Titolo della tesi: The Permanent Literature of the Human Race: Ralph Waldo Emerson and World Literature
Ralph Waldo Emerson is generally considered among the intellectuals who most contributed to the establishment of a quintessentially American literature. Although scholars have noted how much he himself—for his own education as a writer and as a philosopher—had looked for inspiration in foreign authors, and even though his part in a transatlantic network of intellectuals has also been explored, no critical attention has been dedicated to Emerson as a theorist of world literature.
This dissertation examines Emerson’s conception of wholeness and his desire to look for unity in diversity, both considered as the philosophical standpoint from which Emerson arrives at a definition of literature as a transnational instrument of knowledge which explores and embodies the universal nature of mankind. I maintain that this characterization of literature, coupled with the realization that new modes of production and circulation were altering the inner workings of literature, led Emerson to conceive of a “permanent” canon of texts that embodied universal values and could resonate with everyone at all points in history.
I trace his interpretation of world literature back to a series of early and later lectures, as well as to his journals, to demonstrate that although not explicitly stated, “permanent literature” serves as a foil to his admittedly more popular and certainly more direct calls for cultural independence and American self-reliance.