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Cargando... Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995)por Robert D. Richardson Jr.
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Richardson has read just about everything that Emerson read, so he's able to contextualize periods and ideas in the author's life and writings in a very helpful manner. He writes superbly, and he really gets Emerson's impulse to praise and celebrate. Emerson distributed his literary largess in journal entries, letters, lectures and elsewhere, so by reading biography you get in effect a lovely 'selected Emerson'. And Emerson at his best is, in my view, as good as imaginative prose ever gets in the English language. Having this book in my life for a few weeks was galvanizing, and a reminder of why I am passionate about literature. Here is from a recent review in The Guardian John Banville The best book I have read this year is Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D Richardson Jr (University of California Press), a superb biography of the great American philosopher and prose-poet. Richardson's scholarship is exhaustive, he writes a straightforward yet mesmeric prose, and his gift for tracing the development of Emerson's mind through apposite quotation is uncanny. This is, simply, a great book. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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This comprehensive portrait of Emerson draws from newly available material, including correspondence between the Emerson brothers. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)814.3Literature English (North America) American essays Middle 19th Century (1830-1861)Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Richardson made it easy to become immersed in his quest to uncover the mind of the man. He deftly cuts to the essence of some of the complex philosophies at large in this remarkable period of ferment when a thriving Boston was growing rapidly and young boys of 14 started at Harvard with a multilingual Classical education, Germany was seen as the centre of intelligence, and the College Professors were handsome, erudite, well-read 25 year-olds trained in rhetoric. Oh, to have been one of them! Glimpses of remarkable women such as Mary Wooly, Margaret Fuller and Caroline Sturgis, also drift through the pages as they figured in Emerson's life. It was the time of George Eliot and I'm tempted to read Middlemarch.
What I particularly admired about these 100 short chapters is the way they propelled me through the great arc of narrative so that I was able to take advantage of the circularity and precision with which Richardson constructs the story of Emerson by surveying what he read and thought. Every now and then I almost felt that I had a sense of the man. I think I might have liked him.
I've marked many passages but ultimately, as Emerson sinks into what today feels like a premature old-age, I was unsatisfied with any deeper understanding of my own thread of interest; the notion of ‘nature’. I was probably looking in the wrong place.
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