Emerson's Ghosts Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists

It is increasingly commonplace to find scholars who circle back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and his intellectual heirs as a way of better understanding contemporary social and aesthetic contexts. Why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? In this innovative study, Randall Fuller examines the way pivotal twentieth-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. He examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. An engaging institutional history of American literary studies in the twentieth century, Emerson's Ghosts reveals the unexpected convergent forces that have shaped American cultural history in lasting ways.

Randall Fuller is Associate Professor of English at Drury University. He is the author of From Battlefields Rising and the coeditor of The Business of Reflection: Hawthorne in His Notebooks.

Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1. The Haunting of American Literature
Chapter 2. Emerson in the Gilded Age
Chapter 3. How to Dismantle American Culture: Van Wyck Brooks and Oppositional Criticism
Chapter 4. F. O. Matthiessen and the Tragedy of the American Scholar
Chapter 5. Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness
Chapter 6. Sacvan Bercovitch as "American" Scholar
Chapter 7. Emerson's Ghosts
End Notes
Bibliography