| Sumario: | Emerson's Ghosts examines the way in which twentieth-century critics have constructed Emerson as part of their larger projects of reconceiving America. The book includes previously unpublished material, original research, and interviews with students and colleagues, on such figures as VanWyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch. Emerging from this research is not only an account of Emerson's cultural construction, but an institutional history of American literary studies throughout the twentieth century that occurs against the sweeping backdrop of nationaland cultural change. A work of American literary history, Emerson's Ghosts is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between individual urgencies and prevailing cultural conditions impel various critics and writers to redirect the course of a present moment - often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled- toward a desired future. If history impinged on each of the critics discussed in Emerson's Ghosts, Fuller explains why their response so often was Emerson.
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