The New Emerson Canon

Abstract

The New CanonThis review-essay salutes the completion of the final volume (Uncollected Prose Writings) in the fifty-year project of editing Ralph Waldo Emerson's Collected Works while also reflecting on editorial principles that result in omissions from a newly definitive representation of the author. Since the 1970s, all editors have followed the principles of Walter Greg and included only texts for which there was initial coherent by Emerson. With his increasing dementia in old age, however, such intent was construed by a team of others, yet collaborative texts have been omitted from this volume in particular. Detailing the gains of Uncollected Prose Writings, the review-essay also argues for the authenticity of selected missing texts, in particular the lecture Mary Moody Emerson and the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Further editing work may be possible on these, following the collaborative, intertextual (often digital) models proposed since Greg's time by Jerome McGann.The New Canon THE COLLECTED WORKS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON. VOL. 10: UNCOLLECTED PROSE WRITINGS: ADDRESSES, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. Ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson; notes and parallel passages by Glen M. Johnson. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2013. cxxiii + 970 pp. $95.Uncollected Prose Writings was a landmark of American literary publishing in 2013, celebrated with wide satisfaction and a special exhibit at the Houghton Library. Not only does this tenth volume complete the fifty-year project of critically editing the published of Ralph Waldo (1803-82). In addition, the ten volumes parallel the recovery through these decades, in thirty-nine volumes also now completed, of Emerson's letters, journals, sermons, lectures, and notebooks. Editors Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson have elsewhere described the various editions of private papers as a magnificent archaeology of Emerson's thought (R. W. Emerson, Later Lectures 1: x), but now their work at the heart of the dig produces an even greater whole. Gathering addresses, essays, and reviews that were in large part produced for particular occasions and audiences, they follow the emergence from the 1820s to the 1870s of as America's premier public intellectual (xxv). Moreover, this volume tracks the interconnectedness of Emerson's private and public writing, through both Bosco and Myerson's historical and textual introductions and Glen M. Johnson's excellent notes and listing of parallel passages. Both this prodigious author's career and the scholars' recovery of it emerge as remarkably unified wholes.I am not an editor, but I have been a beneficiary of these volumes over the years and a sometime witness to their production while myself reading Emerson-related manuscripts at the Houghton Library. So I write foremost with appreciation of an immense body of work while also observing that, even with the achievement of a new canon, some texts and dimensions of his work have been left in the shadows. This review will focus on volume 10, Uncollected Prose Works, but refer outward to the textual networks with other volumes in a few particular cases. My interest is partially to follow these cases, but even more to explore the issues involved as we define a writer's works and authority.In their final volume, Bosco and Myerson follow editorial principles established for the larger Collected Works since the 1970s, including only Emerson's writings as they were originally published in his lifetime and under his supervision (ci). Adapting Sir Walter Greg's principles of editing to the circumstances of nineteenth-century print culture, the editorial team has always chosen as copy-text the earliest published version of a piece, unless a manuscript in Emerson's hand or a printer's proof preempts it. Later emendations and reprints are listed in notes but not represented. In the series' first volumes, selecting a copy-text was a relatively straightforward process, since each volume corresponded to a book-length assembly of essays or chapters approved by himself. …