A Liberal Education in Late Emerson offers a fascinating insight into Emersonian rhetoric and its relation to the ideals of liberal education. Sean Ross Meehan compellingly argues that, for Emerson, rhetoric was not solely the art of persuasive oratory but an approach to education and an “organizing principle of mind” that encompasses all knowledge and thought (5). Meehan sees this Emersonian rhetoric as foundational to a generalized liberal-arts model of university education that emphasized teaching over the production of new knowledge. This is set against the backdrop of an increased culture of specialization in the US universities of the late nineteenth century.

The book is revisionist in two major ways. First, in its interest in the tail end of Emerson's career – Meehan focusses on a period that has often been seen to represent a decline in Emerson's powers, particularly in relation to his oratorical skill. And second, and most innovatively, the book focusses on Emerson's use of metonymy rather than on the usual critical emphasis on Emersonian metaphor. Under Meehan's direction metonymy emerges as a rhetorical tool apposite to the distillation of broad forms of knowledge. Meehan evaluates this late metonymic Emerson through the lens of four of his intellectual progenies, William James, Charles W. Eliot, Walt Whitman and W. E. B. Du Bois – though the engagement with Du Bois is confined to the conclusion. The three figures who have a chapter devoted to them each represent the three major strands of Emerson's influence: philosophy, education and literature. Through them Meehan develops an idea of an organicized Emersonian rhetoric that sees values of revision and recomposition disseminated through all forms of knowledge production and pedagogical practice.

The chapters on James and Eliot set up Meehan's argument. The discussion of James illustrates how both he and Emerson enact a fluid and unconventional form of mental philosophy that crosses boundaries between the poetic and the analytic. As has become a more prominent view in recent Emerson scholarship, the literary and the philosophical are shown to be mutually reinforcing elements in his work. And the second chapter, on Eliot – the longest-serving president of Harvard who held the post from 1869 to 1909 – provides necessary context about the changing intellectual environs of the day. By showing how an increased culture of disciplinary training both grows out of and refutes an Emersonian model of “liberal-arts” education, this chapter offers a fascinating insight into the development of the modern university as it exists today.

In the chapter on Whitman, Meehan is at his most creative. And, unsurprisingly for a chapter focussed on a poet, it is here is that Emerson's own words receive the most in-depth analysis. Meehan draws out a previously unnoticed similarity in the work of both authors through their shared usage of the word “chyle.” This digestive metaphor brilliantly illustrates values of recomposition that underpin the whole study. Meehan reconstitutes the relationship between metaphor and metonymy in both Emerson and Whitman, finding greater moments of parity between the two authors than was previously assumed. In a fourth chapter, dedicated to Emerson's use of metonymy, Meehan clearly outlines his approach. However, the contribution of this section could have come sooner; the decision to focus on metonymy is left unsubstantiated until this late point of the book.

Meehan ends his study with attention to Du Bois, drawing out the metonymic relationship between a college and its community. The book thus concludes by positing Emersonian principles as an alternative to an elitist form of education that prizes individualistic brilliance innovated within the ivory tower. Instead, for Du Bois, Emersonian rhetoric offers a model of pedagogy that is rooted in history, formed of recomposed knowledge and marked by its connectivity to the wider world. As is common to much scholarship on Emerson, Meehan is careful to tread a line between contradictions. He argues that each one of the figures both adheres to and challenges Emerson's rhetoric and thus fulfils its inherent values of independent thought. Therefore the book creates its own Emersonian “double consciousness” in its combined focus on rhetoric and the ideals of freethinking.

The discussions of the book are particularly pertinent in the current academic climate in which calls for interdisciplinarity are rife. Though Meehan does not explicitly make this connection, the Emerson that his book describes becomes a useful tool for navigating the debates of the contemporary academy. As well as providing a thoughtful reappraisal of Emerson's later career, Meehan's book offers a convincing educational and philosophical justification for interdisciplinarity in general.