Abstract

Between 1820, when Emerson started keeping his journal, and 1870, when Society and Solitude appeared, Indian thought played a number of complex roles in the articulation of the Emersonian self. Studies of Emerson's Orientalism, caught up on the archaeological excavation of sources, failed to view his Indian interest from the broader perspective of the history of ideas. In tracing Emerson's single great idea about the act of experiencing the world, this work aims to establish the relevance of Indian thought to the enactment of this process and the influence it had on his mode of expression.