Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle

Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle

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Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle

Sartor Resartus is Thomas Carlyle's most enduring and influential work. First published in serial form in Fraser's Magazine in 1833-1834, it was discovered by the American Transcendentalists. Sponsored by Ralph Waldo Emerson, it was first printed as a book in Boston in 1836 and immediately became the inspiration for the Transcendental movement. The first London trade edition was published in 1838. By the 1840s, largely on the strength of Sartor Resartus, Carlyle became one of the leading literary figures in Britain.

Sartor Resartus became one of the important texts of nineteenth-century English literature, central to the Romantic movement and Victorian culture. At the time of Carlyle's death in 1881, more than 69,000 copies had been sold. The post-Victorian influence continued and extends to writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, Willa Cather and Ernest Hemingway.

This edition of Sartor Resartus is the first publication of the work that uses all extant versions to create an accurate authorial text. This volume, the second in an eight-volume series, includes a complete textual apparatus as well as a historical introduction and full critical and explanatory annotation.
Thomas Carlyle was born in Dumfriesshire in 1795 and educated at Edinburgh University. He began training for ministry but turned instead to teaching, law study, and increasingly literary work and studying German literature. His first considerable essay was published in 1822. He continued to write on and translate German literature during the following six years, and published a novel, Sartor Resartus, in 1833-4. In 1831 Carlyle met J. S. Mill, who introduced him to Emerson and interested him in the French Revolution, leading to his history of it, completed in 1837. From 1837 to 1840 he undertook several important lecture series, in which he developed his individualist desire to place a satisfactory model of the hero before his contemporaries. His reputation was firmly established by the mid-1840s. He proceeded to spend an immense amount of work on his history of Frederick the Great. In 1865 he was invited to become Rector of the University of Edinburgh, but published little of significance thereafter. Carlyle died in 1881. Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, the son of a Unitarian minister. He was himself ordained in 1829 but found he could not accept Unitarianist orthodoxy and in 1832, shortly after the death of his first wife, resigned his ministry and left for Europe, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Carlyle. Returning to Boston, Emerson turned from preaching to lecturing. In 1835 he remarried and settled in Concord, Massachusetts. He published his first book, Nature, in 1836, and was soon recognised as a revolutionary philosopher. In 1838 he became excluded from Harvard for claiming the priority of individual spiritual experience over any church. In 1842 he became editor of the Transcendentalist quarterly The Dial, and volumes of essays in 1841 and 1844 secured him European reputation. He also became known as a poet through two collections. In the 1850s he became an ardent supporter of the abolition of slavery. In 1866 Harvard conferred an honorary Doctorate of Law upon him. Emerson died in 1882.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781016363334
ISBN 10 1016363338
Title Sartor Resartus
Author Thomas Carlyle
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Legare Street Press
Year published 2022-10-27
Number of pages 302
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.