An Emerson Bibliography, 2016
Todd H. Richardson, University of Texas of the Permian Basin
Readers should also consult the Thoreau bibliography published quarterly in the Thoreau Society Bulletin and the chapters “Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism” and “International Scholarship” in the annual American Literary Scholarship (Duke University Press).
Alves, Isabel; Rochelle Johnson; and Edgardo Medeiros da Silva; eds. Anglo Saxonica 3.12. [Special issue entitled Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882): Naturally Emerson includes fourteen essays by such scholars as David Greenham, Lawrence Rhu, and Alexandra Urakova.]
Arsić, Branka. “Against Pessimism: On Emerson’s ‘Experience.’” Arizona Quarterly 72.3: 25-45. [Responds to critics who see “Experience” as “a transformation of Emerson’s alleged optimism into a more sober pessimism.”]
Arsić, Branka. “Poetry as Flowering of Life Forms: Rancière’s Reading of Emerson.” Textual Practice 30.4: 551-577. [Theorizes a genealogy of modernism beginning with Emerson and John Ruskin.]
Bailey, Austin. “‘The World Is Full’: Emerson, Pluralism, and the ‘Nominalist and Realist.’” The Pluralist 11.2: 32-48. [Argues that “pluralism for Emerson must also ethically and epistemologically mirror the pluralisms of embodied communities.”]
Beebe, Ann. “The Conversation: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass.” Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice 8.2 (online journal). [Beebe details her experience teaching Emerson together with Douglass.]
Boatright, Michael. “Emersonian Reading and Ethics: Reading for Developing an Ethical Stance toward Self and Other.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 50.4: 15-30. [Endeavours to show how Emerson’s program of reading develops “an ethical stance toward self and others.”]
Casalini, Cristiano. “American Jesus: Emerson and Thoreau on Religion, European Heritage and Education.” Seen from Afar: Images of Europe in the Cultivation of American Identity. Ed. Luana Salvarani. Rome: Anicia. 113-40. [Emerson stands against “both imitation and mediation” in his uniquely American push for religious reform.]
Corrington, Robert S. Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism. Lanham, MD: Lexington. [Conceptualizes a Transcendentalism that shows the way forward for a planet in crisis while resisting nihilistic elements within postmodernist thought.]
Djockoua, Manyaka Toko. Cross-cultural Affinities: Emersonian Transcendentalism and Senghorian Negritude. Frankfort am Main: Peter Lang. [Argues that “African religions and philosophy have influenced the formation of American Transcendentalism.”]
Einboden, Jeffrey. The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture: Muslim Sources from the Revolution to Reconstruction. New York: Oxford UP. [Includes a meticulously researched chapter on Emerson’s engagement with Islamic literature, religion, and culture.]
Frank, Jason. “Willful Liberalism in America.” Theory & Event 19.1 (online journal). [“(E)xplores problems of personalism and impersonalism in Richard Flatham’s theory of willful liberalism and … Emerson’s theory of self reliance.”]
Goto, Shoji. Emerson’s Eastern Education. New York: Nova Science Publishers. [Approaches an understanding of the enormous debt Emerson owes to eastern thought.]
Greenham, David. “The Atlantic Adam: Emerson and the Origins of United States Literature.” The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies. Ed. Leslie Eckel and Andrew Taylor. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. 253-265. [Argues that Emerson is an “Atlantic Adam” who helped “(bring) about an American Renaissance.”]
Greenham, David. “Corresponding Natures: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Letters.” The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing. Ed. Judie Newman, Celeste Marie-Bernier, and Matthew Pethers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. 319-331. [Examines Emerson’s letters from 1816-1842 for “the emergence of his central philosophical and literary concerns.”]
Grűnzweig, Walter. “Parasitic Simulacrum: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, and the Urban ‘Creative Class.’” Urban Representations in the U.S.A.: Spaces, Communities, Representations. Ed. Julia Sattler. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. 81-97. [Argues that Florida’s concept of the “creative class” originates with Emerson but lacks Emerson’s critical sensibility.]
Guardiano, Nicholas L. Aesthetic Transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and Nineteenth- Century American Landscape Painting. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. [Presents Aesthetic Transcendentalism as a philosophy seeking to uncover an “aesthetic dimension in nature.”]
Guardiano, Nicholas L. “Ecstatic Naturalism and Aesthetic Transcendentalism on the Creativity of Nature.” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 37.1: 55–69. [Traces out Transcendentalist origins in the cosmology of Charles Sanders Peirce.]
Heddendorf, David. “What is Emerson for?” Sewanee Review 124.3: 482-488. [Characterizes Emerson as seemingly irrelevant but somehow persistent.]
Heidarzadegan, Nazila. “The Discourse of Transcendentalism and Mysticism: Poetry from East and West.” Interstudia 19: 21-31. [Compares Emerson, Khayyam, and Hafiz. (Unseen)]
Hodder, Alan. “The Bhagavad Gītā in American Transcendentalism.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion. Ed. Mark Knight. New York: Routledge. 298-309. [Details Emerson’s reception of the Bhagavad Gītā.]
Kaag, John and Martin Clancy. “Can Transcendence Be Taught?” Chronicle of Higher Education 63.7: B6-B9. [“Experience” provides a beginning point for students asking “the big questions.”]
Kane, Paul. “Work: Emerson, Wittgenstein, Gurdjieff.” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 16.1: 110-114. [Explores similarities in Emerson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and G. I. Gurdjieff in their notion that philosophical work helps us realize truth, even when such truth brings pain.]
