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ON TRANSCENDENTALISM: ITS HISTORY AND USES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

ALBERT J. VON FRANK
ALBERT J. VON FRANK*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Washington State University
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Extract

If any student, graduate or advanced undergraduate, should offer to delve deeper than survey samples and seriously “take on” the Transcendentalists, he or she would be well advised to begin with the histories by Barbara Packer and Philip Gura. For that matter, these sharply differing studies will undoubtedly provoke and clarify the thinking of even the most seasoned scholars, especially if they were to read these works against each other. The more specialized though no less interesting monograph by Elisabeth Hurth, which is not offered as an introductory overview, nevertheless comprises a fully imagined history in its own right, as it places Transcendentalism in the context of crucial nineteenth-century German innovations in Protestant thought, and of the American movement's thence-derived tendency—as its critics alleged—to “atheism.” These three books, as a group, raise interesting questions about how literary history is now being written, what purposes such studies can serve, what coherence “Transcendentalism” might yet retain as a subject of useful historical inquiry, and what kind of importance the movement might have for readers today.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , April 2009 , pp. 189 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Celestial Rail-road,” in idem, Mosses from an Old Manse, vol. 10 of the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 197.

2 Elkins, Stanley M., Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 3rd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 164Google Scholar.

3 “[W]e regard the slave system as decidedly preferable to the system at wages.” Brownson, Orestes, The Laboring Classes, an Article from the Boston Quarterly Review, 3rd edn (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1840), 10Google Scholar.

4 Rowe, John Carlos, At Emerson's Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. I have elsewhere entered a dissent from Rowe's thesis: see von Frank, Albert J., “Mrs. Brackett's Verdict: Magic and Means in Transcendental Antislavery Work,” in Capper, Charles and Wright, Conrad Edick, eds., Transient and Permanent: The Transcendental Movement and Its Contexts (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999), 385–407Google Scholar.

5 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “Egotheism, the Atheism of To-day,” in idem, Last Evening with Allston, and Other Papers (Boston: D. Lothrop, [1887]), 247. The charge of “egotheism” might with greater propriety be brought against William Ellery Channing (always seen as outside the movement) than against Emerson, since it was the former who in 1828 said, “The idea of God, sublime and awful as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual nature, purified and enlarged to infinity.” Channing, William Ellery, “Likeness to God,” in The Works of William Ellery Channing, 8th edn, 6 vols. (Boston: James Munroe, 1848), 3: 233Google Scholar. Emerson's position is as distinguishable from this as his notion of self-reliance is from Channing's “self-culture.”

6 Miller, Perry, ed. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 8Google Scholar.

7 Emerson, Nature, in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, vol. 1 of the Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 39.

8 William James, “A World of Pure Experience,” in idem, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Longmans, Green, 1912), 42–3.

9 Fletcher, John, Studies on Slavery, in Easy Lessons (Natchez, MS: Jackson Warner, 1852), 7–8Google Scholar.

10 Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, 87.

11 Ibid., 92.

12 Ibid., 78.

13 Brownson, Orestes, An Essay in Refutation of Atheism, ed. Brownson, Henry F. (Detroit: Thorndike Nourse, 1882), 1Google Scholar.