American Literature

Transcendentalism🕮 Transcendentalism is an American literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson." What w e now know as transcendentalism first arose among the liberal New England Congregationalists, who departed from orthodox Calvinism in two respects: they believed in the importance and efficacy of human striving, as opposed to the bleaker Puritan picture of complete and inescapable human depravity; and they emphasized the unity rather than the “Trinity” of God (hence the term “Unitarian,” originally a term of abuse that they came to adopt.)  The transcendentalists operated from the start with the sense that the society around them was seriously deficient: a “mass” of “bugs or spawn” as Emerson put it in “The American Scholar”; slavedrivers of themselves, as Thoreau says in  Walden . Thus the attraction of alternative life-styles: Alcott’s ill-fated Fruitlands; Brook Farm, planned and organiz...