Emerson's Metaphors

Emerson's Metaphors provides a radical reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson's figurative language, demonstrating that Emerson's metaphors should be understood as ways of thinking. Covering the full range of Emerson's writings, this book offers a reinterpretation of one the most important and influential nineteenth-century American writers.

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Emerson's Metaphors is a fundamental reinterpretation of the major American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson and an interdisciplinary intervention in literary criticism. This book draws on the methods and conclusions of the paradigm shifting Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which recognizes that metaphor is a cognitive form rather than a rhetorical or ornamental feature. Closely reading Emerson's journals, lectures and reassessing the major essays, Emerson's Metaphors demonstrates that Emerson's prose 'thinks' through its figurative language, enabling the vital symbolic reconceptualizations of nature, man and God that would prove so crucial for the emergence of American literature. This monograph does not just have implications for Emerson scholarship, but as the first full-length study of a canonical writer to use CMT, it provides a model for the interpretation of all literary works.