The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson

The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson PDF Author: Mary Moody Emerson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820314624
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 692

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Book Description
Scholars have long recognized that Mary Moody Emerson (1774-1863) had a vital influence on the intellectual development of her nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson, during his most formative years. The extent of that influence--and the quality of Mary Emerson's own mind--are apparent, however, only through her extensive correspondence spanning seventy years. The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson makes available for the first time this important collection of letters within the Emerson family papers and firmly establishes Mary Emerson as a woman of strong and independent mind. Moreover, as Emerson himself realized, his aunt's letters reveal much about the political, social, and religious concerns that dominated her age--the critical period from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Mary Emerson rejoiced in what she called a "period of wonderfull revolutions" and through her correspondence engaged actively in the disputes of the time. During these years the new Constitution was tried and tested, most severely by slavery and the Civil War but also by the War of 1812, the rapid expansion westward, and the increasingly materialistic and capitalistic pursuits of the American people. These letters contain wide references to the people, events, and controversies of the period. They also reveal the impact of changing conditions on an individual woman--a woman of curiosity and self-reliance who sought to define herself in a patriarchal culture. Ralph Waldo Emerson once commented that in her "prime" Mary Emerson was the "best writer in New England". The letter became her art form, and she managed to transform it into a vehicle for free discussion. Her many correspondents--fifty-five in all--included her Emerson nephews William, Waldo, Edward, and Charles, as well as Charles's fiancee, Elizabeth Hoar, and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley. For this edition, Nancy Simmons has chosen some 333 letters that represent the contours of Mary Emerson's life and thought. A valuable contribution to literary, historical, religious, and feminist scholarship, The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson recovers from the footnotes of literary history a woman of considerable intellectual influence.

The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson

The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson PDF Author: Mary Moody Emerson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820314624
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 692

Get Book

Book Description
Scholars have long recognized that Mary Moody Emerson (1774-1863) had a vital influence on the intellectual development of her nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson, during his most formative years. The extent of that influence--and the quality of Mary Emerson's own mind--are apparent, however, only through her extensive correspondence spanning seventy years. The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson makes available for the first time this important collection of letters within the Emerson family papers and firmly establishes Mary Emerson as a woman of strong and independent mind. Moreover, as Emerson himself realized, his aunt's letters reveal much about the political, social, and religious concerns that dominated her age--the critical period from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Mary Emerson rejoiced in what she called a "period of wonderfull revolutions" and through her correspondence engaged actively in the disputes of the time. During these years the new Constitution was tried and tested, most severely by slavery and the Civil War but also by the War of 1812, the rapid expansion westward, and the increasingly materialistic and capitalistic pursuits of the American people. These letters contain wide references to the people, events, and controversies of the period. They also reveal the impact of changing conditions on an individual woman--a woman of curiosity and self-reliance who sought to define herself in a patriarchal culture. Ralph Waldo Emerson once commented that in her "prime" Mary Emerson was the "best writer in New England". The letter became her art form, and she managed to transform it into a vehicle for free discussion. Her many correspondents--fifty-five in all--included her Emerson nephews William, Waldo, Edward, and Charles, as well as Charles's fiancee, Elizabeth Hoar, and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley. For this edition, Nancy Simmons has chosen some 333 letters that represent the contours of Mary Emerson's life and thought. A valuable contribution to literary, historical, religious, and feminist scholarship, The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson recovers from the footnotes of literary history a woman of considerable intellectual influence.

Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism

Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism PDF Author: Phyllis Cole
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195152005
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Mary Moody Emerson has long been a New England legend, the "eccentric Calvinist aunt" of Ralph Waldo Emerson, wearing a death-shroud as her daily garment. This exciting new study, based on the first reading of all her known letters and diaries, reveals a complex human voice and powerful forerunner of American Transcendentalism. From the years of her famous nephew's infancy, in both private and published writings, she celebrated independence, solitude in nature, and inward communion with God. Mary Moody Emerson inherited both resources and constraints from her family, a lineage of Massachusetts ministers who had earlier practiced spiritual awakening and political resistance against England. Cole discovers a previously unexamined Emerson tradition of fervent piety in the ancestors' own writing and Mary's preservation of their memory. She also examines the position of a woman in this patriarchal family. Barred from the pulpit and university by her sex, she also refused marriage to become a reader, writer, and religious seeker. Cole's biography explores this reading and writing as both a woman's vocation and a gift to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Helping to raise her nephews after their father's death, Mary Moody Emerson urged Waldo the college student to seek solitude in nature and become a divine poet. Cole's pioneering study, tracing crucial lines of influence from Mary Emerson's heretofore unknown texts to her nephew's major works, establishes a fresh and vital source for a central American literary tradition.

The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson PDF Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231102827
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
Virtually no writer has so influenced American thought as Ralph Waldo Emerson--called the heart and soul of Transcendentalism. Here renowned Emerson scholar Joel Myerson distills the essential core of this great thinker's vast letter-writing endeavors into one volume, presenting a collection of 350 pieces of correspondence written between 1813 and 1880. Emerson is revealed as thoroughly engaged with the vital issues of his day.

