Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Major Prose

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780674417069
• eBook ISBN: 9780674286290
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie nordamericane

Upon its completion, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971–2013) was hailed as a major achievement of scholarship and textual editing. Drawing from the ten volumes of the Collected Works, Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson have gathered some of Emerson's most memorable prose published during his lifetime and under his direct supervision. The editors have enhanced those selections with additional writings to produce the only anthology that represents in a single volume the full range of Emerson's written and spoken prose genres—sermons, lectures, addresses, and essays—that took on their public life in the pulpit or lecture hall, or on the printed page.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose demonstrates the remarkable scope of Emerson's interests, from science, literature, art, philosophy, natural history, and religion to pressing social issues such as slavery and women's rights, to the character of his contemporaries, including Lincoln and Thoreau. Emerson's classic essays Nature, "Self-Reliance," and "Experience" complement his less familiar but no less vital texts, including the deeply heterodox sermon on "The Lord's Supper," which effectively announced his resignation from the ministry, and late essays on "American Civilization," "Character," and "Works and Days." Edited according to the most rigorous modern standards, Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose provides an authoritative compendium of writings by one of America's most significant literary figures and public intellectuals.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Textual Policies
• Sermon CLXII [“The Lord’s Supper”] (1832)
• The Uses of Natural History (1833–1835)
• Nature (1836)
• Humanity of Science (1836, 1847–1848)
• The American Scholar (1837)
• The Divinity School Address (1838)
• Self-Reliance (1841)
• Circles (1841)
• The Transcendentalist (1842, 1849)
• New England: Genius, Manners, and Customs (1843–1844)
• The Poet (1844)
• Experience (1844)
• Nominalist and Realist (1844)
• An Address Delivered in the Court-House in Concord, Massachusetts, on 1st August, 1844, on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies (1844)
• England (1848–1852)
• Uses of Great Men (1850)
• The Anglo-American (1852–1855)
• American Slavery (1855)
• Address at the Woman’s Rights Convention (1855)
• Mr. R. W. Emerson’s Remarks at the Kansas Relief Meeting in Cambridge (1856)
• The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy (1858)
• Fate (1860)
• American Civilization (1862)
• Thoreau (1862)
• The President’s Proclamation (1862)
• The Scholar (1863)
• Character (1866)
• Works and Days (1870)
• Credits
• Index