My work is about vistas, horizons, places visited, miles traveled, about a life in teaching and scholarly interests.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is universally recognized as one of America's most influential authors and thinkers. Before achieving eminence as lecturer, essayist, and poet, though, he was a Unitaarian preacher. Susan Roberson examines Emerson's ministerial career from 1826 to 1832, shedding new light on those early, crucial years in Emerson's personal and intellectual development.
Treating the sermons extensively as an autobiographical text, Roberson establishes that Emerson's years in the pulpit were pivotal and that his sermons are key texts in revealing the essential development of his thought. Central to Roberson's explication of the sermons is Emerson's conception of self-reliance, his invention of a new hero for a new age, and his merging of his own identity with that heroic idea.
Emerson in His Sermons offers the first real look at how the sermons fit into Emerson's own development and will have a far-reaching impact on Emerson scholarship. Anyone concerned with the cultural and religious history of America will find this book invaluable.
Since the colonial days, American women have traveled, migrated, and relocated, always faced with the challenge of reconstructing their homes for themselves and their families. Women, America, and Movement offers a journey through largely unexplored territory—the experiences of migrating American women. These narratives, both real and imagined, represent a range of personal and critical perspectives; some of the women describe their travels as expansive and freeing, while others relate the dreadful costs and sacrifices of relocating.
Despite the range of essays featured in this study, the writings all coalesce around the issues of politics, poetry, and self- identity described by Adrienne Rich as the elements of the "politics of location," treated here as the politics of relocation. The narratives featured in this book explore the impact of race, class, and sexual economics on migratory women, their self-identity, and their roles in family and social life. These issues demonstrate that in addition to geographic place, ideology is itself a space to be traversed.
These essays also delve into the writings themselves by looking at what happens to narrative structure as authors or their characters cross geographic boundaries. The reader sees how women writers negotiate relocation in their texts and how the written word becomes a place where one finds oneself.
Travel, movement, mobility--these are some of the essential activities in human life. Whether we travel to foreign lands or just across the city, we all journey, and from our journeying we shape ourselves, our history, and the stories we tell.
In essays written by some of the most respected contemporary scholars, this anthology brings together some of the best informed convictions about travel. Travel, so essential to human life, is a complex matter that encompasses a variety of travel experiences--family vacation, political exile, exploration of distant lands, immigration, mundane shopping trips. Likewise, as the essays in the collection demonstrate, discussion of travel crosses a range of personal and theoretical perspectives--from the postmodern sensibility of Jean Baudrillard to R. Radhakrishnan's explanation to his son of what it means for Indians to live in the United States. As the field of travel itself "travels" across academic and theoretical boundaries, it brings together sociology, anthropology, geography, history, psychology, and literary criticism.
A study of American women’s narratives of mobility and travel, this book examines how geographic movement opened up other movements or mobilities for antebellum women at a time of great national expansion. Concerned with issues of personal and national identity, the study demonstrates how women not only went out on the open road, but participated in public discussions of nationhood in the texts they wrote. Roberson examines a variety of narratives and subjects, including not only traditional travel narratives of voyages to the West or to foreign locales, but also the ways travel and movement figured in autobiography, spiritual, and political narratives, and domestic novels by women as they constructed their own politics of mobility. These narratives by such women as Margaret Fuller, Susan Warner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe destabilize the male-dominated stories of American travel and nation-building as women claimed the public road as a domain in which they belonged, bringing with them their own ideas about mobility, self, and nation. The many women’s stories of mobility also destabilize a singular view of women’s history and broaden our outlook on geographic movement and its repercussions for other movements. Looking at texts not usually labeled travel writing, like the domestic novel, brings to light social relations enacted on the road and the relation between story, location, and mobility.
Positioning the Caribbean within the complexes of the world community, this collection uses the metaphor of the global Caribbean to discuss the multiple movements, identities, epistemologies and politics of the West Indies. Examining the processes of the transnational transport of peoples, languages, and literatures between the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and North America, the essays look at the complexities of geographical, intellectual, and artistic migrations: at the ways Caribbean writers negotiate the construction of literary and political identities and the ways in which the Caribbean influenced writers and thinkers in North American or Europe. A culturally and linguistically rich region of the world, the Caribbean also provides a fascinating literature of its own that is complicated by its history of migration and colonization, as well as by its location between continents.