Abstract
Transcendentalism delivered no tidy body of doctrine, no distinctive new aesthetic, and no unified, coherent programme for political action. The men and women who considered themselves part of the transcendentalist movement often disagreed profoundly about such questions as the future of religion, the attitude Americans should take towards British culture, and the respective claims of individualism and collectivism. Transcendentalism was also confined geographically to the relatively small area of the American continent known as New England, its main centres being in Massachusetts (Concord, Boston and Cambridge) with some sympathisers in Maine, Vermont and further afield. It is all the more striking that transcendentalism should have played such a large part in the creation of a distinctly American literary tradition, and that the energy and originality of this loose association of individuals should have prompted historians to adopt such terms as ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Flowering’ to characterise it.
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Notes
R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing and J. F. Clarke, eds, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli vol. II (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1881) pp. 27–8.
Hereafter cited in text as Memoirs. Joel Myerson’s The Transcendentalists: A Review of Research and Criticism (New York: MLA, 1984), to which the reader is referred for full bibliographies of the transcendentalists mentioned in this essay, lists twenty-eight men and women considered ‘transcendentalists’ who published work of interest to modern scholars.
See also Alexander Kern, ‘The Rise of Transcendentalism 1815–1860’, Transitions in American Literary History ed. Harry Hayden Clark (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1953) pp. 247–314
and Joel Myerson, ‘A History of the Transcendental Club’, Emerson Society Quarterly XXIII (1977) 27–35.
Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, vol. II (1927; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1954 ) pp. 263–5.
Frank T. Thompson, ‘Emerson’s Indebtedness to Coleridge’, Studies in Philology XXIII (1926) 60. See also Kern, ‘The Rise of Transcendentalism’, pp. 250–1.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Works, Riverside Edition, 11 vols (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1883–3) vol. IV (1893) p. 11. Hereafter cited in text as Representative Men.
James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. I (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887 ) p. 241.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks ed. W. H. Gilman et al., (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960-) vol. VII (1969) p. 431.
Noah Porter, ‘Coleridge and his American Disciples’, Bibliotheca Sacra IV (1847) 123–4.
Margaret Fuller, Papers on Literature and Art vol. II (1846; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1972) p. 123. Hereafter cited in text as Papers.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) p. 88. Hereafter cited in text as Walden.
Julie Ellison, Emerson’s Romantic Style ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984 ) p. 180.
Henry David Thoreau, Journal vol. I, 1837–1844 ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) p. 230; Walden p. 112.
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, Works Centenary Edition, (London: Chapman & Hall, 1896–9) vol.II, p. 5.
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© 1990 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Harding, A.J. (1990). Coleridge and Transcendentalism. In: Gravil, R., Lefebure, M. (eds) The Coleridge Connection. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20667-4_11
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