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Book Cover for: Emerson's Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style, Christopher Hanlon

Emerson's Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style

Christopher Hanlon

Ralph Waldo Emerson's dementia, an ordeal that marked his final two decades, has never been a secret among those who study Emerson's life. Still, few have focused on the period of Emerson's decline. Thus, his later thinking has succumbed to a process of critical forgetting too often ignored by scholars if not excluded from his oeuvre altogether. And yet Emerson's late output, composed as his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly, stages a reconsideration of interests that had preoccupied him for decades: the continuum of human thought and the rest of nature, the bearing of the individual toward the collective, the mind's relationship with the body.

Emerson's Memory Loss presents an archive of texts documenting Emerson's intellectual, affective, and associative states during his late phase, along with the varying forms of shared connection from which these works emerge. It is also about the way such texts connect Emerson with a stream of thought in America, coursing through the works of other nineteenth-century writers and thinkers adjacent to Emerson, that emphasizes the aggregate over the singular, the social over the solipsistic, the engaged over the distant, and the many over the one. Hanlon attends to manuscripts and publications marking Emerson's collaborations with others which Emerson himself articulated as his most important work-texts written even as his ability to do so independently waned. Hanlon measures its resonance across broader strains of U.S. culture familiar to Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and more.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Oxford Univ PR
  • Publish Date: Jan 4th, 2018
  • Pages: 180
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.30in - 6.00in - 0.70in - 0.85lb
  • EAN: 9780190842529
  • Categories: EssaysAmerican - RegionalModern - 19th Century

About the Author

Christopher Hanlon is Associate Professor of U.S. Literature at Arizona State University and the author of America's England: Atlantic Sectionalism and Antebellum Literature (Oxford, 2007).

Praise for this book

"Hanlon takes [Emerson's] involuntary lapse of autonomy as an opportunity for charting Emerson's waning commitment to an 'autonomous and self-reliant mind.' ... This powerful line of analysis results in substantial reassessments ... Hanlon's study of an unfamiliar Emerson attests to the value of 'actively transformative forms of remembrance.' ... Essential." --J. Risinger, CHOICE

"Hanlon's book is beautifully written and its claims are carefully modulated. ... One of the most exciting things about Emerson's Memory Loss is its way of opening for serious examination an area of Emerson's writing that has been deemed more or less off limits: the work gener-ated during the years after the onset of his dementia" -- Dominic Mastroianni, American Literary History