- 385 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
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.
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.
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Yes, you can access American Transcendentalism by Philip F. Gura in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Title Page
- Table of Contents
- PREFACE
- INTRODUCTION: LOCATING THE “LIKE-MINDED”
- 1 - SEARCHING THE SCRIPTURES
- 2 - REINVIGORATING A FAITH
- 3 - TRANSCENDENTALISM EMERGENT
- 4 - RELIGIOUS COMBUSTION
- 5 - CENTRIPETAL FORCES AND CENTRIFUGAL MOTION
- 6 - HEAVEN ON EARTH
- 7 - VARIETIES OF TRANSCENDENTALISM
- 8 - SELF AND SOCIETY
- 9 - THE INWARD TURN
- 10 - FREE RELIGION AND THE DREAM OF A COMMON HUMANITY
- 11 - TOWARD THE GENTEEL TRADITION
- ALSO BY PHILIP F. GURA
- NOTES
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- INDEX
- Copyright Page