The Public Intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois

In The Public Intellectualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois , Ryan Schneider shows how and why two of America's most influential public intellectuals - writing from opposite sides of the color line - defined race not only in biological and geo-cultural terms but also as an emotional phenomenon. Drawing on and advancing recent work in Cognitive Literary Studies, Critical Race Theory, and the History of Emotions, Schneider comparatively examines the range of feelings Emerson and Du Bois attribute to the experience of racial difference; his innovative close readings reveal the surprising extent to which they conceive of race reform as an emotive process and how expressions of personal feeling underwrite their public commitments to re-imagining black-white relations.