The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rusk, Ralph L.

doi:10.7312/rusk93740

Cited by 28 publications

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“…Concord was not to be a miniature Boston or Plymouth. 14 Yet Concord was no sleepy country town. Far from forfeiting urban advantages, Emerson could enjoy them in his new home, along with easy access to nature, under circumstances that promised to combine the best of both country and city.…”

Section: Concord Boston and The World 565mentioning

confidence: 99%

Transcendentalism and Urbanism: Concord, Boston, and the Wider World

Gross

1984

J. Am. Stud.

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The town of Concord, Massachusetts, is widely celebrated in American culture as a pastoral place. It was the home of the Minutemen, the “embattled farmers” who fought the Redcoats at the Old North Bridge and launched the War for Independence. More than a half-century later, it became the bucolic center of the American Renaissance, where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau waged their own revolutions of the spirit. In these terms, Concord readily plays its part within the longstanding American opposition between country and city, serving as the timeless small town, the symbolic guardian of that rural simplicity and love of liberty so regularly invoked in times of crisis to recall a complex urban-industrial nation to its roots. Even today, when the town numbers some 16,000 people, Concordians like to picture their community as a “climate for freedom.”

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Section: Concord Boston and The World 565mentioning

confidence: 99%

Transcendentalism and Urbanism: Concord, Boston, and the Wider World

Gross

1984

J. Am. Stud.

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New England Congregationalists and Unitarianism in Late Eighteenth Century/Early Nineteenth Century

Field

2024

Antitrinitarianism and Unitarianism in the Early Modern World

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“After a High Negative Way”: Emerson's “Self-Reliance” and the Rhetoric of Conversion

Hodder

1991

H. Theolo. Review

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The year 1991 marked the sesquicentennial of the publication of the first volume of Emerson's Essays in which appeared, for the first time, “Self-Reliance,” arguably America's most famous essay. Despite the passage of time, this essay has never lost its power to inspire or to enrage. The controversies that continue to swirl around Emerson originate in a few points of contention, but none arouse as much furor as his seemingly innocuous formulation “self-reliance.” From the beginning, Emerson's reception among his readers has been sharply divided. A sampling of studies appearing in the current flood of Emerson criticism suggests that this polarization has never been more characteristic of Emerson's readership than it is currently. On the one hand are those critics of American culture like the late A. Bartlett Giamatti who found Emerson “as sweet as barbed wire” or the sociologist of religion Robert Bellah who located in Emerson the roots of America's most portentous national defects. On the other hand are such notable critics as Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, and Richard Poirier who find in Emerson, rightly read and construed, one of the few viable trails left in contemporary culture. The crux of all such articulate responses, whether of detractor or partisan, is the reflexive and seemingly disinterested conception popularized by Emerson as “self-reliance.”

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The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cited by 28 publications

References 0 publications

Transcendentalism and Urbanism: Concord, Boston, and the Wider World

Transcendentalism and Urbanism: Concord, Boston, and the Wider World

New England Congregationalists and Unitarianism in Late Eighteenth Century/Early Nineteenth Century

“After a High Negative Way”: Emerson's “Self-Reliance” and the Rhetoric of Conversion

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