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Between Faith and Unbelief : American Transcendentalists and the Challenge of Atheism This book sets out to shed light on what is specific to American Transcendentalism by comparing it with the atheistic vision of German philosophers and theologians like Ludwig Feuerbach and Arthur Schopenhauer. The study argues that atheism was part of the discursive and religious context from which Transcendentalism emerged. Tendencies toward atheism were already inherent in Transcendentalist thought. The atheist scenario came to the surface in the controversy about Emerson's "new views." Contemporary critics charged that the deity Emerson worshipped was himself. Emersonian Transcendentalism thus anticipated some of the central concerns in the works of German atheists like Feuerbach. From idealism to atheism seemed but a short step.
Fruitlands : The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia This is the first definitive account of Fruitlands, one of history's most unsuccessful--but most significant--utopian experiments. It was established in Massachusetts in 1843 by Bronson Alcott (whose ten-year-old daughter Louisa May, future author of Little Women, was among the members) and an Englishman called Charles Lane, under the watchful gaze of Emerson, Thoreau, and other New England intellectuals. Alcott and Lane developed their own version of the doctrine known as Transcendentalism, hoping to transform society and redeem the environment through a strict regime of veganism and celibacy. But physical suffering and emotional conflict--particularly between Lane and Alcott's wife, Abigail--made the community unsustainable. Drawing on the letters and diaries of those involved, Richard Francis explores the relationship between the complex philosophical beliefs held by Alcott, Lane, and their fellow idealists and their day-to-day lives. The result is a vivid and often very funny narrative of their travails, demonstrating the dilemmas and conflicts inherent to any utopian experiment and shedding light on a fascinating period of American history.
A Journey into the Transcendentalists' New England From picturesque towns across the city of Boston, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson and the other Transcendentalists revolutionised ideas about the artistic, spriritual and natural worlds. This volume explores how their lives were intertwined with their stunning New England surroundings.
Labor Pains : Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott on Work, Women, and the Development of the Self This book explores the importance of work and its role in defining and developing the self. Maibor reveals how the writings of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott delve into notions of equality through this emphasis on labor. In doing so she challenges the traditional view of Emerson as unconcerned with societal issues, and opens the work of Hawthorne and Alcott to new feminist readings.
Margaret Fuller : a new American life Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England's intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women's sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimedThe Peabody Sisters "discovered" three fascinating women, has done it again: no biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving. Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley's offer to be theNew-York Tribune's front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a late-in-life hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover, a young officer in the Roman Guard; she wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome; and she gave birth to a son. Yet, when all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fuller's fortieth birthday, the sense and passion of her life's work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall's inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life.
Our Common Dwelling : Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature OurCommonDwelling explores why America's first literary circle turned to nature in the 1830s and '40s. When the New England Transcendentalists spiritualized nature, they were reacting to intense class conflict in the region's industrializing cities. Their goal was to find a secular foundation for their social authority as an intellectual elite. New England Transcendentalism engages with works by William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. The works of these great authors, interpreted in historical context, show that both environmental exploitation and conscious love of nature co-evolved as part of the historical development of American capitalism.
The Postcolonial and Imperial Experience in American Transcendentalism Analyses literary representations of the American experience in selected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Reveals the ambivalence that underlay the cultural and political development of the United States as a former colony.
Transcendentalism : A Reader The transcendentalist movement is generally recognized to be the first major watershed in American literary and intellectual history. Pioneered by Emerson, Thoreau, Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott (among others), Transcendentalism provided a springboard for the first distinctly American forays into intellectual culture: religion and religious reform, philosophy, literature, ecology, and spiritualism. This new collection, edited by eminent American literature scholar Joel Myerson, is the first anthology of the period to appear in over fifty years. Transcendentalism: A Reader draws together in their entirety the essential writings of the Transcendentalist group during its most active period, 1836-1844. It includes the major publications of the Dial, the writings on democratic and social reform, the early poetry, nature writings, and all of Emerson's major essays, as well as an informative introduction and annotations by Myerson.
Transcendental utopias : individual and community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden New England Transcendentalism was a vibrant and many-sided movement whose members are probably best remembered for their utopian experiments, their attempts to reconcile the contingent world of history with what they perceived as the stable and patterned world of nature. Richard Francis has written the first book to explore in detail the ideological basis of the three famous experiments during the 1840s: Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Henry David Thoreau's "community of one" on the shores of Walden Pond.Francis suggests that at the heart of Transcendentalism was a belief that all phenomena are connected in a repetitive sequence. The task was to explain how human society could be reordered to benefit from this seriality. Some members of the movement believed in evolutionary progress, whereas others hoped to be the agents of a sudden millennial transformation. They differed, as well, in their views as to whether the fundamental social unit was the individual, the family, the phalanstery, or the community. The story of the three communities was, inevitably, also the story of particular individuals, and Francis highlights the lives and ideas of such leaders as George Ripley, W. H. Channing, Bronson Alcott, Charles Lane, and Theodore Parker. The consistent underlying beliefs of the New England Transcendentalists have exerted a powerful influence on American intellectual and cultural history ever since.

