American Transcendentalism: Individuality and Spirituality
Figures of Dependence, Figures of Expansion: Representations of the Postcolonial and Imperial Experiences in the Discourse of
American Transcendentalism. Warsaw [Poland]: Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, 2009.
She argues carefully that the "atheism" courted boldly by the Germans was merely "part of the discursive and religious context from which
American Transcendentalism emerged" (1).
Faun is "Hawthorne's final attempt to differentiate his view of
American transcendentalism from Melville's." Hawthorne connects transcendentalism and Roman Catholicism in Faun by depicting them as "racialized, primitive, universal, and closely associated with nature." He chooses Rome as a setting "in reaction to Melville's pantheism" and, "most of all," as a reply to Pierre's "'soft social Pantheism.'" The faun's obvious similarity to the "primitive Pan" demonstrates "that Hawthorne is surely aiming his satire at Emerson via his understanding of Melville and his unsocialized wild-child Isabel." In the end, Faun, "recants the Catholicism with which it periodically flirts for the 'nativist' Pantheon," which has, in the narrator's words, "'an impression of solemnity" that "St.
Ideas about learning and growing not only intellectually but also morally and spiritually are at the heart of
American Transcendentalism (Atkinson 2000).
Gura, who grew up in Ware, adds his voice with "
American Transcendentalism: A History." Gura will talk about the relationships that grew up around the most renowned of the transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, at 7:30 p.m.
Coleridge's seminal interpretations of Kant were those most widely read by his contemporaries William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, as well as the primary progenitor of
American transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
For the most part, they were young men who were either directly or indirectly involved in World War I and who belonged to a young generation that went to fight in that war, having been brought up on a very romantic and idealistic diet of Jeffersonianism and
American Transcendentalism. Yet, they emerged from the experience of the war disillusioned and bitter.
Alan Bewell starts the issue with a broad survey of colonial natural history and its place as a discursive site for colonial conceptions and relationships; George Gilpin explores Blake's use and abuse of John Hunter's anatomical and implicitly forensic science to advance an integrated and Romantic science of life; Tim Fulford evokes the vital fluid of Romantic mesmerists to summon and query the politics and poetics of the 1790s; Stuart Peterfreund examines the Romantic transformations of Paracelsus' neglected science of affinities in Frankenstein; and Eric Wilson reads Thoreau and
American transcendentalism through the life formations and the transparencies of Romantic crystallography.
Both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, titans of 19th-century
American transcendentalism, loved it.
One cannot, he maintains, fully understand
American Transcendentalism and many writers of the American Renaissance without an adequate understanding of the role played by esotericism in their creative imaginations.
All the major nineteenth-century versions of rationalistic realism and romantic idealism--including an
American transcendentalism popularized by Ralph Waldo Emerson--built upon Kant's ideas.
A raft of academics have expended their careers variously accounting for the sudden bloom of
American Transcendentalism, the strange, homegrown spiritual product that proclaims every individual's ability to absorb and secrete omnipotent power.
Likewise, Bernard Bell's "Genealogical Shifts in Du Bois's Discourse" traces the historical origins of Du Bois's discourse of double consciousness to European Romanticism,
American Transcendentalism, and William James's exploration of double consciousness as a psychological concept in The Principles of Psychology (1890).
If the Utopianism here came to bear most clearly the stamp of Fourier, so it is the communitarian Ripley rather than the ideally self-reliant Emerson who may be 'the essential figure in
American Transcendentalism as a whole' (p.