Explores the theories of democratic individualism articulated in the works of the American transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, pragmatic philosophers William James and John Dewey, and African-American novelist and essayist Ralph ...

Colin Koopman proposes a recovery of pragmatism by way of "transitionalist" themes of temporality and historicity which flourish in the work of the early pragmatists and continue in contemporary neopragmatist thought.

"Rather than choose between Emerson and Nietzsche, Mikics attends to Nietzsche's struggle with Emerson's example and influence.

This major new work will be of interest not only to Baudelaire specialists, but also to scholars working in any area of nineteenth-century French studies."

Examining both why and how Emerson evades the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy, this book entirely rethinks the nature of Emerson's radical individualism and its relation to the possibility of an ethics and a politics.