The Fate of Transcendentalism

The Fate of Transcendentalism PDF Author: Bruce A. Ronda
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351253
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
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.

The Fate of Transcendentalism

The Fate of Transcendentalism PDF Author: Bruce A. Ronda
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351253
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
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.

Transcendentalism: Essential Essays of Emerson and Thoreau: Literary Touchstone Classic

Transcendentalism: Essential Essays of Emerson and Thoreau: Literary Touchstone Classic PDF Author:
Publisher: Prestwick House Inc
ISBN: 1603890165
Category : American essays
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description


The Transcendentalists and Their World

The Transcendentalists and Their World PDF Author: Robert A. Gross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374711887
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
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.

The Transcendentalists

The Transcendentalists PDF Author: Barbara L. Packer
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820329581
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
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.

Transcendental Learning

Transcendental Learning PDF Author: John P. Miller
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1617355860
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
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."

American Heretic

American Heretic PDF Author: Dean Grodzins
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807862045
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
Theodore Parker (1810-1860) was a powerful preacher who rejected the authority of the Bible and of Jesus, a brilliant scholar who became a popular agitator for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights, and a political theorist who defined democracy as "government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people--words that inspired Abraham Lincoln. Parker had more influence than anyone except Ralph Waldo Emerson in shaping Transcendentalism in America. In American Heretic, Dean Grodzins offers a compelling account of the remarkable first phase of Parker's career, when this complex man--charismatic yet awkward, brave yet insecure--rose from poverty and obscurity to fame and notoriety as a Transcendentalist prophet. Grodzins reveals hitherto hidden facets of Parker's life, including his love for a woman who was not his wife, and presents fresh perspectives on Transcendentalism. Grodzins explores Transcendentalism's religious roots, shows the profound religious and political issues at stake in the "Transcendentalist controversy," and offers new insights into Parker's Transcendentalist colleagues, including Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. He traces, too, the intellectual origins of Parker's epochal definition of democracy as government of, by, and for the people. The manuscript of this book was awarded the Allan Nevins Prize by the Society of American Historians.

Transcendentalism Yesterday and Today: A Collection of Address and Sermons on Trancendentalist Themes

Transcendentalism Yesterday and Today: A Collection of Address and Sermons on Trancendentalist Themes PDF Author: Barry M. Andrews
Publisher: Xlibris Us
ISBN: 9781664150126
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Transcendentalism isn't just a phase in Unitarian Universalist history, it is an on-going source of inspiration for Unitarian Universalists today. Drawing upon ancient wisdom and modern knowledge, Transcendentalist spirituality is at once timeless and timely. The Transcendentalists sought to cultivate the soul through such practices as walks in nature, contemplation, solitude, reading, simple living, religious cosmopolitanism, and action from principle. Unitarian Universalists today will find these practices congenial to their own spiritual growth. The Transcendentalists show us that by concerted effort we can become receptive to insights that will elevate our spirit and motivate us in our efforts to make society more just and to protect the natural world.

Literary Transcendentalism

Literary Transcendentalism PDF Author: Lawrence Buell
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501707655
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
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.

Romanticism and Transcendentalism

Romanticism and Transcendentalism PDF Author: Jerry R. Phillips
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1604134860
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
An overview of American literature from 1800 through 1860 that examines the social, cultural, and historical contexts of the time, and provides information on romanticism, transcendentalism, American idealism, social reform movements, specific authors, and other related topics.

American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions

American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions PDF Author: Arthur Versluis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195076583
Category : Asia
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Arthur Versluis offers a comprehensive study of the relationship between the American Transcendentalists and Asian religions. He argues that an influx of new information about these religions shook nineteenth-century American religious consciousness to the core. With the publication of ever more material on Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, the Judeo-Christian tradition was inevitably placed as just one among a number of religious traditions. Fundamentalists and conservatives denounced this influx as a threat, but the Transcendentalists embraced it, poring over the sacred books of Asia to extract ethical injunctions, admonitions to self-transcendence, myths taken to support Christian doctrines, and manifestations of a supposed coming universal religion.