• American Studies
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.159-191
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• 2021

"In the United States, you almost never say that virtue is beautiful," Alexis de Tocqueville reports in Democracy in America. Yet Ralph Waldo Emerson, arguably the most prominent American moralist in the nineteenth century, stands as an exception to Tocqueville's generalization. This article explores Emerson's perspective on beauty in the moral education of democratic citizens. His interest in this aesthetic category partly stemmed from his deep concern about both the moral inaction and interest politics in commercial culture. As a response to the crisis, Emerson conceived ethical beauty as a key promoter of public-minded democratic citizenship as exemplified by the American abolitionists, and his own practice as a poetic moralist further illustrates this belief. Emerson's aesthetic approach to the cultivation of public virtue in liberal democracy offers a meaningful comparison to contemporary neo-Tocquevillian emphasis on the language of interest or duty.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1193-1213
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• 2012

This essay "Twain's Contestation of Emersonian Transcendental Manhood in Huckleberry Finn" explores how Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) manifests his postwar contestation of Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendental manhood that endorses the dogmatic, egocentric, and decorporealized position of the Cartesian subject, who believes his being's unity, elevation, and centrality through his fantasy of possessing direct access to divine truth. The connection between Emerson and Twain is based not on Emerson's influence on Twain but on their common interest in American landscape as a site for the redefinition of manhood and masculinity. I examine different types of manhood in their association with nature in Huckleberry Finn by comparing them with the two fundamental concepts of Emerson's philosophy: "a true man" in "Self-Reliance" (1841) and transparent eyeball vision in Nature (1836). Twain's use of Huck's ambivalent position-his centrality as a protagonist in the novel in spite of his marginality in society-renegotiates Emerson's valorization of nonconformity, wholeness, and nonchalance as the characteristics of both boyhood and "a true man," Emerson's term for the ideal individual in "Self-Reliance." I also read Twain's satire of two different types of masculine characters-Bob and the Child of Calamity, boatmen of the Southern frontier, and Colonel Grangerford, patriarch of a Southern aristocratic family-as Twain's denouncement of the antebellum desire for transcendental vision, which Emerson crystalizes into his notion of transparent eyeball in Nature.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.975-992
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• 2009

Whereas many Dickinson scholars tend to focus on Emily Dickinson's anthropocentric dimension, her work also reveals an ecocentric aspect. On the one hand, influenced by New England Puritan typology and its offshoot Emersonian Transcendentalist idealism, Dickinson reveals her indebtedness to these two worldviews by emphasizing the invisible over the visible and the spiritual over the physical. At times, she reflects the common thread of the two outlooks-a hierarchical thinking, in which nature is inferior to human beings and does not have its own identity outside of human use. On the other hand, seeing through the downside of the hierarchical Emersonian idealism, Dickinson sometimes suggests an alternative stance on nature in a nonhierarchical way. She often appreciates nature for its own sake, becoming its neighbor and companion. This aligns Dickinson with modern ecocritics and ecofeminists who criticize a hierarchical anthropocentrism and promote an egalitarian ecocentrism in which natural and human beings are fellow citizens of the earth community. And yet, unlike most ecocritics who advocate a complete shift to an egalitarian paradigm, Dickinson embraces both anthropocentrism and ecocentrism in her poetry of "open portfolio." This openness stems from her belief in interrelatedness between God, nature, and human beings. Housing the two opposing perspectives in her poetry, she widely opens the possibility to choose the better way to relate to our sister and brother, nature.