of Fuller’s work for the Dial and the Tribune
as essential sites of tutelage for the emergence of “Fuller’s transnational
American nationalism.” Joseph G. Schöpp’s “Playing the Eclectic: Mar-
garet Fuller’s Creative Appropriation of Goethe” (pp. 27–44) contends
that Fuller understood Goethe’s “Daimonic” as “a pre-Christian, pre-
rational power, an elemental and pervasive force, ‘instinctive,’ sponta-
neous, incalculable, uncontainable,” and responded to its potential to
“transcend the limitations of a routinized, commonplace existence.” In
“Margaret Fuller and the Ideal of Heroism” (pp. 45–65) Robert N. Hud-
speth traces Fuller’s developing idea of heroism, noting its relation to
Goethe’s concept of the Daimonic and Emerson’s “Heroism.” In Rome
“Fuller at last found her ideal fulfilled: heroism had a ‘local habitation,’
and the hero a name, Giuseppe Mazzini.” As she learned, the source of
Mazzini’s heroism was “his connection with the people,” a selfless capac-
ity to act “as the instrument of the Romans.” Anna Scacchi (“Margaret
Fuller’s Search for the Maternal,” pp. 66–96) describes Fuller’s maternal
roles as teacher, leader of “conversations,” responsible elder to her sib-
lings, and trustworthy friend. Scacchi challenges early biographers who
saw her as frustrated by childlessness, but she also perceptively describes
the conflict between motherhood and the “political role” that Fuller had
made for herself in Italy. This conflict continued to trouble her as she
made her plans to return to America, divided between an “overwhelm-
ing desire for a private life and the equally compelling desire to assume
a public role.” Bell Gale Chevigny’s “Mutual Interpretation: Margaret
Fuller’s Journeys in Italy” (pp. 99–123) proposes “mutual interpretation”
as a defining concept of Fuller’s life and work, a “unique receptivity”
that marked “her ethos of friendship, encompassing receptivity, open-
ness, equality, and joint experiments.” Fuller brought this quality to
Italy, expanded through “three influential encounters—with the exiled
Mazzini in London, the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, and the novelist
George Sand in Paris, and found the place and the people suited for her
most sustained experiment in mutual interpretation.” In “The Unbroken
Charm: Margaret Fuller, G. S. Hillard, and the American Tradition of
Travel Writing on Italy” (pp. 124–55) John Paul Russo considers Fuller
part of a tradition of travel writing in which “New Englanders write
as exiles from themselves, from a buried life to which, as they think,
Italy will help gain access.” This tradition was marked by ambivalence
between the “splendor” and “squalor” that they perceived in Italy and
in some cases by a nostalgia that generated resistance to Italian modern-
ization. Fuller and George S. Hillard, whose Six Months in Italy (1853)
was widely read, brought changes to this tradition. Francesco Guida
(“Realism, Idealism, and Passion in Margaret Fuller’s Response to Italy,”
pp. 156–71) argues that Fuller’s observations of Italy, “sometimes ideal-
ized and sometimes wholly foreign to the actual Italian situation,” were
intended to garner American support for Italian independence. The fail-
ure of the Roman uprising did not however dim her “belief in the prog-
ress of human thought and human society.” In “Righteous Violence:
The Roman Republic and Margaret Fuller’s Revolutionary Example”
(pp. 172–92) Larry J. Reynolds connects Fuller’s Italian dispatches with
evolving American antislavery discourse. Her “support of political vio-
lence in Europe prefigured a major change in antislavery thinking in the
United States,” contributing to the shift from Garrisonian nonresistance
to more militant forms of antislavery in the 1850s. “A number of ardent

abolitionists responded with admiration to Fuller’s revolutionary exam-
ple,” including Julia Ward Howe and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Giorcelli (“A Humbug, a Bounder, and a Dabbler: Margaret Fuller, Cris-
tina di Belgioioso, and Christina Casamassima,” pp. 195–220) describes
Fuller’s friendship with the learned, multilingual, politically progressive,
feminist intellectual Cristina di Belgioioso, noting the parallels in their
personalities and experiences. Writing that “both women were much
criticized in their respective worlds,” Giorcelli examines Henry James’s
belittling descriptions of Fuller and Belgioioso and explains his merger
of their personalities in Christina Light (Princess Casamassima), an
English-Italian “femme fatale” who embodied James’s prejudices against
both Italians and women. Maria Anita Stefanelli’s “Margaret Fuller on
the Stage” (pp. 221–37) considers Fuller’s presence as a character in Susan
Sontag’s 1993 Alice in Bed, a play that explores the experience of Alice
James as a precursor to modern feminism.
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American Literary Scholarship, 2007, pp. 3-34 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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Annus mirabilis ! The year 2007 brought important additions to the

American Literary Scholarship (2007)

critically neglected essay, as a biographically revealing and intellectually

“Parliament on the Times” and “Reform Spirit in New England” from

ii The Transcendentalist Movement

the 1830s. This culminated in Emerson’s Divinity School Address and

Transcendentalism as a “movement” rather than a marker for a few liter-

We can add to these two comprehensive histories Daniel Walker

to much theorizing about Emerson’s modernity, that “to some extent,

b. Transcendentalist Ideas For an illuminating discussion of the cur-

c. Transcendentalist Biography John Matteson’s Eden’s Outcasts: The

clear Louisa’s resistance to the intensity of her father’s paternal interest

not share the “luminist” fascination with meditative tranquility and

upon Transcendentalist foundations.” Higginson’s growing discomfort

the chaotic is transformed into meaning and harmony. Psychomythic

work as a founder of psychology. Richardson’s analysis of Emerson in

cosmopolitan conception of an “American” identity in Whitman, Wil-

poet as the modern exemplar for authentic religious experience. Emer-

infinitely expanding knowledge can mean “power” but also “constant

b. Emerson and His Contemporaries Joseph C. Schöpp’s “ ‘The Powers

development” expressing the relationship of all events. In “Medieval

c. Emersonian Concepts In Emerson’s Nonlinear Nature (Missouri)

paradigms dominating nineteenth-century thought.” Emerson consis-

1833,” ESQ 52 [2006]: 193–225) argues effectively that Italy’s “complex

conversation to a conception of the “the secular” as we find in the film

d. Antislavery Writings, Political Thought, and Social Criticism Bar-

politics of affront.” He employs this abrasive and confrontational strat-

world.” His “local cosmopolitanism” prefigures a “contemporary eco-

Matthew Peters, “Individual Development and the American Auto-

b. “Walking,” the Journal, and Other Works Dieter Schulz considers

c. Antislavery Writings Contributing to recent interest in Thoreau’s

d. Thoreauvian Source Material James Dawson, “Recently Discovered

with Thoreau” (Smithsonian 38, vii: 60–65) Michelle Nijhuis describes

exhaustively researched, commanding in its handling of the various

b. Early Career Jeffrey Steele provides an illuminating overview of

describe Allen as one of Fuller’s “most intellectually mature and literate

d. Italy Fuller’s political education continued and accelerated in Italy,

to more militant forms of antislavery in the 1850s. “A number of ardent

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