Emerson’s Unoriginality and the Commonplace Books of Mary Moody Emerson and Margaret Fuller

Abstract The commonplace books of Mary Moody Emerson and Margaret Fuller exposes the ways in which popular, conventional, and unoriginal genres shaped “the Newness”; they likewise invite a reconsideration of the ostensible exceptionality of Transcendentalist approaches to friendship, conversation, and “Verses of the Portfolio.” Fuller and Mary Emerson’s intertextual experimentations shaped Waldo Emerson’s development, heightened his awareness of the value of manuscript miscellanies, and inflected his curation of their own manuscripts. Because commonplace books’ thoroughgoing intertextuality subverts intentionalist models of textual authority in favor of social-text editorial practices, it also prompts fresh assessments of the Transcendentalist corpus, including Waldo’s late-style, collaboratively authored publications. Notably, the affordances of computational analysis can render these intricate references more legible. An example of such an intervention is “Intertextual References in the Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: Visualization for Close and Distant Reading,” an NEH-funded, open-access interface that clarifies complicated intertextual gestures and enriches their interpretation.