The register of reality in Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson

This dissertation examines the role of "reality" in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. While much critical debate has focused on the "realism" of the fiction of later nineteenth-century American authors, this dissertation situates the "real" within a transatlantic history of ideas in order to bring out some of the philosophical implications and complexities of the "real" for American writers of the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Its analysis of the "real" attends to the ways in which Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson find the "real" in more than merely actual objects, and their literary approaches to the "real" often press at the bounds of the actual. The argument synthesizes philosophical analysis and literary criticism, exploring the ways in which the textures of ideas influence literary style, and literary style reveals philosophical implications.;The first two chapters sketch a broad ground for this critical enterprise: the first by examining the general discourse of the "real" in both scholarly writings and the works of antebellum Americans and the second by exploring some of the ways in which the development of various epistemologies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggests philosophical reasons for the complication of the "real." The last three chapters attend to the techniques of the "real" and explore how these theoretical senses of the "real" might in turn entail or encourage certain literary effects. The third chapter considers the possibilities of real transformation and the role of the actual. The fourth offers an extended reading of Emerson's essay "Experience" and discusses the language theories of Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson in order to bring out some of their intertwinings of the issues of language and those of existence. The fifth chapter analyzes the approaches of these writers to registering the whole of "reality" in verse.