Emerson's Ghosts

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 influential 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 He examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. Emerging from this research is not only the first in-depth account of Emerson's cultural construction but also a deeply engaging institutional history of American literary studies in the twentieth century.
A work of American literary history, Emerson's Ghosts is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between a scholar's individual perspective and prevailing cultural conditions merge together to impel critics to redirect the course of a present moment - often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled - toward a desired future. When an engaged but theoretical mind meets with an impassive history, the response that follows, for some of our most imaginative and brilliant critics, has led, often and suggestively, to a turn toward Emerson. Fuller speculates about why--why that turn--and considers what it has meant for those that follow. His answers provide compelling reading for anyone interested in the convergent forces that have carved the panorama of American cultural history.