the Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson


UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS

The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph H. Orth, Chief Editor

"A substantial addition to the tools the present generation of scholars has been and will be provided for reading and coming to terms with the development of Emerson's thought."
—Nineteenth Century Prose

"The editors have done an excellent, thorough job of source-hunting, annotating, translating, indexing, and cross-indexing the many references to the essays and other journals. Emerson scholars are already immensely indebted to the previous scrupulous editorial labors of Susan Sutton Smith and Ralph Orth, and these volumes are the continuation of their splendid work on the journals."—American Literature

"The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson will provide a valuable resource for detailed study of the critically neglected last three decades of Emerson's career, and they will hold a wealth of material especially for those wishing to track the fate of Emerson's characteristic themes and interests into his later work, or to study his working methods and creative processes."—Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Volume 1

Edited by Susan Sutton Smith

Published here for the first time are seven of Emerson's topical notebooks, which served as a source for his lectures, essays, and books of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s. Concerned primarily with nature, art, philosophy, American culture, and his contemporaries, the notebooks presented in this volume afford fascinating insight into Emerson's creative practices.

1990. 360 pp. 6 1/8 x 9 1/4. Biblio. Appendix. Index. Illus. ISBN 978-0-8262-0730-2. $49.95s.

Volume 2

Edited by Ronald A. Bosco

Among the highlights of the five notebooks in Volume 2, "Orientalist" provides an unusual opportunity to view closely Emerson's adaptation of Eastern thought.

1993. 432 pp. 6 1/8 x 9 1/4. Biblio. Indexes. Appendixes. Illus. ISBN 978-0-8262-0858-3. $54.95s.

Volume 3

Edited by Glen Martin Johnson

Volume 3 completes the series that brings twelve of Emerson's topical notebooks and four other notebooks into print for the first time. In this final volume, Glen Martin Johnson presents four of the topical notebooks dating from the mid 1840s through the early 1870s, the end of Emerson's productive life. Each of the four notebooks illustrates some of the many uses Emerson made of these collections of quotations and ideas: OP Gulistan is a compendium of biographical information and anecdotes about dozens of Emerson's acquaintances; S Salvage takes stock of and preserves parts of his earlier writings; ZO was used in preparing the lectures that became "Poetry and Imagination"; and ML was employed for extensive notes on the moral law and religion, and as a resource in preparing lectures and readings during the late 1860s.

1994. 392 pp. 6 1/8 x 9 1/4. Biblio. Index. Appendix. Illus. ISBN 978-0-8262-0951-1. $54.95s.

Other Books of Interest

The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Albert J. von Frank, Chief Editor

The Poetry Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Ralph H. Orth, Albert J. von Frank, Linda Allardt, and David W. Hill

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