Overview

Metaphors are ubiquitous and yet—or, for that very reason—go largely unseen. We are all variously susceptible to a blindness or blurry vision of metaphors; yet even when they are seen clearly, we are left to situate the ambiguities, conflations and contradictions they regularly present—logically, aesthetically and morally. David LaRocca’s book serves as a set of ‘reminders’ of certain features of the natural history of our language—especially the tropes that permeate and define it. As part of his investigation, LaRocca turns to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s only book on a single topic, English Traits (1856), which teems with genealogical and generative metaphors—blood, birth, plants, parents, family, names and race. In the first book-length study of English Traits in over half a century, LaRocca considers the presence of metaphors in Emerson’s fertile text—a unique work in his expansive corpus, and one that is regularly overlooked. As metaphors are encountered in Emerson’s book, and drawn from a long history of usage in work by others, a reader may realize (or remember) what is inherent and encoded in our language, but rarely seen: how metaphors circulate in speech and through texts to become the lifeblood of thought.

Full Product Details

Author:   Dr. David LaRocca (Cornell University, USA)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic USA
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.80cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.618kg
ISBN:  

9781441161406

ISBN 10:   1441161406
Pages:   408
Publication Date:   21 November 2013
Audience:   General/trade ,  College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Language:   English

Table of Contents

Prefatory Notes ....................................................................................................... Introduction: Some Traits of English Traits ..................................................... I. More Prone to Melancholy.............................................. II. With Muffins and Not the Promise of Muffins............ III. The Lively Traits of Criticism.......................................... IV. The Cabman is Phrenologist So Far .............................. V. The Florilegium and the Cabinets of Natural History VI. Founding Thoughts........................................................... VII. A Child of the Saxon Race............................................... VIII. Living Without a Cause..................................................... IX. Adapting Some Secret of His Own Anatomy............... X. First Blood.......................................................................... XI. Second Selves...................................................................... XII. Genealogy and Guilt........................................................... XIII. The Pirate Baptized............................................................. XIV. My Giant Goes With Me................................................... XV. Corresponding Minds........................................................ XVI. Titles Manifold..................................................................... Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... Notes ......................................................................................................................... Index ..........................................................................................................................

Reviews

This immensely learned, deeply thoughtful and far-ranging book helps re-situate Emerson in his own time, and in ours. More than just a work of scholarship, it rises to the level of philosophical investigation. It is also witty, playful and, in its own strange way, original. -- Phillip Lopate

Author Information

David LaRocca (Ph.D., Vanderbilt) is Writer-in-Residence in the F. L. Allen Room at the New York Public Library and Fellow at the Moving Picture Institute in New York. Author of On Emerson (2003), editor of Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (2003) and Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell (2013), he was Harvard’s Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellow in the United Kingdom, and consultant to the American Museum of Natural History, during the composition of this book.

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