Representative men; seven lectures. By Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men is a collection of seven lectures - Softcover

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1537126520 ISBN 13: 9781537126524

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016

Synopsis

Representative Men is a collection of seven lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published as a book of essays in 1850. The first essay discusses the role played by "great men" in society, and the remaining six each extoll the virtues of one of six men deemed by Emerson to be great: Plato ("the Philosopher") Emanuel Swedenborg ("the Mystic") Michel de Montaigne ("the Skeptic") William Shakespeare ("the Poet") Napoleon ("the Man of the World") Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ("the Writer") See also On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History – a similar series of lectures given by Thomas Carlyle, Emerson's Scottish contemporary Parallel Lives – classic work by Ancient Greek biographer Plutarch, outlining the lives of elite individuals and the virtues they represented. Great Men of History – the popular theory of the 19th-century that history could be explained as the product of 'Great Men'. Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), known professionally as Waldo Emerson, was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, "Nature". Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence"

About this title

About the Author

Ralph Waldo Emerson was the leading proponent of the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. He was ordained as a Unitarian minister at Harvard Divinity School but served for only three years before developing his own spiritual philosophy based on individualism and intuition. His essay Nature" is arguably his best-known work and was both groundbreaking and highly controversial when it was first published. Emerson also wrote poetry and lectured widely across the US.

Edition details

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1537126520
• ISBN 13: 9781537126524
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 94