Description: While Emerson's place in American literary history has remained secure, the New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson draws on a wealth of recent Emerson scholarship which has highlighted his contemporary relevance for questions of philosophy and politics, ecology and science, poetics and aesthetics, or identity and race, and connects these to the key formal and interpretive issues at stake in understanding his work. The volume's contributors engage the full breadth of Emerson's writing, developing novel approaches to canonical works like Nature, the essays 'Self-Reliance' 'Experience, ' or to his poetry and journals, and bringing critical attention to his lectures and to the long-overlooked texts of his later period. This New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson thus both bears witness to the new Emersons that have emerged in the past decades, and draws a new circle in Emerson's reception.
Brief description: Michael Jonik is Professor of American Literature and Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is author of Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge 2018) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook to Herman Melville. He is book reviews and special issues editor for the journal Textual Practice.