Description:The essays continue a dialogue between the New England of Emerson and the New York milieu of the early 1930s. The New York dialogue flourished among intellectuals simultaneously concerned with the political consequences of liberalism and Marxism and with the imaginative implications of modernism. In both periods the vexing relationship between politics and literary expression was a common concern. Contributors, some of whom write about Emerson, some about Quentin Anderson, are Jacques Barzun, Stephen Donadio, Denis Donoghue, Aaron Fogel, Carl Hovde, Steven Marcus, Stephen Railton, Ormond Seavey, Peter Shaw, Timothy Trask, Diana Trilling, and Paul Zweig.