The Transcendentalists

Author : Robert A. Gross
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 493 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2021-11-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9780374711887

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The Transcendentalists and Their World by Robert A. Gross Pdf

One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021 One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021 Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers. The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand–plus souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant today. The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

Author : Perry Miller
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 548 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 1950
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0674903331

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The Transcendentalists by Perry Miller Pdf

The philosophy explained in terms of selections from the writings of the chief adherents.

Author : Barbara L. Packer
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0820329584

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The Transcendentalists by Barbara L. Packer Pdf

Barbara L. Packer's long essay "The Transcendentalists" is widely acknowledged by scholars of nineteenth-century American literary history as the best-written, most comprehensive treatment to date of Transcendentalism. Previously existing only as part of a volume in the magisterial Cambridge History of American Literature, it will now be available for the first time in a stand-alone edition. Packer presents Transcendentalism as a living movement, evolving out of such origins as New England Unitarianism and finding early inspiration in European Romanticism. Transcendentalism changed religious beliefs, philosophical ideas, literary styles, and political allegiances. In addition, it was a social movement whose members collaborated on projects and formed close personal ties. Transcendentalism contains vigorous thought and expression throughout, says Packer; only a study of the entire movement can explain its continuing sway over American thought. Through fresh readings of both the essential Transcendentalist texts and the best current scholarship, Packer conveys the movement's genuine expectations that its radical spirituality not only would lead to personal perfection but also would inspire solutions to such national problems as slavery and disfranchisement. Here is Transcendentalism in whole, with Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller restored to their place alongside such contemporaries as Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, Jones Very, Theodore Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Orestes Brownson, and Frederick Henry Hedge.

Author : R. Todd Felton
Publisher : Roaring Forties Press
Page : 99 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2006-06-01
Category : Travel
ISBN : 9780984623983

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A Journey Into the Transcendentalists' New England by R. Todd Felton Pdf

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.

Author : Bruce A. Ronda
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2017-10-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780820351254

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The Fate of Transcendentalism by Bruce A. Ronda Pdf

The Fate of Transcendentalism examines the mid-nineteenth-century flowering of American transcendentalism and shows the movement’s influence on several subsequent writers, thinkers, and artists who have drawn inspiration and energy from the creative outpouring it produced. In this wide-ranging study, Bruce A. Ronda offers an account of the movement as an early example of the secular turn in American culture and brings to bear insights from philosopher Charles Taylor and others who have studied the broad cultural phenomenon of secularization. Ronda’s account turns on the interplay and tension between two strands in the transcendentalist movement. Many of the social experiments associated with transcendentalism, such as the Brook Farm and Fruitlands reform communities, Temple School, and the West Street Bookshop, as well as the transcendentalists’ contributions to abolition and women’s rights, spring from a commitment to human flourishing without reference to a larger religious worldview. Other aspects of the movement, particularly Henry Thoreau’s late nature writing and the rich tradition it has inspired, seek to minimize the difference between the material and the ideal, the human and the not-human. The Fate of Transcendentalism allows readers to engage with this fascinating dialogue between transcendentalist thinkers who believe that the ultimate end of human life is the fulfillment of human possibility and others who challenge human-centeredness in favor a relocation of humanity in a vital cosmos. Ronda traces the persistence of transcendentalism in the work of several representative twentieth- and twenty-first-century figures, including Charles Ives, Joseph Cornell, Truman Nelson, Annie Dillard, and Mary Oliver, and shows how this dialogue continues to inform important imaginative work to this date.

Author : John P. Miller
Publisher : IAP
Page : 153 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2012-01-01
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781617355868

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Transcendental Learning by John P. Miller Pdf

Transcendental Learning discusses the work of five figures associated with transcendentalism concerning their views on education. Alcott, Emerson, Fuller, Peabody and Thoreau all taught at one time and held definite views about education. The book explores these conceptions with chapters on each of the five individuals and then focuses the main features of transcendental learning and its legacy today. A central thesis of the book is that transcendental learning is essentially holistic in nature and provides rich educational vision that is in many ways a tonic to today’s factory like approach to schooling. In contrast to the narrow vision of education that is promoted by governments and the media, the Transcendentalists offer a redemptive vision of education that includes: -educating the whole child-body, mind, and soul, -happiness as a goal of education. -educating students so they see the interconnectedness of nature, -recognizing the inner wisdom of the child as something to be honored and nurtured, - a blueprint for environmental education through the work of Thoreau, - an inspiring vision for educating women of all ages through the work of Margaret Fuller, - an experimental approach to pedagogy that continually seeks for more effective ways of educating children, - a recognition of the importance of the presence of teacher and encouraging teachers to be aware and conscious of their own behavior. -a vision of multicultural and bilingual education through the work of Elizabeth Peabody The Transcendentalists, particularly Emerson and Thoreau, sewed the seeds for the environmental movement and for non-violent change. Their work eventually influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and it continues to resonate today in the thinking of Aung Sang Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama. The Transcendentalists’ vision of education is worth examining as well given the dissatisfaction with the current educational scene. Endorsements: "A Transcendental Education provides a powerfully hopeful, integrative, and holistic vision that can help guide education out of its current vacuum. The book is thoughtfully explicated, expertly synthesized and completely relevant for anyone interesting in helping education find itself. Like the transcendentalists themselves, this is both down-to-earth and soaring in its potential implications." Tobin Hart author of "The Secret Spiritual World of Children" and "From Information to Transformation: Education for the Evolution of Consciousness." "The secret to a vital, renewed America lies in the life and writings of the Transcendentalist community of Concord, Massachusetts in the 19th century. Jack Miller, who I know has been devoted to a new, living form of education throughout his career, has written a book that could inspire a revolution in teaching. It goes against the tide, as do Emerson and Thoreau. But it offers a blueprint and a hope for our children." Thomas Moore, author of "Care of the Soul." "A timely account of great thinking on genuine education. Reading this, today's beleaguered teachers should experience a renewal of spirit and commitment." Nel Noddings, author of "Happiness and Education."

