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.
Edited by:
Michael Jonik (University of Sussex)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Weight: 602g
ISBN: 9781009347754
ISBN 10: 1009347756
Series: Cambridge Companions to Literature
Pages: 340
Publication Date: 07 May 2026
Audience:
General/trade
,
College/higher education
,
ELT Advanced
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction: Emerson's Circles Michael Jonik; 1. Emerson's Times Jeffrey Insko; 2. Spiritual Laws: Religion and Rainbows Devin Zuber; 3. Emerson and Transnational Romanticisms Jennifer Baker; 4. Nature, Ecology, Climate: Emerson's Ecopoetical Thought Laura Dassow Walls; 5. 'Allied to All': Emerson and Ethics Beyond 'Self-Reliance' Prentiss Clark; 6. Life, Form and Power in 'Experience' Michael Jonik; 7. Emerson at the Lectern and the Voiced Essay Tom F. Wright; 8. Labor, Slavery and the Civil War Sophia Forster ; 9. Democracy Johannes Voelz; 10. English Traits David LaRocca; 11. 'Numbers Wild': Emerson's Poetry and Metaphysics Danielle Follett; 12. Writing Emerson into the History of American Philosophy Joseph Urbas; 13. Emerson and Science Mark Noble; 14. Emerson's Aesthetics: The Abiding Life of Beauty Nicholas Guardiano; 15. Emerson, Asia and 'The Progress of Culture' Spencer Tricker; 16. Emerson's Late Styles Sean Ross Meehan; 17. Emersonian Aesthetics in the 20th Century Paul Grimstad.
Michael Jonik is Professor of American Literature and Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is author of Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge 2018) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook to Herman Melville. He is book reviews and special issues editor for the journal Textual Practice.
