Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather, Diana Hope Polley

Probes the ways in which two major periods in nineteenth-century American literature--Romanticism and Realism--have come to be understood and defined.

Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather traces the complex and unexplored relationship between American realism and the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Critics often read American realism as a clear disavowal of earlier American romantic philosophy and as a commitment to recognizing the stark realities of a new postbellum order. Diana Hope Polleys study complicates these traditional assumptions by reading American realism as an ongoing dialogue with the ideas--often idealisms--of Americas greatest romantic philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In this illuminating work, Polley offers detailed readings of Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Henry Jamess The Portrait of a Lady, Edith Whartons The House of Mirth, and Willa Cathers My ntonia--all through the lens of Emersonian philosophy and discourse. This unique contribution to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary studies shows how these texts revisit Emersons antebellum republic of the spirit philosophy, specifically the trope of the Emersonian hero/heroine navigating the harsh contingencies of the modern world.