This essay prints two previously unpublished letters from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle and contextualizes them against the background of the transatlantic collaboration between the two writers, shedding new light on their exchange of books and manuscripts between Boston and London during the second third of the nineteenth century.

This essay examines how Orestes Brownson used literary criticism as a medium to distance himself from the Transcendentalist movement. It argues that Brownson's qualified rejection of Transcendentalism played a crucial role in the formation of his professional identity as a literary critic and public intellectual in the mid-nineteenth-century literary sphere.