San Antonio College Library

"In this original and highly readable book, Peter Field explains how Ralph Waldo Emerson became the first democratic intellectual in American history. By focusing on his public career, Field contends that Emerson was a democrat in two senses: he single-handedly sought to create a vocation equal to his conviction that America represented the democratic promise of the Western world; and as importantly, he acted the part of the democrat by attempting...

Challenging the standard periodization of American literary history, Reconstituting the American Renaissance reinterprets the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and the relationship of these two authors to each other. Jay Grossman argues that issues of political representation -- involving vexed questions of who shall speak and for whom -- lie at the heart of American political and literary discourse from the revolutionary era through the...