Knutson, Andrea and Kathryn Dolan, eds. Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 49.1. [Special issue entitled Fugitive Environmentalisms. The conceptual framework as put forth in “Introduction: Fugitive Environmentalisms” (7-24) is informed by Emerson’s lifelong mission to unsettle “the oppressive stability of hardened ‘fact.’”]
Levine, Robert S. “The Canon and the Survey: An Anthologist’s Perspective.” J19 4.1: 135-140. [97% of college instructors teaching American literature 1820-1865 considered Emerson “absolutely essential to their survey classes.”]
Loots, Christopher. “‘That Inscrutable Thing’: Holography, Nonlocality, and Identity in American Romanticism.” Configurations 24.1: 71-108. [Sees common ground in Emerson’s thought and “the science of quantum nonlocality and optical holography, and David Bohm’s holomovement theory.”]
Malachuk, Daniel S. Two Cities: The Political Thought of American Transcendentalism. [Argues, contrary to received opinion, that Emerson, along with other Transcendentalists, viewed “democracy as a profane project and individuality as a sacred one.”]
Mastroianni, Dominic. Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. [Explores Emerson’s belief in a “secret spring” that mysteriously transforms the individual. The book received a subvention award from the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society.]
Macleod, Glen. “Influence or Affinity?” Wallace Stevens Journal 40.1: 1-5. [Calls for a clearer understanding of Emerson’s influence on Stevens.]
Meehan, Sean Ross. “Metonymies of Mind: Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and the Rhetoric of Liberal Education.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 49.3: 277-299. [Uncovers “ways that Emerson and James engage and enact a congenial and unconventional rhetoric of mind” that both “associate with the older liberal education of the college.”]
Mondello, Kaitlin. “‘Perpetual Analogies’ and ‘Occult Harmonies’: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Ecological Selves.” Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies. Ed. Dewey W. Hall. Lanham, MD: Lexington. 105-122. [Examines biblical typology as a source for Emerson’s scientific thought.]
Mott, Wesley T. “Choral Setting of Emerson’s ‘Boston Hymn’ Premiers at Symphony Hall.” Emerson Society Papers 27.1: 1, 6-7). [Reviews Boston’s Handel and Hayden Society Period Instrument Orchestra and Chorus’s performance of My Angel, His Name Is Freedom, an arrangement of Emerson’s poem “Boston Hymn.” Another version of the review appears in the online Boston Musical Intelligencer.]
Myerson, Joel and Michael C. Weisenburg “‘I liked the town no better at our second interview’: A New Emerson Letter from Charleston in 1827.” New England Quarterly 89.3: 493-504. [Prints and historically contextualizes Emerson’s letter to his uncle Samuel Ripley.]
Myerson, Joel and Leslie Perrin Wilson. Picturing Emerson: An Iconography. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library. [Includes color reproductions of every known photograph, painting, sculpture, and drawing of Emerson taken from life. Appeared originally as a special issue of Harvard Library Bulletin, Spring-Summer 2016, 27.1-2.]
Posnock, Ross. Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. [Devotes a chapter to commonalities in Emerson, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.]
Rabiee, Robert Yusef. “Feudalism, Individualism, and Authority in Later Emerson.” ESQ 62.1: 77-114. [Argues that Emerson’s early theorizing of a “dialectical relationship…between society and the individual gave way to a doctrine of natural aristocracy.”]
Schlett, James. A Not Too Greatly Changed Eden: The Story of the Philosophers’ Camp in the Adirondacks. Ithaca: Cornell UP. [Relates the story of the August 1858 camping expedition to the Adirondacks in which Emerson participated.]
Scholnick, Robert J. “Whigs and Democrats, the Past and the Future: The Political Emerson and Whitman’s 1855 Preface.” American Periodicals 26.1: 70-91. [Argues that Whitman’s agenda as a Democrat and Emerson’s affinities with the same party are apparent when their work is read in context of the Democratic Review and the Whig affiliated American Review.]
Shanahan, John. “Digital Transcendentalism in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas” Criticism 58.1: 115-45. [Posits that Mitchell has crafted a new form of Transcendentalism for the digital age.]
Sommer, Tim. “Economies of Value: Emerson, Thoreau, and the (Literary) Market.” Oxford Research in English 3: 42-53 (online journal). [Discusses “the ambiguity about the market economy” expressed by Emerson and Thoreau.]
Stanley, Kate. “Through Emerson’s Eye: The Practice of Perception in Proust.” American Literary History 28.3: 455-483. [Identifies an intellectual lineage extending from Plotinus to Emerson to Marcel Proust.]
Sweeny, Jon M., ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essential Spiritual Writings. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. [Designed for spiritual seekers coming to Emerson for the first time.]
Urbas, Joseph. Emerson’s Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes. Lanham, MD: Lexington. [Drawing on the entire corpus of Emerson’s work, Urbas makes a strong case for Emerson’s metaphysics of causation.]
von Frank, Albert J. An Emerson Chronology. 2nd ed, 2 vols. Albuquerque: Studio Non Troppo. [Roughly twice the size the first edition of the Chronology. Includes a thorough index.]
Weber, Edward P. Endangered Species: A Documentary and Reference Guide. Santa Barbara: Greenwood. [In the chapter “Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Nature,’” Weber reprints and offers commentary upon the first three chapters of Emerson’s book to underscore his contributions to an ethos of biodiversity.]
West, Kristina. “#Emerson in 140 Characters or Less” Emerson Society Papers 27.1: 8-9. [Explores how “Twitter…might be a useful tool in introducing students to Emerson.”]