The individual in nature's history: A study of Emerson and Cather

In the Nineteenth-Century, American intellectuals struggled to understand the problem of how to establish one's identity in a society held captive by the current ideologies of history, tradition, dogma and institutions. Such a philosophical dilemma gave rise to the issue of idealism as opposed to materialism, an idea that will be discussed in Chapter 3. Ralph Waldo Emerson articulated this struggle in his essays and stressed the importance of the individual in and through a harmonious relationship with nature and its history. Transcendentalism appeared to be exhausted as a viable moral stance in the twentieth century; however, in Willa Cather, an inventive, complex and paradoxical writer, we see a hitherto unexplored continuity of Emerson's ideas.