At Emerson's Tomb

by John Carlos Rowe

Representative works are interpreted in light of the two great political movements of the nineteenth the abolition of slavery and the women's rights movement. By reexamining Emerson, Poe, Melville, Douglass, Walt Whitman, Chopin, and Faulkner and others, Rowe assesses the degree to which major writers' attitudes toward race, class, and gender contribute to specific political reforms in nineteenth and twentieth-century American culture.

320 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 1996

About the author

John Carlos Rowe is USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. From 1975-2004, he taught at the University of California, Irvine, where he was Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Director of African-American Studies, Chair of Comparative Literature (during its successful move to departmental status), Director of the Critical Theory Emphasis, and Director of the Critical Theory Institute (sponsor of the annual Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory and three-year research projects, both series published by Columbia University Press), which he helped found in the mid-1980s.

Reviews

[Christopher Porzenheim]

Influential main thesis is that there is this thing called "Emersonianism" or "Trascendentalism" that is antipolitical which is central to what is typically considered canonical American literature.

More specifically argues Emerson's philosophy pre 1844 was incompatible with his political actions against slavery and for woman's rights and that while his philosophy became more compatible post 1844, that his philosophy was always in tension with his actions.

Only worth reading if you want to agree with, emend, or contest the thesis.