Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor

David LaRocca (Ph.D., Vanderbilt) is Writer-in-Residence in the F. L. Allen Room at the New York Public Library and Fellow at the Moving Picture Institute in New York. Author of On Emerson (2003), editor of Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (2003) and Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell (2013), he was Harvard’s Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellow in the United Kingdom, and consultant to the American Museum of Natural History, during the composition of this book.

• Prefatory Notes .......................................................................................................Introduction: Some Traits of English Traits .....................................................I. More Prone to Melancholy.............................................. II. With Muffins and Not the Promise of Muffins............III. The Lively Traits of Criticism..........................................IV. The Cabman is Phrenologist So Far ..............................V. The Florilegium and the Cabinets of Natural HistoryVI. Founding Thoughts...........................................................VII. A Child of the Saxon Race...............................................VIII. Living Without a Cause.....................................................IX. Adapting Some Secret of His Own Anatomy...............X. First Blood..........................................................................XI. Second Selves......................................................................XII. Genealogy and Guilt...........................................................XIII. The Pirate Baptized............................................................. XIV. My Giant Goes With Me................................................... XV. Corresponding Minds........................................................ XVI. Titles Manifold..................................................................... Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... Notes ......................................................................................................................... Index ..........................................................................................................................

This immensely learned, deeply thoughtful and far-ranging book helps re-situate Emerson in his own time, and in ours. More than just a work of scholarship, it rises to the level of philosophical investigation. It is also witty, playful and, in its own strange way, original.