Representative Men: Seven Lectures - Softcover

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674761057 ISBN 13: 9780674761056

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 1996

Synopsis

"At first reading, Representative Men seems the most alien of Emerson's books. First published in 1850 (having taken form over the five preceding years as a series of lectures intended as 'winter evening entertainments'), it was inspired by the romantic belief that there exists a 'general mind' that expresses itself with special intensity through certain individual lives. It was an appreciation of genius as a quality distributed to the few for the benefit of the many. When, according to Longfellow, Emerson began to speak on these themes in Boston in 1845, the Odeon theater was jammed with 'old men and young, bald heads and flowing transcendental locks, matrons and maidens, misanthropists and lovers.' The crowds were rapt and grateful, as were their counterparts two years later in England where the lecture series continued...

This edition of Representative Men is reproduced from the fourth volume of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, text established by Douglas Emory Wilson.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

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.

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 this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0674761057
• ISBN 13: 9780674761056
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 174
• Editor: Douglas Emory Wilson