Joel Myerson

Scholarship on Ralph Waldo Emerson has expanded considerably during the past decade. Since Emerson is the subject of historians, philosophers, and literary scholars, there is a need for an efficient and effective means to access information within an extraordinary range of critical approaches and perspectives. This bibliography lists and annotates writings about Emerson published in English between 1980 and 1991, and complements earlier Emerson bibliographies. Because the response to Emerson has evolved greatly over the years, the contents of this bibliography are arranged in chronological order. This arrangement allows the user to trace the progression of certain critical approaches to Emerson and to follow the development of critics who have made numerous contributions to Emerson scholarship. Each chapter is devoted to a particular year. Within each chapter, entries begin with book publications arranged alphabetically by author, followed by annual journals alphabetized by journal title and journal articles arranged by date of publication. A detailed index locates works by subject, author, and title.

Picturing Emerson reproduces and explores the background of all known images of Ralph Waldo Emerson created from life, including drawings, paintings, silhouettes, sculptures, and photographs. The book provides dates for these images; information about their makers and Emerson’s sittings; as well as commentary by family members and contemporaries. The resulting work makes it possible for the first time to trace Emerson’s visage over seven decades. Dating and correctly identifying images of Emerson has long challenged scholars, collectors, and the general public. By examining over fifty years of archival and published research—including web resources, library catalogs, and correspondence with international collections—the authors have been able to locate nearly 140 images dating from 1829 to immediately before Emerson’s death in 1882. Joel Myerson has written or edited over sixty books on Emerson and the Transcendentalists, most recently Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose with Ronald A. Bosco. They have jointly received the Julian P. Boyd Award, the highest award presented by the Association for Documentary Editing. Leslie Perrin Wilson is a curator at the Concord Free Public Library, a repository known for significant holdings of Emerson portraiture. She has written extensively on local historical and literary topics.

Focusing on actual publications by Whitman rather than those about him, Joel Myerson's painstakingly compiled supplement to his 1993 Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography (Oak Knoll, ISBN 0-82293-739-5) includes almost twenty years of newly discovered and updated materials that will be invaluable to Whitman scholars. The entries describe in detail the various forms of Whitman's books, newspaper articles, broadsheets, reprints, translations, and so on. Myerson includes facsimiles of title pages as well as information on pagination, illustrations, dimensions, contents, publication history, typography, paper, binding, and dust jackets. The sections incorporate the following: all books and pamphlets written wholly by Whitman through 1892, the year of his death, and all editions and reprintings in English through 2009; all collected editions of Whitman's writings through 2009; all miscellaneous collections of his writings through 2009; all books in which material by Whitman appears for the first time; all first American and English publications in newspapers and magazines of material by Whitman through 2009; all proof copies as well as circulars and broadsides of his poetry and prose published during his lifetime; prose and poetry by Whitman reprinted in books and pamphlets through 1892; separate publications of individual poems and prose works through 2009; and references to possible publications by Whitman that are not dealt with elsewhere in the bibliography. The volume is thoroughly indexed. Based on evidence gathered from personal inspection of multiple copies of Whitman's works in American, Canadian, British, and New Zealand libraries, Myerson's Supplement exemplifies the highest standards of bibliographic research.

The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism offers an eclectic, comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to the immense cultural impact of the movement that encompassed literature, art, architecture, science, and politics.

The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters is a narrative and epistolary biography based upon the lifelong correspondence exchanged among the four Emerson brothers: Charles Chauncy, Edward Bliss, Ralph Waldo, and William Emerson, as well as Charles' 181 letters to his fiancée Elizabeth Hoar (one of the few extended series of courtship letters surviving from this period) and 86 letters from the brothers to their paternal aunt Mary Moody Emerson in which they discuss their moral and theological upbringing and views. Often composed as "round robin" exchanges among and between the brothers, the Emerson brothers' correspondence is the last great untapped body of personal writings remaining in manuscript from within the Emerson family. These letters illuminate aspects of Waldo's character and personal and intellectual development that, lacking access to the letters, even his most sympathetic biographers and critics have thus far failed to appreciate fully; reveal that all of the brothers were invigorated by their shared sense of origin as well as by a sense of duty to improve upon their ancestors' literary and intellectual work; shine new light on Waldo's debt to William for his first serious encounters with German Higher Criticism in the midUL1820s; present new evidence about the devastation Waldo felt at the death in 1831 of his first wife, a correction to Waldo's own sometimes under-recorded sense of grief at her passing; demonstrate that Waldo's desire for financial security for himself, his mother, and his brothers was at least as powerful a motivation behind his resignation from Boston's Second Church in 1832 as were Ellen's death and his reservations about the Lord's Supper; and mark Waldo's self-conscious and steady progress away from the forms of institutionalized religion toward the career of lecturer, essayist, poet, and social reformer which earned him his reputation as a principal architect of American culture.

One of the most influential American women writers of the 19th century, Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) played a vital role in the shaping of New England Transcendentalism and the birth of the women's movement. Her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) was the first thorough discussion of feminism by an American. As a feminist manifesto, her treatise examined the economic, political, and cultural roles of women in society. As the editor of The Dial, the quarterly literary and philosophical publication of the Transcendentalists, she was in close contact with Emerson, Thoreau, and other leading thinkers of the era. As a staff member of the New York Tribune, she developed a widespread reputation as a critic. Her influence was so great that her ideas and persona were reflected in the literary works of Hawthorne, Lowell, and other writers of the period. For many decades, Margaret Fuller was largely neglected by the scholarly community. While she was always considered a pioneering feminist, she was also seen as only a peripheral figure of the American Renaissance. In recent years, however, scholarship on Fuller has exploded, and her great contributions to 19th century American literature and culture are receiving much attention. This bibliography cites and annotates several hundred scholarly studies about Fuller published between 1983 and 1995. It also provides entries for roughly 100 works about Fuller not included in the author's previous bibliographies. Entries are grouped in chapters devoted to each year, so that the reader may trace the growth in Fuller scholarship. A comprehensive index allows the user to locate sources according to author, subject, and periodical title.