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Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most renowned New England Transcendentalist, stirred Victorian American audiences with his message of self-reliance, philosophical idealism, and forward-looking optimism. Emerson's one travel work and the only book-length volume he wrote, English Traits (1856), is, however, considerably less informed by his Transcendental philosophy than his other writings, either in terms of content or style. Indeed, many scholars hold that this work, a sophisticated appraisal of mid-nineteenth-century English national identity, is the least Emersonian of his publications. Rather than expanding upon abstract Idealist concepts (such as the "Over-Soul" or "Self-Reliance"), English Traits offers specific social observations, concrete details, abundant facts and statistics, and alternately admiring and satiric anecdotes about English literati and historical figures. Likewise, although the prose style is often allusive and aphoristic, it avoids the daunting ellipses of Emerson's more famous, visionary essays. The volume will seem less atypical, though, if the reader recognizes that it engages a basic theme that preoccupied Emerson throughout his career--the opposed claims, on the one side, of nature, potentiality, and liberty; and, on the other, culture, realized power, and tradition.
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