“Descending into us from we know not whence”: Marilynne Robinson and the Emersonian tradition

Abstract

This thesis argues that contemporary American writer Marilynne Robinson’s fiction is informed by the Emersonian tradition, and accordingly seeks to trace and establish this influence in her three novels, Housekeeping, Gilead and Home. Placing Emerson in his American Transcendentalist context, it is argued that even though he perceived and presented his thought as independent from and uninfluenced by his intellectual predecessors, it was nevertheless very much informed by them. Robinson, by means of fictionalization, explores the origins and implications of this disjunction in her novels. The thesis traces this process within the context of American Transcendentalism.