Transcendentalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
National Development ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
Literary Movement

New England transcendentalism is the first significant literary movement in American history, notable principally for the influential works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. The movement emerged in the 1830s as a religious challenge to New England Unitarianism. Building on the writings of the Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing, Emerson and others such as Frederic Henry Hedge, George Ripley, James Freeman Clarke, and Theodore Parker developed a theology based on interior, intuitive experience rather than the historical truth of the Bible. By 1836 transcendentalist books from several important religious thinkers began to appear, including Emerson’s Nature, which employed idealist philosophy and Romantic symbolism to examine human interaction with the natural world. Emerson’s Harvard addresses, “The American Scholar” (1837) and the controversial “Divinity School Address” (1838), gave transcendental ideas a wider prominence, and also generated strong resistance that added an element of experiment and danger to the movement’s reputation. In 1840 the transcendentalists founded a journal for their work, and Fuller became the Dial’s first editor, a position that gave her an important role in the movement and a crucial outlet for her own work in literary criticism and women’s rights. Though it had begun as a religious movement, by the middle 1840s transcendentalism could be better described as a literary movement with growing political engagements on several fronts. Emerson proclaimed it as an era of reform and aligned the transcendentalists with those who resisted the social and political status quo. In her feminist manifesto Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Fuller called for the removal of both legal and social barriers to women’s full potential. In 1845 Henry David Thoreau went to live in the woods by Walden Pond; his memoir of his experience, Walden (1854), became a founding text of modern environmental thinking. Antislavery also became a key concern for many of the transcendentalists, who condemned the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and actively resisted the execution of the law after its passage. The transcendentalists, a nineteenth-century cultural avant-garde, continue to exert cultural influence through the durability of their writings, works that shaped many aspects of American national development.

Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
First Century ◽  
British Romanticism

This book presents innovative readings of literary works of British Romanticism and its influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literary culture and thought. It traverses the traditional critical boundaries of prose and poetry in American and Romantic and post-Romantic writing. Analysing significant works by nineteenth-century writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, as well as the later writings of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Wallace Stevens, the book reasserts the significance of second-generation Romantic writers for American literary culture. Sandy reassesses our understanding of Romantic inheritance and influence on post-Romantic aesthetics, subjectivity and the natural world in the American imagination.

Activity in Czech and Russian Nineteenth-century Sonnets: A Contrastive Study

Glottotheory ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
Sergey Andreev ◽  
Michal Místecký
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Statistical Significance ◽  
Wilcoxon Test ◽  
Scatter Plot ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
The Individual

Abstract The article focuses on analysing activity in the selected sonnets of the Czech and Russian nineteenth-century literatures (100 poems per each). Busemann Coefficient (Q) is counted for the samples, and the individual authors are tested on statistical significance by means of the nonparametric Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon test. Another product of the research is a scatter plot, where the counts of the significant MWW test values for the poets and their average Q’s are compared; these figures are clustered according to the k-means method, and interpretations are formulated on the basis of the groupings. Both microanalyses penetrating into an author’s production, and literary-movement investigations are provided, so as to make the research of use for literary criticism, too. Finally, two ways of comparing the Czech and Russian data are sketched, with the outcomes being commented upon.

A Composite Portrait of a True American Philosophy on Magnanimity

2019 ◽  
pp. 235-265
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Corsa ◽  
Eric Schliesser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Natural World ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Standard Methods ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Characteristic Features

This chapter offers a composite portrait of the concept of magnanimity in nineteenth-century America, focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. A composite portrait, as a method in the history of philosophy, is designed to bring out characteristic features of a group’s philosophizing in order to illuminate features that may still resonate in today’s philosophy. Compared to more standard methods in the historiography of philosophy, the construction of a composite portrait de-privileges the views of individual authors. These American philosophers saw the virtue of magnanimity as a remedy for a number of modern ills. They suggest that the best sort of magnanimity is acquired by adopting the correct relation to the natural world, including new forms of inquiry, or by adopting a life of voluntary poverty. Magnanimous individuals are critics of capitalism and offer themselves as exemplars of a better, experimental life.

Literary Chronicles of the Qajars’ Epoch

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 170-173
Author(s):  
Gulnar Aqiq Jafarzade
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Original Source ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Literary Environment ◽  
Source Materials

Abstract Following a historical appraisal and the progress of literature and poetry during the Qajar era, this article focuses on the specific literary environment in nineteenth century. As literature has effect in all areas such as cultural, social and other affairs, it is important to remember that Qajars’ rulers Fathali Shah and Nasiraddin Shah had an influential role in the comprehensive evolution of the literary environment in this period. Literary chronicles covered the works written during Qajar dynasty can be considered the most important sources for researching literary processes. Circle of poets inside and outside of the court led the new founded literary movement “bazgasht” (“Return”), turning to the their predecessors for the inspiration in this period. The most important and wealthy genre of literature were tazkiras (biographical books of anthology), based on the original source materials in Arabian, Persian, and sometimes in Turkish, especially written about poets and poetry.

THE NATURE AND ENVIRONMENT OF COST MANAGEMENT AMONG EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY U.S. TEXITLE MANUFACTURERS

1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Tyson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Cost Management ◽  
Cost Accounting ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Cost Information ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Textile Mills

Several authors have suggested that a particular managerial component was needed before cost accounting could be fully used for accountability and disciplinary purposes. They argue that the marriage of managerialism and accounting first occurred in the United States at the Springfield Armory after 1840. They generally downplay the quality and usefulness of cost accounting at the New England textile mills before that time and call for a re-examination of original mill records from a disciplinary perspective. This paper reports the results of such a re-examination. It initially describes the social and economic environment of U.S. textile manufacturing in New England in the early nineteenth century. Selected cost memos and reports are described and analyzed to indicate the nature and scope of costing undertaken at the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the late 1820s and early 1830s. The paper discusses how particular cost information was used and speculates why certain more modern procedures were not adopted. Its major finding is that cost management practices fully measured up to the business complexities, economic pressures, and social forces of the day.

The “Twilight of the Poets” in the Age of Realism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Renker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
The Core ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Institutional Status ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Historical Origins

American literary histories of the post-Civil War period typically treat “poetry” and “realism” as oppositional phenomena. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated in a genteel “twilight of the poets.” This chapter excavates the historical origins of the twilight narrative in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It shows how this narrative emerged as a function of a particular idealist ideology of poetry that circulated widely in authoritative print-culture sites. The chapter demonstrates that the twilight narrative was only one strain in a complex cultural debate about poetry, a debate that entailed multiple voices and positions that would later fall out of literary history when the twilight narrative achieved institutional status as fact.

A Reading of Westcott's Gospel of Creation: An Early Venture into Ecological Theology?

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Duncan Reid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Ecological Theology ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Science And Theology ◽  
Doctrine Of Creation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractIn response to the contemporary ecological movement, ecological perspectives have become a significant theme in the theology of creation. This paper asks whether antecedents to this growing significance might predate the concerns of our times and be discernible within the diverse interests of nineteenth-century Anglican thinking. The means used here to examine this possibility is a close reading of B. F. Westcott's ‘Gospel of Creation’. This will be contextualized in two directions: first with reference to the understanding of the natural world in nineteenth-century English popular thought, and secondly with reference to the approach taken to the doctrine of creation by three late twentieth-century Anglican writers, two concerned with the relationship between science and theology in general, and a third concerned more specifically with ecology.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document