I wonder if I am the only reader of Emerson who weeps over the death of his son in 1842. I have never heard anyone else confess to this reaction, although the story of how Emerson's “Experience” refers to Waldo Emerson's death is told briefly by Emerson himself, in the willfully perverse third paragraph of the essay. Then it is narrated repeatedly by twentieth-century scholars and critics, who treasure this moment as the most dramatic autobiographical reference in Emerson's published prose: 'In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, - no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, - neither better nor worse.'

In the I 830s and 'qos, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau engaged in a prolonged series of meditations and dialogues on the meaning of friendship. At key moments, each writer decided that fundamental issues of human development could not be articulated without taking into account the role of friends. But Transcendentalist models of individuation cannot be completely reconciled with theories of social relationship; for the demands of self-reliance, especially the intuition of the “divine” depths of the self, often pull one out of the social orbit into an intense introspection. As a result, Transcendentalist discussions of friendship often emerged in response to moments of crisis (whether encounters with death, separation, or personal misunderstanding) that laid bare the specter of isolation underlying their theories. This tension (between friendship and isolation) poignantly dramatizes one of the paradoxes of Transcendentalist literary expression: its central subject matter - profound moments of imaginative and spiritual intensity - could only be described in retrospect, from the vantage point of someone who had passed through and remembered the experience.

Without superstitious reference to the Bible - indeed, without the slightest veneration of any scripture - Emerson yet writes in the tradition of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. He is concerned, as the prophets were, with the relation of spirit and human behavior, of right seeing and right living, the perfection of justice, and the power that comes into human beings when they yield to the truth. Too polite and civilized to be a Jeremiah in style, Emerson nevertheless sees his audience as worshiping false gods and as laboring under a compensatory punishment for their general disloyalty to the regime of spirit. His work is restoration. He finds the sacred quarantined in small religious redoubts, calls it out, makes it credible, and broadcasts it lavishly over the landscape. We watch this process in astonishment.

Is there a “late” Emerson? Certainly there was an elder one. Emerson lived a long and extraordinarily prolific 79 years. It seems only natural and reasonable to assume that his thought - like his life, like the metamorphic history of his times - can be divided into chronological periods. Emerson seems, in fact, to invite us to read him in terms of early and late phases. In the opening pages of The Conduct of Life, generally considered his last important book, he speaks of a former naiveté (the optimistic assurance that the world is all “positive power”) and a new realism (the chastened acknowledgment that “negative power” is really something to be reckoned with): “Once we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn, that negative power, or circumstance, is half.”

My purpose here is to say something about Ralph Waldo Emerson as a figure in American culture. It was Emerson who, in literary terms at least, really put America on the map; who created for himself the practically nonexistent role of man of letters, and for about a half century - from the golden age of Jackson to the gilded age of Grant - criticized, cajoled, sometimes confused, but mainly inspired audiences in America and abroad. When Emerson died in 1882 he was indisputably a figure - for some a figure of fun, but for most one to be spoken of with reverence approaching awe. Matthew Arnold declared that Emerson's was the most important work done in prose in the nineteenth century. Nietzsche called him a “brother soul.” One of his disciples, Moncure Conway, likened him to Buddha, and twenty years later William James would pronounce him divine.

On a transitional November day, in the year 1872, a pair of American gentlemen could be seen roaming the rooms of the Museum of the Louvre. The elder of them was clearly in the scanning mode, moving his tall, spare frame briskly through the rooms. His younger, fleshier partner frequently would urge hesitation in the midst of one or another masterpiece, to which his companion would give friendly but only momentary assent before moving on once more, like a steer of the Western plains avoiding the rope. Again the younger man would linger with his all-absorbing gaze, then respectfully touch his friend's elbow. He would softly exclaim and modestly explicate, progressively but pleasantly puzzled by his companion's polite impatience and clear desire to gallop on, taking in everything at large yet nothing in particular with his strong, frank stare.

In 1833, Waldo Emerson (as he still called himself) gave a talk at the Unitarian chapel in Edinburgh, Scotland. At least one member of the audience remembered it ecstatically: 'The originality of his thoughts, the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effect, and the singular directness and simplicity of his manner . . . made a deep impression on me. . . . His voice was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any I ever heard.' The enthusiastic auditor might have added that the go-year-old visiting American speaker did not receive any sort of fee.

In a journal entry of 1859, Emerson expressed satisfaction at having successfully imbued would-be students with the doctrine of self-reliance: 'I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twentyfive or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. . . . This is my boast that I have no school & no follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence.' This passage offers a glimpse of a precursor's perspective on the problem of literary influence. Instead of expressing anxiety about receiving influence, or, for that matter, an anxious desire to be influential, Emerson boasts (albeit perhaps ambivalently) of having declined to exert a personal influence on others that might have warped them from their own orbits.

“The ancient manners were giving way,” Emerson recalled in 1867, looking back some three decades to the beginning of the Transcendentalist movement. As he tried to explain the milieu in which his early work emerged with such impact, he concluded that “the key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself. Men grew reflective and intellectual. There was a new consciousness” (W 10: 325-26). Emerson wanted to explain the movement's sense of newness, of what many felt to be the initiation of a new era in human history. But now at some distance himself from these earlier hopes, he placed the fervor of this movement in a larger framework of the cycles of human history, part of the necessary and inevitable process of reform and renewal. Transcendentalism represented one of the recurrent periods in which “the party of the Past” and “the party of the Future” collide. “At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs” (W 10: 325). Transcendentalism was thus a moment in history containing both expansive hope and a sense of strife and embattlement, and marked by the emergence of new intellectual categories, new relations among persons and classes, and new ethical and political imperatives.'