Author : Richard G. Geldard
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2005-10-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781101144114

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Essential Transcendentalists by Richard G. Geldard Pdf

Interest abounds in the work of the Transcendentalists, such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. Each year, tens of thousands of readers rediscover Transcendental thought in books and articles, and in visits to historic sites, such as Walden Pond. But few appreciate the truly mystical and contemplative qualities of the Transcendentalists, and the spiritual movements and figures they have since inspired. As Richard G. Geldard-one of today's leading scholars of Emerson-illustrates in The Essential Transcendentalists, Transcendentalism adds up to a school of practical spiritual philosophy that aims to guide the individual toward inner development, much like that of Stoicism in Western antiquity. This current of New England mysticism has influenced modern-day luminaries as diverse as essayist Annie Dillard and Ernest Holmes, founder of the worldwide Religious Science movement. Through revealing commentary, historical overview, and selections from classic works, The Essential Transcendentalists provides a distinctive and heretofore neglected examination of the spiritual breadth and depth of "Yankee mysticism."

Author : George Hochfield
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 438 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2004-01-01
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 030010281X

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Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists by George Hochfield Pdf

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.

Author : Joel Myerson,Sandra Harbert Petrulionis,Laura Dassow Walls
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 800 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2010-04-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0199716129

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The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism by Joel Myerson,Sandra Harbert Petrulionis,Laura Dassow Walls Pdf

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.

Author : Lawrence Buell
Publisher : Modern Library
Page : 616 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2006-01-10
Category : History
ISBN : UOM:39015063688405

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The American Transcendentalists by Lawrence Buell Pdf

Publisher Description

Author : Barry Hankins
Publisher : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2008-11-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780802863898

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Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America by Barry Hankins Pdf

Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984) was probably the single greatest intellectual influence on young evangelicals of the 1960s and '70s. He was cultural critic, popular mentor, political activist, Christian apologist, founder of L'Abri, and the author of over twenty books and two important films. It is impossible to understand the intellectual world of contemporary evangelicalism apart from Francis Schaeffer.Barry Hankins has written a critical but appreciative biography that explains how Schaeffer was shaped by the contexts of his life -- from young fundamentalist pastor in America, to greatly admired mentor, to lecturer and activist who encouraged world-wary evangelicals to engage the culture around them. Drawing extensively from primary sources, including personal interviews, Hankins paints a picture of a complex, sometimes flawed, but ultimately prophetic figure in American evangelicalism and beyond.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Prestwick House Inc
Page : 138 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : American essays
ISBN : 9781603890168

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Transcendentalism: Essential Essays of Emerson and Thoreau: Literary Touchstone Classic by Anonim Pdf

Author : Peter Wirzbicki
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2021-03-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812297898

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Fighting for the Higher Law by Peter Wirzbicki Pdf

In Fighting for the Higher Law, Peter Wirzbicki explores how important black abolitionists joined famous Transcendentalists to create a political philosophy that fired the radical struggle against American slavery. In the cauldron of the antislavery movement, antislavery activists, such as William C. Nell, Thomas Sidney, and Charlotte Forten, and Transcendentalist intellectuals, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, developed a "Higher Law" ethos, a unique set of romantic political sensibilities—marked by moral enthusiasms, democratic idealism, and a vision of the self that could judge political questions from "higher" standards of morality and reason. The Transcendentalism that emerges here is not simply the dreamy philosophy of privileged white New Englanders, but a more populist movement, one that encouraged an uncompromising form of politics among a wide range of Northerners, black as well as white, working-class as well as wealthy. Invented to fight slavery, it would influence later labor, feminist, civil rights, and environmentalist activism. African American thinkers and activists have long engaged with American Transcendentalist ideas about "double consciousness," nonconformity, and civil disobedience. When thinkers like Martin Luther King, Jr., or W. E. B. Du Bois invoked Transcendentalist ideas, they were putting to use an intellectual movement that black radicals had participated in since the 1830s.

Author : Lawrence Buell
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2016-11-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501707650

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Literary Transcendentalism by Lawrence Buell Pdf

Broader in scope than any previous literary study of the transcendentalists, this rewarding book analyzes the theories and forms characteristic of a vital group of American writers, as well as the principles and vision underlying transcendentalism. All the movement's major literary figures and forms are considered in detail. Lawrence Buell combines intellectual history and critical explication, giving equal attention to general trends and to particular works and individuals. His chapters on conversation, religious discourse, catalog rhetoric, and literary travelogue treat intensively topics that have been relatively neglected. His analyses of Ellery Channing's poetry and the use of persona in Emerson and Very are also innovative. In the final section, he offers the first systematic account of the autobiographical tradition in transcendentalist writing.This incisive and sympathetic overview of transcendentalist writing and thought will attract readers interested in American culture, and it will suggest new critical approaches to nonfiction.

Author : Lawrence D. Geller
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 1973
Category : American literature
ISBN : UOM:39015003758540

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Between Concord and Plymouth: the Transcendentalists and the Watsons by Lawrence D. Geller Pdf