The First Comprehensive History of Transcendentalism
American Transcendentalism is a comprehensive 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 America Civil War. Philip F. Gura masterfully traces their intellectual genealogy to transatlantic religious and philosophical ideas, illustrating how these informed the fierce local 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, the uniquely American problem of slavery dissolved differences as transcendentalists turned ever more exclusively to abolition. Along with their early inheritance from European Romanticism, America's transcendentalists abandoned their interest in general humanitarian reform. 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 Gura has given us the most comprehensive and concise overview of Transcendentalism to appear in fifty years. By carefully re-historicizing the movement, in all its diversity, he provides the term 'Transcendentalistism' with much needed definition. An important book on a subject indispensable for study of the American mind."
John McWilliams, Professor, Middlebury College
"In American Transcendentalism Philip F. Gura makes accessible the fascinating story of two generations of Transcendentalists, men and women whose multifaceted movement profoundly shaped 19th-century American literary and reform culture. In this remarkably insightful, engaging narrative Gura explains relationships among ideas and people--not only the most prominent and celebrated like Ralph Waldo Emerson, but also the lively and creative lesser-known writers, thinkers, and clergymen who were his friends, followers, and adversaries."
Richard D. Brown, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History
"Philip Gura's short history of American transcendentalism--its origins, heyday, and decline--deftly defines this nineteenth century movement. The notables (Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Parker, Fuller et. al.) are predictably featured, but they are embedded in the crowd of clergymen, social reformers, and poets who formed a large part of a complex consensus. The strains of American transcendentalism are charted and elucidated in this learned and lively book."
