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@article{1322425, author = {Smith, Jeffrey Alan}, article_location = {Praha}, article_number = {48}, keywords = {Ralph Waldo Emerson; Bible; United States; Nineteenth-century literature; Joseph Smith; William Miller; Walt Whitman}, language = {eng}, issn = {0862-8424}, journal = {Litteraria Pragensia}, title = {These Desponding Days : Emerson and America's Crisis of Textual Authority}, url = {http://litteraria-pragensia.ff.cuni.cz/front.issue/detail/50}, volume = {24}, year = {2014} }
TY - JOUR ID - 1322425 AU - Smith, Jeffrey Alan PY - 2014 TI - These Desponding Days : Emerson and America's Crisis of Textual Authority JF - Litteraria Pragensia VL - 24 IS - 48 SP - 79-93 EP - 79-93 PB - Ústav anglofonních literatur a kultur FF UK SN - 08628424 KW - Ralph Waldo Emerson KW - Bible KW - United States KW - Nineteenth-century literature KW - Joseph Smith KW - William Miller KW - Walt Whitman UR - http://litteraria-pragensia.ff.cuni.cz/front.issue/detail/50 L2 - http://litteraria-pragensia.ff.cuni.cz/front.issue/detail/50 N2 - Americans in the era of the Second Great Awakening faced a problem intrinsic to Protestantism: the difficulty of grounding authority in a sacred text. Ralph Waldo Emerson's emergence from Unitarian circles immediately followed three native-born religious movements, each of which had focused on one aspect of that problem. William Miller's Adventism responded to doubt; Alexander Campbell's Restorationism took aim at sectarian disagreement; and Joseph Smith's Mormonism vividly sought to overcome dullness. Re-reading and even rewriting the Bible in increasingly radical ways, these movements represented three of the logically possible answers to the self-contradictions of textual authority. This essay argues for seeing Emerson's Transcendentalism as a fourth way. What linked this movement both to Unitarian controversy and romantic idealism, on the one hand, and on the other to the modern creation of a new, secular literary "canon" of America's own, was its immersion in biblical and textual anxieties. Recovering and re-employing the spirit behind the ancient sacred books, Transcendentalists insisted on rethinking not just the Bible but text-based authority as such – and like the other movements, they did this to counter a particular problem: in their case, an array of modern ills that Emerson summed up in the word "desponding." ER -
SMITH, Jeffrey Alan. These Desponding Days : Emerson and America's Crisis of Textual Authority. \textit{Litteraria Pragensia}. Praha: Ústav anglofonních literatur a kultur FF UK, 2014, vol.~24, No~48, p.~79-93. ISSN~0862-8424.
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