Emerson's contemporaries and Kerouac's crowd

"Emerson's Contemporaries and Kerouac's Crowd examines self-location in the works of six authors; Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Baraka. This topic - so crucial in the minds of the writers in both centuries - has received a surprising lack of critical interest. By returning to the philosophical underpinnings of these writers, and by examining what they considered important about what they wrote, Bradley J. Stiles hopes to correct some popular misreadings of the nineteenth-century writers and provide a new approach to reading the twentieth-century authors by juxtaposing them alongside their predecessors."--BOOK JACKET.