Some of Emerson's finest and most famous essays, such as "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," and "The Over-Soul," appeared in his Essays of 1841, published when he was thirty-seven years old. Preceded by the slim volume Nature, it was his first full-length book.The present edition provides for the first time an authoritative text of the Essays, together with an introduction, notes, and supplementary material of great value for the study of Emerson's creative processes. A list of hundreds of parallel passages in his earlier journals and lectures makes it possible to...

Both a historical recovery and a critical rethinking of the functions and practices of textbooks, "Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States" argues for an alternative understanding of our rhetorical traditions. The authors describe how the pervasive influence of nineteenth-century literacy textbooks demonstrate the early emergence of substantive instruction in reading and writing. Tracing the histories of widespread educational practices, the authors treat the textbooks as an important means of cultural formation that...

In Local Histories, the contributors seek to challenge the widely held belief that the origin of American composition as a distinguishable discipline can be traced to a small number of elite colleges such as Harvard, Yale, and Michigan in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Through extensive archival research at liberal arts colleges, normal schools, historically black colleges, and junior colleges, the contributors ascertain that many of these practices were actually in use prior to this time and were not the sole province of elite universities. Though not discounting the elites'...