Performing Loss, Elegy, and Transcendental Friendship-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

Performing Loss, Elegy, and Transcendental Friendship

Published:2008-06 Issue:2 Volume:81 Page:252-277
ISSN:0028-4866
Container-title:The New England Quarterly
language:en
Short-container-title:The New England Quarterly

Author:

Rossi William¹

Affiliation:

1. William Rossi, Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon and an editor of the Journal in the Princeton University Press edition of Thoreau's writings, is the author of essays on Thoreau, Emerson, and nineteenth-century natural science. He is editor most recently of the Norton Critical Edition of “Walden,” “Civil Disobedience,“ and Other Writings (2008).

Abstract

Like friendships among other transcendentalists, that between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau was complicated by loss and grief. Three highly charged moments (1842–49) in their relationship shed new light on Thoreau's capacity for intimacy, his alternative theory of transcendental friendship, and his emergence as a major American writer.

Publisher

MIT Press - Journals

Subject

Literature and Literary Theory,History

Link

https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.2.252

Reference23 articles.

1. "When He Became My Enemy": Emerson and Thoreau, 1848-49

2. 3As Emerson characterized his friend in summer 1848: "Henry Thoreau is like the woodgod who solicits the wandering poet & draws him into antres vast & desarts idle, & bereaves him of his memory, & leaves him naked, plaiting vines & with twigs in his hand. Very seductive are the first steps from the town to the woods, but the End is want & madness" (The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson [JMN], ed. William H. Gilman et al., 16vols. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960-82], 10:344).