The Making of American Liberal Theology

The Making of American Liberal Theology PDF Author: Gary J. Dorrien
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 9780664223540
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
This text identifies the indigenous roots of American liberal theology and uncovers a wider, longer-running tradition than has been thought. Taking a narrative approach the text provides a biographical reading of important religious thinkers of the time.

The Religion of Democracy

The Religion of Democracy PDF Author: Amy Kittelstrom
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143108131
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
A history of religion’s role in the American liberal tradition through the eyes of seven transformative thinkers Today we associate liberal thought and politics with secularism. When we argue over whether the nation’s founders meant to keep religion out of politics, the godless side is said to be liberal. But the role of religion in American politics has always been far less simplistic than today’s debates would suggest. In The Religion of Democracy, historian Amy Kittelstrom shows how religion and democracy have worked together as universal ideals in American culture—and as guides to moral action and to the social practice of treating one another as equals who deserve to be free. The first people in the world to call themselves “liberals” were New England Christians in the early republic. Inspired by their religious belief in a God-given freedom of conscience, these Americans enthusiastically embraced the democratic values of equality and liberty, giving shape to the liberal tradition that would remain central to our politics and our way of life. The Religion of Democracy re-creates the liberal conversation from the eighteenth century to the twentieth by tracing the lived connections among seven transformative thinkers through what they read and wrote, where they went, whom they knew, and how they expressed their opinions—from John Adams to William James to Jane Addams; from Boston to Chicago to Berkeley. Sweeping and ambitious, The Religion of Democracy is a lively narrative of quintessentially American ideas as they were forged, debated, and remade across our history.

A Passionate Usefulness

A Passionate Usefulness PDF Author: Gary D. Schmidt
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813922720
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
In a literary environment dominated by men, the first American to earn a living as a writer and to establish a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic was, miraculously, a woman. Hannah Adams dared to enter--and in some ways was forced to enter--a sphere of literature that had, in eighteenth-century America, been solely a male province. Driven by poverty and necessity, and aided by an extraordinarily adept mind and keen sense of business, Adams authored works on New England history, sectarian history, and Jewish history, using and citing the most recent scholarly works being published in Great Britain and America. As a female writer, she would always remain something of an outsider, but her accomplishments did not by any means go unrecognized: embraced by the Boston intelligentsia and highly regarded throughout New England, Adams came to epitomize the possibility in a democratic society that anyone could rise to a circle of intellectual elites. In A Passionate Usefulness, the first book-length biography of this remarkable figure, Gary Schmidt focuses primarily on the intimate connection between Adams's reading and her own literary work. Hers is the story of incipient scholarship in the new nation, the story of a dependence that evolved into intellectual independence. Schmidt sets Adams's works in the context of her early poverty and desperate family situation, her decade-long feud with one of New England's most powerful Calvinist ministers, her alliance with the budding Unitarian movement in Boston, and her work establishing the first evangelical mission to Palestine (a task she accomplished virtually single-handedly). Today Adams still holds a place not only as a female writer who made her way economically in the book business before any other woman--or male writer--could do so, but also as a key figure in the transitional generation between the American Revolution and the Renaissance upon whose groundwork much of the country's later literature would build.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson PDF Author: Peter S. Field
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847688432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In this original and fascinating book, Peter S. Field argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson is America's first democratic intellectual. Field contends that Emerson was a democrat in two senses: his writings are imbued with an optimistic, confident ethos, and more importantly, he acted the part of the democrat by bringing culture to all Americans. In Ralph Waldo Emerson, Field connects Emerson and his remarkable creativity to the key political issue of the day: the nature of democracy and the role of intellectuals within a democratic society.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson PDF Author: Prentiss Clark
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476647755
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In his 1837 speech "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, "life is our dictionary," encapsulating a body of work that reached well beyond the American 19th century. This comprehensive study explores Emerson as a preacher, poet, philosopher, lecturer, essayist and editor. There are nearly 100 entries on individual texts and their personal, historical and literary contexts. Emerson's work is placed within his relationships with family members, fellow Transcendentalists and transatlantic friends, and his commitment to ethics, self-culture and social change. This book provides the fullest possible exploration of Emerson's writing and philosophy. Far ahead of his own time, the man enthusiastically questioned institutions, communities, friendships, history, individuality and contemporaneous approaches to environmental stewardship.

The Emerson Brothers

The Emerson Brothers PDF Author: Ronald A. Bosco
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195140362
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
Features a narrative and epistolary biography, based upon the correspondence exchanged among the four Emerson brothers and the women who were most important to them. The Emerson brothers' correspondence is the last body of personal writings remaining in manuscript from Ralph Waldo Emerson and his extended family.

Lives Out of Letters

Lives Out of Letters PDF Author: Robert N. Hudspeth
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838640050
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Though the efficacy of literary biography has been widely contested by academic theorists, artention to the lives of authors remains an enduring fact of our literary history. Dedicated to Robert N. Hudspeth, editor of the Letters of Margaret Fuller and the Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, the eleven essays in this collection address from a practitioner's perspective the relationship between American literary biography, documentation, and interpretation.