Book Description

The long-awaited final volumes of Emerson's lectures The past several decades have witnessed an extraordinary editorial reconstruction of the life and influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of America's foremost writers and intellectuals. By drawing primarily from previously unpublished manuscripts in the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association Collection in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, recent editions of Emerson's correspondence, journals and notebooks, sermons, and early lectures have provided authoritative texts that inspire readers to consider Emerson's place in American culture afresh. Drawn from the last untapped body of Emerson's manuscripts, The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871 presents the texts of forty-seven complete and unpublished lectures that Emerson delivered during the crucial middle years of his career. They offer Emerson's thoughts on subjects that occupied him throughout his life - New England and Old World history and culture, poetic theory, education, the history and uses of intellect - as well as his ideas on subjects that sparked as many debates in the nineteenth century as they do today - race relations and women's rights. T