Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
- 2 RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND THE AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISTS
- 3 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN AND THE TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT
- 4 DREY, MÖHLER AND THE CATHOLIC SCHOOL OF TÜBINGEN
- 5 ROMAN CATHOLIC MODERNISM
- 6 RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
- 7 BRITISH AGNOSTICISM
- 8 THE BRITISH IDEALISTS
- 9 WILLIAM JAMES AND JOSIAH ROYCE
- INDEX
2 - RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND THE AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISTS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
- 2 RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND THE AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISTS
- 3 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN AND THE TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT
- 4 DREY, MÖHLER AND THE CATHOLIC SCHOOL OF TÜBINGEN
- 5 ROMAN CATHOLIC MODERNISM
- 6 RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
- 7 BRITISH AGNOSTICISM
- 8 THE BRITISH IDEALISTS
- 9 WILLIAM JAMES AND JOSIAH ROYCE
- INDEX
Summary
Transcendentalism is the single most provocative spiritual movement in American history. In proportion to its size and duration it has stimulated a body of literature that is probably unequalled in detail, interest, and profundity. At its centre stands the serene, enigmatic and challenging figure of Emerson – the poet, prophet and seer who more than any other personified its central impulses, propounded its most troubling paradoxes, and stimulated the diverse reformers who constituted the movement.
From almost the outset Emerson has been the object of very contradictory interpretations. He has repeatedly been seen as at once an other-worldly mystic and a practical Yankee; as an uncritical celebrant of American culture and as one of its most penetrating critics. As early as 1907 George Woodberry spoke of ‘the double image on the mind that has dwelt long upon his memory. He is a shining figure on some Mount of Transfiguration; and he is a parochial man.’ He has been seen as a child of the eight Puritan ministers in his ancestry, and as a blasphemous champion of Romantic extravagance. Emerson himself is at least partly to blame for the difficulty of interpreting his published work. There are very few writers who have indulged less in self-disclosure, whether in public or to friends. Not only did he refuse to explain himself, he constantly and deliberately deepened the mystery by planting misleading clues for the gullible to find. Crucial to our understanding of his thought, therefore, are the immensely voluminous notebooks which he maintained assiduously from his college days on.
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- Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the West , pp. 29 - 68Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985