This is the first comprehensive scholarly account of the journal that was the official organ of Associationism and Fourierism in America in the 1840s, as well as a major forum for Transcendentalist writers. The author traces the journal's history, examines its handling of important contemporary social, political, and economic questions, evaluates its literary and musical criticism, and considers The Harbinger's role in the reform-minded Associationist and Transcendentalist movements.
The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism offers an ecclectic, comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to the immense cultural impact of the movement that encompassed literature, art, architecture, science, and politics.
The utopian socialism of Charles Fourier spread throughout Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, but it was in the United States that it generated the most intense excitement. In this rich and engaging narrative, Carl J. Guarneri traces the American Fourierist movement from its roots in the religious, social, and economic upheavals of the 1830s, through its bold communal experiments of the 1840s, to its lingering twilight after the Civil War.
More than ten years in the making, this comprehensive single-volume literary survey is for the student, scholar, and general reader. The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature represents a collaborative effort, involving 300 contributors from across the US and Canada. Composed of more than 1,100 signed biographical-critical entries, this Encyclopedia serves as both guide and companion to the study and appreciation of American literature. A special feature is the topical article, of which there are 70.
"John Sullivan Dwight (1813-93) was for much of the nineteenth century America's leading music critic. Born into a musical family and educated at several premiere Boston schools, he fell under the spell of New England Transcendentalism during which time he befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, and others of a similarly progressive mindset. Dwight resided at the socialist/utopian community of Brook Farm where he learned the art of journalism and the business of publishing while writing for The Harbinger. He wrote on many topics-Transcendentalism, of course, but especially on music and musical performance. Dwight was a skilled communicator, and he conveyed ideas powerfully, persuasively, and constantly in language that had recently been given verve by German Romanticism and Emersonian Transcendentalism. When Brook Farm collapsed, Dwight's professional prospects ran desperately low. After several years as a journeyman writer, he launched in 1852 his own Dwight's Journal of Music: A Paper of Art and Literature, a newspaper that firmly established him as a serious music critic. The Journal was published regularly until 1881. It was and remains an important periodical. In its own time, it spoke to America's growing appetite for art music; today it is indispensable for research into nineteenth-century American classical music, especially in Boston. This biography follows Dwight's fascinating life as he meets and writes about some of the era's most crucial intellectuals and musicians. His enormous body of essays, reviews, and translations, much of it illuminated here, leads to the conclusion that Dwight the Music Critic and Dwight the Transcendentalist are inseparable"--
"[Lause] argues that the interest of of working people in equitable access to the country's most obvious asset -- land -- led them to advocate a federal homestead act granting land to the landless, state legislation to prohibit the foreclosure of family farms, and antimonopolistic limitations on land ownership ...
This lavishly illustrated volume examines the major figures of the Transcendentalist movement and explores the places that inspired them. Beginning with Transcendentalism’s birth in Boston and Cambridge, the book charts the development of a movement that revolutionized American ideas about the artistic, spiritual, and natural worlds. At the same time, it creates a vivid sense of New England in the nineteenth century, from its idyllic countryside and sleepy towns to its bustling ports and burgeoning cities. The book is divided geographically into chapters, each focusing on a town or village famous for its relationship to one or more of the Transcendentalists.
