The New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson

This volume offers new perspectives on Emerson in relation to his contemporary moment; his religious and spiritual development; transatlantic Romanticism; nature, the environment, and climate; ethics and self-reliance; political resistance and slavery; race, US imperialism and Asia; and aesthetics, poetry, philosophy, and experimentalism.

While Emerson's place in American literary history has remained secure, the New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson draws on a wealth of recent Emerson scholarship which has highlighted his contemporary relevance for questions of philosophy and politics, ecology and science, poetics and aesthetics, or identity and race, and connects these to the key formal and interpretive issues at stake in understanding his work. The volume's contributors engage the full breadth of Emerson's writing, developing novel approaches to canonical works like Nature, the essays 'Self-Reliance' 'Experience,' or to his poetry and journals, and bringing critical attention to his lectures and to the long-overlooked texts of his later period. This New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson thus both bears witness to the new Emersons that have emerged in the past decades, and draws a new circle in Emerson's reception.