1 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism文档.pdfVIP

1 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism David M. Robinson Two important essay collections, historically grounded and textually mindful, continued the remarkable momentum in the scholarship on Transcendentalism. Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Move- ment and Its Contexts, ed. Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright (MHS), collects 20 papers from a 1997 conference at the Massachusetts Historical Society, a signal event in the history of Transcendentalist scholarship. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris have gathered 13 new essays on all facets of Emerson’s works and influence in their Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge). Other important work included Jonathan Levin’s contribution to the pragmatist reading of Emerson and Gustaaf Van Cromphout’s study of Emerson as an ethical thinker. Newer biographies of important Transcendentalist women, Mary Moody Emerson and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley (see AmLS 1998, pp. 4–6), are now joined by Gary Williams’s revealing study of Julia Ward Howe and Bruce A. Ronda’s reassessment of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. i Emerson a. Emerson’s Intellectual Contexts Gustaaf Van Cromphout’s erudite and judicious account of Emerson’s Ethics (Missouri) situates Emerson’s ethical thought in the productive transition between 18th-century moral philosophy and the rise of Romanticism. For Van Cromphout, Imman- uel Kant is the central influence on Emerson’s ethical thought, for whether one concludes that Emerson read Kant directly or absorbed him from Coleridge and others, it was Kant who established the terms for ethical discourse in Emerson’s day. Kant’s ‘‘critical idealism’’ and his emphasis on the authority of practical over pure reason are embodied in 4 Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism Emerson’s development of an ethics of ‘‘self-realization.’’ E