Emersonian Circles and the Southern Hemisphere

Emersonian Circles demonstrates the often-overlooked importance of the Southern Hemisphere in the nineteenth century as a region of enormous creative activity and as a voracious audience for foreign literature. It focuses on the US Transcendentalists, and their relationship – directly and indirectly - with writers in Latin America, Southern Africa and Australia. It reconsiders canonical American figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, arguing that the Southern Hemisphere was essential to their understanding of the world and presents a broader transnational appreciation of writers often confined to Western, Northern or Transatlantic frameworks. Equally, it provides the first study of how several nineteenth-century communities south of the equator adapted Transcendentalism to suit local needs, contending that a double-sided account of these interactions can enrich our interpretations of both US and world literary texts, enabling new approaches to be taken on questions of race, settler colonialism, Romantic nationalism and globalisation.