The first comprehensive history of the nineteenth-century American intellectual movement. American Transcendentalism is a comprehensive narrative history of America’s first group of public intellectuals, the men and women who defined American literature and indelibly marked American reform in the decades before and following the America Civil War. Philip F. Gura masterfully traces their intellectual genealogy to transatlantic religious and philosophical ideas, illustrating how these informed the fierce local theological debates that, so often first in Massachusetts and eventually throughout America, gave rise to practical, personal, and quixotic attempts to improve, even perfect the world. The transcendentalists would painfully bifurcate over what could be attained and how, one half epitomized by Ralph Waldo Emerson and stressing self-reliant individualism, the other by Orestes Brownson, George Ripley, and Theodore Parker, emphasizing commitment to the larger social good. By the 1850s, the uniquely American problem of slavery dissolved differences as transcendentalists turned ever more exclusively to abolition. Along with their early inheritance from European Romanticism, America’s transcendentalists abandoned their interest in general humanitarian reform. By war’s end, transcendentalism had become identified exclusively with Emersonian self-reliance, congruent with the national ethos of political liberalism and market capitalism.
Transcendentalism was the first major intellectual movement in U.S. history, championing the inherent divinity of each individual, as well as the value of collective social action. In the mid-nineteenth century, the movement took off, changing how Americans thought about religion, literature, the natural world, class distinctions, the role of women, and the existence of slavery. Edited by the eminent scholar Lawrence Buell, this comprehensive anthology contains the essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellow visionaries. There are also reflections on the movement by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. This remarkable volume introduces the radical innovations of a brilliant group of thinkers whose impact on religious thought, social reform, philosophy, and literature continues to reverberate in the twenty-first century.
Transcendentalism was the name given to the New England movement of the 1830s and 1840s that brought together Romanticism in literature and social reform in politics. Its partisans argued for the rights of women, the abolition of slavery, and, in some cases, the socialization of labor and equal distribution of profits. They were America’s first avant-garde. This volume presents substantial selections from the writings of key American Transcendentalists, such as George Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker, and Bronson Alcott. Included are sermons and diary entries, essays on labor, religion, education, and literature, on German metaphysics and Coleridge’s philosophy of mind. Many are expressive of the movement’s over-arching project: to define the innermost meanings of democracy--the nature of man, his place in the world, and his relation to the divine. First published in 1966, the book has been updated and expanded for this edition.
This book sets out to shed light on what is specific to American Transcendentalism by comparing it with the atheistic vision of German philosophers and theologians like Ludwig Feuerbach and Arthur Schopenhauer. The study argues that atheism was part of the discursive and religious context from which Transcendentalism emerged. Tendencies toward atheism were already inherent in Transcendentalist thought. The atheist scenario came to the surface in the controversy about Emerson’s “new views.” Contemporary critics charged that the deity Emerson worshipped was himself. Emersonian Transcendentalism thus anticipated some of the central concerns in the works of German atheists like Feuerbach. From idealism to atheism seemed but a short step.
In this extraordinarily candid book, Umesh Patri presents a fresh reappraisal of the impact of Indian scriptures on American transcendentalism which flourished in New England in the 19th century. The major premise of the study is that other influences on the transcendentalists, such as Chinese, Persian, Sufi, Arabic, Neo-Platonism and German transcendentalism, are of less significance than that of Indian scriptures comprising of Hindu and Buddhist texts. In the writings of Emerson, Thoreau and minor transcendentalists like Alcott, Fuller, Channing, Johnson, Brownson, etc., the influence of Indian scriptures is clearly discernable. An attempt has been made here to show that Indian scriptures have not only influenced the philosophical thinking of these writers but also their lifestyle and social conduct. It also attempts to show that transcendentalism was not an isolated movement but was a part of a cultural renaissance which swept the entire nation in the wake of avid interest and curiosity in the ancient lore of other countries. Transcendentalism, it is suggested here, continues to affect the thinking of Americans and can be viewed as a continuing movement of thought in American intellectual history. This book draws attention to many aspects of transcendentalism which have not been adequately discussed so far.
The first major study since the 1930s of the relationship between American Transcendentalism and Asian religions, and the first comprehensive work to include post-Civil War Transcendentalists like Samuel Johnson, this book is encyclopedic in scope. Beginning with the inception of Transcendentalist Orientalism in Europe, Versluis covers the entire history of American Transcendentalism into the twentieth century, and the profound influence of Orientalism on the movement--including its analogues and influences in world religious dialogue. He examines what he calls "positive Orientalism," which recognizes the value and perennial truths in Asian religions and cultures, not only in the writings of major figures like Thoreau and Emerson, but also in contemporary popular magazines. Versluis's exploration of the impact of Transcendentalism on the twentieth-century study of comparative religions has ramifications for the study of religious history, comparative religion, literature, politics, history, and art history.
A comprehensive history of American transcendentalism which originated with a number of nineteenth-century intellectuals including Ralph Waldo Emerson, and examines their philosophical and religious roots in Europe and opposition to slavery.
Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism explores Saul Bellow's moral and philosophical affinity with the writers of American transcendentalism, especially Emerson and Whitman. Its focus is on the «vintage» Bellow, or his «mature» novels, from Henderson the Rain King (1959) to The Dean's December (1982). In these novels, Bellow highlights a moral crisis, arising from humankind's despiritualization and dehumanization, which, he believes, is responsible for an ongoing dichotomy in the modern world. Bellow describes this as a dichotomy of the «Cleans» and the «Dirties», in the context of American culture. To rectify this dichotomy and redeem humankind from its current «death-ridden» state, Bellow and his protagonists advance a vision of life that corresponds to the transcendental vision of dialogue and «double consciousness», or coordination and balance. Like Emerson, they advocate, «The mid-world is best... A man is a golden impossibility; the line he must walk is a hair's breadth». Comparable to Whitman, they urge the individual to «knit the knot of contrariety» and act as «an arbiter of the diverse».
Analyses literary representations of the American experience in selected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Reveals the ambivalence that underlay the cultural and political development of the United States as a former colony.