Robert N. Hudspeth's Books

Lives Out of Letters

Essays on American Literary Biography and Documentation in Honor of Robert N. Hudspeth

By: Robert N. Hudspeth

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Lives Out of Letters

Essays on American Literary Biography and Documentation in Honor of Robert N. Hudspeth

By: Robert N. Hudspeth

Though the efficacy of literary biography has been widely contested by academic theorists, artention to the lives of authors remains an enduring fact of our literary history. Dedicated to Robert N. Hudspeth, editor of the Letters of Margaret Fuller and the Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, the eleven essays in this collection address from a practitioner's perspective the relationship between American literary biography, documentation, and interpretation.

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292

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0838640052

ISBN 13

9780838640050

Building Their Own Waldos

Emerson’s First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age

By: Robert D. Habich

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Building Their Own Waldos

Emerson’s First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age

By: Robert D. Habich

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 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.

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Page Count

217

Publisher

University of Iowa Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1587299631

ISBN 13

9781587299636

Adam Mickiewicz

The Life of a Romantic

By: Roman Robert Koropeckyj

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Adam Mickiewicz

The Life of a Romantic

By: Roman Robert Koropeckyj

Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), Poland's national poet, was one of the extraordinary personalities of the age. In chronicling the events of his life--his travels, numerous loves, a troubled marriage, years spent as a member of a heterodox religious sect, and friendships with such luminaries of the time as Aleksandr Pushkin, James Fenimore Cooper, George Sand, Giuseppe Mazzini, Margaret Fuller, and Aleksandr Herzen--Roman Koropeckyj draws a portrait of the Polish poet as a quintessential European Romantic. Spanning five decades of one of the most turbulent periods in modern European history, Mickiewicz's life and works at once reflected and articulated the cultural and political upheavals marking post-Napoleonic Europe. After a poetic debut in his native Lithuania that transformed the face of Polish literature, he spent five years of exile in Russia for engaging in Polish "patriotic" activity. Subsequently, his grand tour of Europe was interrupted by his country's 1830 uprising against Russia; his failure to take part in it would haunt him for the rest of his life. For the next twenty years Mickiewicz shared the fate of other Polish émigrés in the West. It was here that he wrote Forefathers' Eve, part 3 (1832) and Pan Tadeusz (1834), arguably the two most influential works of modern Polish literature. His reputation as his country's most prominent poet secured him a position teaching Latin literature at the Academy of Lausanne and then the first chair of Slavic Literature at the Collége de France. In 1848 he organized a Polish legion in Italy and upon his return to Paris founded a radical French-language newspaper. His final days were devoted to forming a Polish legion in Istanbul. This richly illustrated biography--the first scholarly biography of the poet to be published in English since 1911--draws extensively on diaries, memoirs, correspondence, and the poet's literary texts to make sense of a life as sublime as it was tragic. It concludes with a description of the solemn transfer of Mickiewicz's remains in 1890 from Paris to Cracow, where he was interred in the Royal Cathedral alongside Poland's kings and military heroes.

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Page Count

576

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801444713

ISBN 13

9780801444715

The Transcendentalists and Their World

By: Robert A. Gross

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The Transcendentalists and Their World

By: Robert A. Gross

One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021 One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021 Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers. The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand–plus souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant today. The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

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Page Count

493

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374711887

ISBN 13

9780374711887

Lives Out of Letters

Essays on American Literary Biography and Documentation in Honor of Robert N. Hudspeth

By: Robert N. Hudspeth

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Lives Out of Letters

Essays on American Literary Biography and Documentation in Honor of Robert N. Hudspeth

By: Robert N. Hudspeth

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

292

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0838640052

ISBN 13

9780838640050

Building Their Own Waldos

Emerson’s First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age

By: Robert D. Habich

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Building Their Own Waldos

Emerson’s First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age

By: Robert D. Habich

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Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

217

Publisher

University of Iowa Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1587299631

ISBN 13

9781587299636

Book's by Robert N. Hudspeth

Lives Out of Letters

Lives Out of Letters

Building Their Own Waldos

Building Their Own Waldos

Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Mickiewicz

The Transcendentalists and Their World

The Transcendentalists and Their World

Lives Out of Letters

Lives Out of Letters

Building Their Own Waldos

Building Their Own Waldos

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