LaRocca, D: Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History

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 History VI. 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 ...

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.

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. -- Phillip Lopate, editor of Writing New York and The Art of the Personal Essay David LaRocca treats Emerson's English Traits with the philosophical seriousness and sophistication the book has long deserved, but never before so richly received. In elegant numbered paragraphs of subtle, self-reflexive philosophical prose, LaRocca refracts a selection of the book's principal metaphors through a remarkably wide array of related texts ranging from Seneca to Augustine to Darwin, Nietzsche, and, especially, Wittgenstein. The result is not a conventional academic study, but rather a many-faceted Emersonian reflection by quotation on such topics as evolution, originality, liberalism, American identity, self-renaming, and the fecund nature of metaphor itself. This is a valuable contribution to the re-assessment of Emerson's most neglected work, and a distinctive example of creative hermeneutical engagement. -- Neal Dolan, Assistant Professor of English, University of Toronto, Canada In this elegantly written, scrupulously researched book, David La Rocca has convincingly demonstrated that, rather than locating a restricted area of inquiry, Natural History constitutes the grounding precondition for Emersonian thinking. Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor will surely prove an indispensable reference for undergraduates and graduates alike. -- Donald E. Pease, Professor of English and The Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Dartmouth College, USA In this wonderful book, David LaRocca illuminates Emerson's mind by, in effect, pursuing his methods. LaRocca's treatment of English Traits is no mere academic summary. Rather, his object is to conduct his own