[OUR COURSE] [FJU ENGLISH] [COURSE NOTES] [DISCUSSION]

Margaret Fuller*

     What is Transcendentalism? The term," transcendentalism, " could be understood in one sense -- by what the contemporaries of this period were rebelling against, what they saw as the current situation and what they tried to be different from.

Theodore Parker*

     Transcendentalists could be seen as a generation of well educated people who lived in the decades before the American Civil War and the national division that it both reflected and helped to create. These people are mostly New Englanders, who were around Boston, that attempted to create a uniquely American body of literature. since it had already been decades since Americans had been independent. Now, these people believed it was time for literary independence, as they start to create literature, essays, novels, philosophy, poetry, and other writing different from anything from England, France, Germany, or any other European countries.

Harriet Martineau*

    Another way to look at Transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of people struggling to define spirituality and religion (our words, not necessarily theirs) in a way that took into account the new understandings their age made available.

James Martineau*

     The Enlightenment had come to new rational conclusions about the natural world, mostly based on experimentation and logical thinking. However, this pendulum was swinging, as a more Romantic way of thinking, a less rational, more intuitive, more in touch with the senses, came into vogue. This new generation looked at the previous generation's rebellions of the early 19th century Unitarians and Universalists against traditional Trinitarianism and Calvinist predestinationarianism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson*

    So,  Transcendentalism was born. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."  Most of the Transcendentalists became involved as well in social reform movements, especially anti-slavery and women's rights.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson*

     The Transcendentalists, despite some remaining Euro-chauvinism  thinking, believing that people with British and German backgrounds were more suited for freedom. Thus, those institutions of society which fostered vast differences in the ability to be educated, to be self-directed, were institutions to be reformed. In addition, women and African-descended slaves were human beings who deserved more ability to become educated, in order to fulfill their human potential (in a twentieth-century phrase), to be fully human.

Reference: Transcendentalism. http://www.transcendentalists.com/