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Bezig met laden... Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995)door Robert D. Richardson Jr.
Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Richardson has read just about everything that Emerson read, so he's able to contextualize periods and ideas in the author's life and writings in a very helpful manner. He writes superbly, and he really gets Emerson's impulse to praise and celebrate. Emerson distributed his literary largess in journal entries, letters, lectures and elsewhere, so by reading biography you get in effect a lovely 'selected Emerson'. And Emerson at his best is, in my view, as good as imaginative prose ever gets in the English language. Having this book in my life for a few weeks was galvanizing, and a reminder of why I am passionate about literature. Here is from a recent review in The Guardian John Banville The best book I have read this year is Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D Richardson Jr (University of California Press), a superb biography of the great American philosopher and prose-poet. Richardson's scholarship is exhaustive, he writes a straightforward yet mesmeric prose, and his gift for tracing the development of Emerson's mind through apposite quotation is uncanny. This is, simply, a great book. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)
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.These pages present a young suitor, a grief-stricken widower, an affectionate father, and a man with an abiding genius for friendship. The great spokesman for individualism and self-reliance turns out to have been a good neighbor, an activist citizen, a loyal brother. Here is an Emerson who knew how to laugh, who was self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who became the greatest intellectual adventurer of his age.Richardson has, as much as possible, let Emerson speak for himself through his published works, his many journals and notebooks, his letters, his reported conversations. This is not merely a study of Emerson's writing and his influence on others; it is Emerson's life as he experienced it. We see the failed minister, the struggling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator.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. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)814.3Literature English (North America) American essays Middle 19th Century (1830-1861)LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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Richardson made it easy to become immersed in his quest to uncover the mind of the man. He deftly cuts to the essence of some of the complex philosophies at large in this remarkable period of ferment when a thriving Boston was growing rapidly and young boys of 14 started at Harvard with a multilingual Classical education, Germany was seen as the centre of intelligence, and the College Professors were handsome, erudite, well-read 25 year-olds trained in rhetoric. Oh, to have been one of them! Glimpses of remarkable women such as Mary Wooly, Margaret Fuller and Caroline Sturgis, also drift through the pages as they figured in Emerson's life. It was the time of George Eliot and I'm tempted to read Middlemarch.
What I particularly admired about these 100 short chapters is the way they propelled me through the great arc of narrative so that I was able to take advantage of the circularity and precision with which Richardson constructs the story of Emerson by surveying what he read and thought. Every now and then I almost felt that I had a sense of the man. I think I might have liked him.
I've marked many passages but ultimately, as Emerson sinks into what today feels like a premature old-age, I was unsatisfied with any deeper understanding of my own thread of interest; the notion of ‘nature’. I was probably looking in the wrong place.
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