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The American Transcendentalists: Concord, Massachusetts (54:00) The ideas and ideals of three American Transcendentalists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller—initially given expression through The Dial continue to shape the discourse of literature, philosophy, and religion worldwide. This program, hosted by James H. Bride II and divided into eight chapters, traces the origins and defines the concept of Transcendentalism. It also spotlights key landmarks in and around Concord, where the Transcendental movement began, while profiling Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller in depth through readings, interviews, and dramatizations from significant Transcendentalist texts. Scholarly commentary is provided by Richard Baker, Lawrence Buell, Burnham Carter, Philip McFarland, Joan von Mehren, Joel Myerson, Wesley Mott, Robert Richardson Jr., and David Reynolds. Several dramatic passages are reenacted by Jeffrey Hyatt as Thoreau at Walden Pond. Some audio segments are slightly substandard due to limitations at the time of recording.
Introducing the Transcendentalists - Full Video (49:53) Host James H. Bride brings the language and lives of the Transcendentalists to realization by recognizing the context, expression, and foundation of the movement. This program pioneers a new way for teachers and general readers to be on familiar terms with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, as well as the journals and writings of Henry David Thoreau. Professors Richard Baker, Joel Myerson, Bob Richardson, Wes Mott, and Larry Buell add significant biographical commentary and teaching suggestions to introduce this body of American philosophy and literature. Still important in the curriculum for studying the development of 19th-century American ideas, Introducing the Transcendentalists reflects today’s 21st-century individual and philosophical challenges and associations. Additionally, historian and actor Richard Smith offers a reenactment of a day in Thoreau’s life at Walden Pond. A separate documentary, In The Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, mirrors the challenges and isolation in his 19th-century Walden Pond experiment.
The Margaret Fuller Legacy: America's First Feminist, 1810–1850 (40:01) n Margaret Fuller’s Memoirs she wrote, “I remember how, as a little child, I had stopped myself one day on the stairs, and asked ‘How came I here? How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?’” During her brief life of 40 years, Fuller made every effort to answer those questions, supported and documented by her inquiring nature and writings, all to fulfill American women’s growing intellectual and spiritual needs. In this program hosted by James H. Bride, distinguished educators Megan Marshall (author of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life), Joan Von Mehren, Peter McFarland, and Joel Myerson contribute to the first comprehensive overview of Margaret Fuller’s life, times, and achievements. The Margaret Fuller Legacy examines her Transcendental period as editor of the first literary magazine in America, The Dial, along with her professional and personal relationships with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Additionally, the video brings to light her Conversations—the first successful women’s studies initiative in America—in Boston and at Brook Farm and her role as the first American female journalist and foreign reporter with the New-York Tribune. The program concludes at the Fuller monument at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Essays - First Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson American essayist, philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) lead Transcendentalism in the early nineteenth century and greatly influenced the later New Thought movement. Summing up his work, Emerson said that his primary principle was "the infinitude of the private man", and advised to "make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you." His First Series collects together the following 12 essays: History, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, The Over-Soul, Circles, Intellect and Art.
Essays - Second Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson American essayist, philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) lead Transcendentalism in the early nineteenth century and greatly influenced the later New Thought movement. Summing up his work, Emerson said that his primary principle was "the infinitude of the private man", and advised to "make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you." His Second Series collects together the following 9 essays: The Poet, Experience, Character, Manners, Gifts, Nature, Politics, Nominalist and Realist and New England Reformers.
Essential Transcendentalists Interest abounds in the work of the Transcendentalists, such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. Each year, tens of thousands of readers rediscover Transcendental thought in books and articles, and in visits to historic sites, such as Walden Pond. But few appreciate the truly mystical and contemplative qualities of the Transcendentalists, and the spiritual movements and figures they have since inspired. As Richard G. Geldard-one of today's leading scholars of Emerson-illustrates in The Essential Transcendentalists, Transcendentalism adds up to a school of practical spiritual philosophy that aims to guide the individual toward inner development, much like that of Stoicism in Western antiquity. This current of New England mysticism has influenced modern-day luminaries as diverse as essayist Annie Dillard and Ernest Holmes, founder of the worldwide Religious Science movement. Through revealing commentary, historical overview, and selections from classic works, The Essential Transcendentalists provides a distinctive and heretofore neglected examination of the spiritual breadth and depth of "Yankee mysticism."
Walden by Henry Thoreau One of the most famous non-fiction American books, Walden by Henry David Thoreau is the history of Thoreau's visit to Ralph Waldo Emerson's woodland retreat near Walden Pond. Thoreau, stirred by the philosophy of the transcendentalists, used the sojourn as an experiment in self reliance and minimalism… "so as to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Walden stresses the significance of self-reliance, solitude, meditation, and nature in rising above the the life of quiet desperation lived by most people. that, he argues, is the lot of most people. Part autobiography, part manifesto Walden is a moving treatise on the importance distancing oneself from the consumerism of modern Western society and embracing nature in its place.
The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings This new edition of this classic and influential book features recently recovered writings about Fuller by her contemporaries and additional selections from Fuller's writings, including previously unpublished excerpts from her journals.