Beschreibung:
@font-face { font-family: "e;Calibri"e;;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "e;Times New Roman"e;; }h4 { margin: 12pt 0in 3pt; page-break-after: avoid; font-size: 14pt; font-family: "e;Times New Roman"e;; }span.Heading4Char { font-family: Calibri; font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }By the end of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson was well on his way to becoming the Wisest American and the Sage of Concord, a literary celebrity and a national icon. With that fame came what Robert Habich describes as a blandly sanctified version of Emerson held widely by the reading public. Building Their Own Waldos sets out to understand the dilemma faced by Emerson s early biographers: how to represent a figure whose subversive individualism had been eclipsed by his celebrity, making him less a representative of his age than a caricature of it. Drawing on never-before-published letters, diaries, drafts, business records, and private documents, Habich Emerson s First Biographers explores the making of a cultural hero through the stories of Emerson s first biographers George Willis Cooke, a minister most recently from Indianapolis who considered himself a disciple; the English reformer and newspaper mogul Alexander Ireland, a friend for half a century; Moncure D. Conway, a Southern abolitionist then residing in London, who called Emerson his spiritual father and intellectual teacher ; the poet and medical professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, with Emerson a member of Boston s gathering of literary elite, the Saturday Club; James Elliot Cabot, the family s authorized biographer, an architect and amateur philosopher with unlimited access to Emerson s unpublished papers; and Emerson s son Edward, a physician and painter whose father had passed over him as literary executor in favor of Cabot.Just as their biographies reveal a complex, socially engaged Emerson, so too do the biographers own stories illustrate the real-world perils, challenges, and motives of life-writing in the late nineteenth century, when biographers were routinely vilified as ghoulish and disreputable and biography as a genre underwent a profound redefinition. Building Their Own Waldos is at once a revealing look at Emerson s constructed reputation, a case study in the rewards and dangers of Victorian life-writing, and the story of six authors struggling amidst personal misfortunes and shifting expectations to capture the elusive character of America s representative man, as they knew him and as they needed him to be.
@font-face { font-family: "e;Calibri"e;;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "e;Times New Roman"e;; }h4 { margin: 12pt 0in 3pt; page-break-after: avoid; font-size: 14pt; font-family: "e;Times New Roman"e;; }span.Heading4Char { font-family: Calibri; font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }By the end of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson was well on his way to becoming the Wisest American and the Sage of Concord, a literary celebrity and a national icon. With that fame came what Robert Habich describes as a blandly sanctified version of Emerson held widely by the reading public. Building Their Own Waldos sets out to understand the dilemma faced by Emerson s early biographers: how to represent a figure whose subversive individualism had been eclipsed by his celebrity, making him less a representative of his age than a caricature of it. Drawing on never-before-published letters, diaries, drafts, business records, and private documents, Habich Emerson s First Biographers explores the making of a cultural hero through the stories of Emerson s first biographers George Willis Cooke, a minister most recently from Indianapolis who considered himself a disciple; the English reformer and newspaper mogul Alexander Ireland, a friend for half a century; Moncure D. Conway, a Southern abolitionist then residing in London, who called Emerson his spiritual father and intellectual teacher ; the poet and medical professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, with Emerson a member of Boston s gathering of literary elite, the Saturday Club; James Elliot Cabot, the family s authorized biographer, an architect and amateur philosopher with unlimited access to Emerson s unpublished papers; and Emerson s son Edward, a physician and painter whose father had passed over him as literary executor in favor of Cabot.Just as their biographies reveal a complex, socially engaged Emerson, so too do the biographers own stories illustrate the real-world perils, challenges, and motives of life-writing in the late nineteenth century, when biographers were routinely vilified as ghoulish and disreputable and biography as a genre underwent a profound redefinition. Building Their Own Waldos is at once a revealing look at Emerson s constructed reputation, a case study in the rewards and dangers of Victorian life-writing, and the story of six authors struggling amidst personal misfortunes and shifting expectations to capture the elusive character of America s representative man, as they knew him and as they needed him to be.