Representative Men: Seven Lectures (Modern Library Classics) - Softcover

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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9780812970050: Representative Men: Seven Lectures (Modern Library Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812970055 ISBN 13: 9780812970050

Publisher: Modern Library, 2004

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Introduction by Brenda Wineapple

In 1845 Ralph Waldo Emerson began a series of lectures and writings in which he limned six figures who embodied the principles and aspirations of a still-young American republic. Emerson offers timeless meditations on the value of individual greatness, reconnecting readers with the everyday virtues of his “Representative Men”: Plato, in whose writings are contained “the culture of nations”; Emanuel Swedenborg, a “rich discoverer” who strove to unite the scientific and spiritual planes; Michel de Montaigne, “the frankest and honestest of all writers”; William Shakespeare, who “wrote the text of modern life”; Napoleon Bonaparte, who had the “virtues and vices” of common men writ large; and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who “in conversation, in calamity...finds new materials.”

This Modern Library Paperback Classic reflects the author’s corrections for an 1876 reprinting.

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From the Back Cover:

To find in this extraordinary book, Representative Men, an Emerson expounding the primacy of personality and heroic genius in six major figures of Western European civilization - Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Goethe - seems nothing short of anomalous. Was Emerson reconsidering his own philosophical premises? Or is there a hidden agenda in this study that reflects on European phenomena and values? As the notion of the "representative" is becoming increasingly central to our national cultural debate, it seems of utmost importance to reexamine Emerson's meditations and seek in them a challenge to philosophy.

About the Author:

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803?—1882) was a renowned lecturer and writer, whose ideas on philosophy, religion, and literature influenced many writers, including Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. After an undergraduate career at Harvard, he studied at Harvard Divinity School and became an ordained minister, continuing a long line of ministers in his family. He traveled widely and lectured, and became well known for his publications Essays and Nature.

About the Introducer
BRENDA WINEAPPLE is the author of Hawthorne: A Life and Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. She has twice a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She lives in New York City.

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