Consideration of Emerson's writings without significant emphasis on his verse would in some ways produce Hamlet without the prince, for Emerson seems to have identified himself primarily as a poet. During his New York lecture tour of March 1842, he wrote to his wife Lidian of feeling alienated from and misunderstood by his dinner companions, the social reformers Horace Greeley and Albert Brisbane: 'They are bent on popular action: I am in all my theory, ethics, & politics a poet and of no more use in their New York than a rainbow or a firefly. Meantime they fasten me in their thought to “Transcendentalism” whereof you know I am wholly guiltless, and which is spoken of as a known & fixed element like salt or meal: so that I have to begin by endless disclaimers &explanations - “I am not the man you take me for.” (L 3: 18)'

Ralph Waldo Emerson's birth into a lineage of New England clergy - seven generations stretching back to the Puritan migration - has long offered food for thought to biographers and historians. To his earliest interpreters, genealogy itself had explanatory value: James Elliot Cabot could claim that Emerson received from his father “the blood of several lines of 'painful preachers.'” Recent scholars have returned to the family not as a blood influence so much as a cultural, psychological, and textual field around Emerson's written work. Most important, his writing itself includes a scrutiny of family heritage. As Emerson commented in 1841, after eight pages of journalizing on his aunt, brothers, and ancestry, “I doubt if the interior & spiritual history of New England could be truelier told than through the exhibition of family history such as this, the picture of this group of M.[ary] M.[oody] E.[merson] & the boys, mainly Charles” (JMN 7: 446). The memoir that he proposes here never took full shape, but occasional addresses before and after 1841 drew from the well of family memory, as even more deeply did the ongoing, six-decade record of thought in his journal.

Liberation theology - an umbrella term embracing a number of particular movements, including African, black, feminist, and womanist theologies - is self-consciously contextual. While having certain characteristics in common, specific liberation theologies need to be understood in terms of their particular contexts. In this chapter attention is first given to the broad and inclusive tenets of Latin American liberation theology. The second part explores some of the challenges facing liberation theologians in the wider context defined by the post-cold war period; in particular, the situation of the poor in the changing contexts of debate. Specific attention is given to the changing South African context within which the present writer is located.

There is, of course, no one prevailing context in any particular Latin American country or in South Africa. Divisions of class, race, gender and choice continue to ferment the liberation theology debate, and each of these is, in turn, profoundly affected by the changes that have taken place in different regional contexts since the 1960s. The Medellín and Puebla conferences of 1968 and 1979 gave formative expression to Latin American liberation theology, which formed part of the revolutionary milieu that swept South and Central America during this time. In Europe 1968 was the year of the Prague Spring. In North America the 1960s were the time of the Black Power movement. In South Africa, Black theology and liberation theology were born in the late 1960s, reaching their highwater mark with the publication of the Kairos Document in 1985, while Black theology regained a sense of prominence in the debate at more or less the same time. The divide between the forces of resistance and liberation, throughout this period, was crisp, clear and relatively uncomplicated.

The northern frontier of China has long been recognized as something more than a simple line separating natural zones, political entities, or ethnic groups. This frontier has been represented as the birthplace of independent cultures and the habitat of peoples whose lifestyle, economic activities, social customs, and religious beliefs became, from the Bronze Age onward, gradually but increasingly distant from the civilization of the Central Plain. This distinct cultural region, often called the “Northern Zone” of China, comprises the interlocking desert, steppe, and forest regions from Heilong jiang and Jilin in the east to Xinjiang in the west. The frontier between China and the north has also been envisaged as a bundle of routes and avenues of communications through which peoples, ideas, goods, and faiths flowed incessantly between West and East. In economic terms, it provided the Chinese with a source of foreign goods as well as a market for domestic production.

The process by which the northern frontier acquired these qualifications was a long one. While its complexities cannot be captured in a single image, the Great Wall – this symbolic and material line that came into existence as a unified system of fortifications with the establishment of the Qin empire in 221 B.C. – can be seen as the culmination of a long process of cultural differentiation that embraces several aspects.

In their general introduction to the first volume of the Cambridge History of China (The Ch’in and Han Empires), John K. Fairbank and Denis Twitchett, general editors of the series, explained why, when they were planning the series in the 1960s, they had felt obliged to start their coverage with the first empires, omitting earlier developments. After noting the transformation brought about by archaeological discoveries, they wrote:

However, by the time that first volume was published (1986), some twenty years after Fairbank and Twitchett had initiated the Cambridge History of China project, the “flood of new information” that they mentioned had already revitalized the study of ancient China. A large number of scholars, both in East Asia and in the West, had been drawn to consider the new archaeological evidence and, in its light, to reconsider China’s traditional written record and many of the historiographical assumptions based there on. In the light of these developments in the field, and with the active encouragement of Denis Twitchett, Cambridge University Press determined to repair the omission, the result being the present Cambridge History of Ancient China.