American Transcendentalism: A History

*HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION* At a time when we need to rediscover how the idea of America can manifest itself in a practical philosophy, along comes Philip Gura's excellent American Transcendentalism to inspire us with the story of the greatest intellectual movement in our brief history. Tracing the intersecting paths of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott -- and less well-known figures as Orestes Brownson, George Ripley, Elizabeth Peabody, and Theodore Parker -- Gura gives a clear and concise history of this truly American strain of thought. He argues effectively that while transcendentalist thought was based primarily on Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance, that particular viewpoint made room for the social activism of Brownson, Ripley, Parker, and Fuller, despite the differences between the two camps in the 19th century. If you're curious about American Transcendentalism but don't know where to start, here's your answer.

American Transcendentalism is a sweeping 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 American Civil War. Philip F. Gura masterfully traces their intellectual genealogy to transatlantic religious and philosophical ideas, illustrating how these informed the fierce 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, transcendentalists turned ever more exclusively to abolition, and by war’s end transcendentalism had become identified exclusively with Emersonian self-reliance, congruent with the national ethos of political liberalism and market capitalism.

Philip F. Gura is William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he holds appointments in English, American studies, and religious studies.

NOMINATED FOR THE 2008 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

 

“The best collective biography on the group published in modern times.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

“A perfect companion to Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club.” —Kirkus Reviews

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Distributor: MPS
Publication Date: 09-02-2008
Pages: 384
Measurements: 8.280in X 5.600in X 1.110in