The World Soul in American Transcendentalism

American Transcendentalism, a religious, literary, and social reform movement whose acknowledged leader was Ralph Waldo Emerson, characteristically deployed world soul thinking to harmonize Protestant individualism with Deist rationalism and modern science. Emerson’s “Over-Soul,” whose sources include Platonism, German Idealism, and the transcendental anatomy of Georges Cuvier, enabled the Transcendentalists to distance themselves from orthodox theism by turning God’s magisterial law from outer command into inner creative principle, based on the fundamental concept that all human beings (and, for some, all life) share an inner divine principle that radiates meaning into the world. This chapter draws on William James, who analyzed world soul thinking in terms of the varieties of transcendentalism: this lens suggests that for many Transcendentalists, Emerson’s idealist, absolute monism yielded to a range of pluralist and materialist variants, as seen in Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and the radical pluralism of William James himself.

The City Sketch

Although the picturesque sketch genre is primarily associated with rural subjects, it was also applied to city life during the mid-nineteenth century, when urban populations were undergoing unprecedented growth. Chapter 2 argues that the newly popular picturesque city sketch helped the emergent middle class to establish its identity as it attained a distinctive position between the wealthy and the working classes. Walking the streets, the middle-class picturesque city sketcher turned the class-divided city into picturesque tableaux that were far less antagonistic to city life than the sensationalist characterizations that were central to the dominant mode of city writing in midcentury. The chapter examines city sketches and fiction derived from the genre, written by Edgar Allan Poe, Lydia Maria Child, George “Gaslight” Foster, Margaret Fuller, Cornelius Mathews, and others. Although city sketchers helped articulate a middle-class identity, the picturesque at times tended to give way to a sublime mode in which the city crowd threatened to absorb the middle class into its undifferentiated mass.

The Travel Sketch

Focusing on the early work of three well-known American Romantic authors who are not best known as travel writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau, the first chapter examines the midcentury rise in popularity of the picturesque travel sketch genre. Writers engaged in this genre used the picturesque to consider the effects of history on the landscape and meditate on America’s past and future. Although modern scholarship has typically dismissed the picturesque travel sketch as superficial, this chapter demonstrates that writers used the spatiotemporal protocols of the picturesque to think through American exceptionalism, particularly the view that the frontier landscape helps to make the nation unique. This topic is filtered through the travelers’ views of picturesque scenery that touch upon the relationship of human to natural time (“deep time”), the resonances of the national past on the present (particularly in the residual presence of Native Americans and the colonial past), and the future effects of spatial expansion and new people (particularly immigrants) on the American landscape.

Margaret Fuller and the New York Christian Inquirer

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Among the Ruins

From the ancient past of Chapter 3, this chapter moves to the account of contemporary American travelers through the ruins and remnants of the ancient Roman world. Starting with Jhumpa Lahiri’s period living in Rome, and touching also on Thomas Jefferson’s account of antique ruins over two hundred years before, the chapter uses the potent image of the “ruin”—both as noun and as verb—to read American travelers in Europe as observers of empire’s recursive temporalities. Closer examinations of travel writing by William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Eleanor Clark, and Margaret Fuller reveal the ways in which the contemporary moment for each of these writers ends up filtered through the liberal observing subject via their confrontation with the materiality of an ancient empire, collectively registering the analogical history that the ruins of empire inculcate within the landscape.