Re: NP -The Foul Reign of Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’

[alice wellintown]

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the
history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of
his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to
influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D.
Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old
stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast
amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson
brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that
is also a portrait of the whole man.

The Emerson of this book not only influenced Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman,
Dickinson, and Frost, he also inspired Nietzsche, William James,
Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges.
Emerson's timeliness is persistent and striking: his insistence that
literature and science are not separate cultures, his emphasis on the
worth of every individual, his respect for nature.

Richardson gives careful attention to the enormous range of Emerson's
readings—from Persian poets to George Sand—and to his many friendships
and personal encounters—from Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs
in Boston—evoking both the man and the times in which he lived.
Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across
the decades, and his hold on us endures.


http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520206892


Tony Tanner, who begins with the leader of the whole parade in his
book, _The American Mystery_ wrote a review for the London Review of
books.


> Oh, but Emerson was merely the American spokesman for Rousseau. His
> ideas of individualism were neither new nor original. Of course,
> neither were Rousseau's, though they looked radical to the aristocracy
> of the time. I think if you want to aver roots, you'll have to go back
> to the First Empire in Egypt at least, maybe further.