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Abstract: Readers outside our field of study may be surprised to learn that for the last forty years many of the most influential scholars of the American Transcendentalists have aimed to de-transcendentalize them. What Emerson and the rest meant by Transcendentalism has been, and likely always will be, debated, but what these scholars mean by detranscendentalizing the Transcendentalists is not so hard to explain. That’s the first of this introduction’s three aims, the others being to note how some scholars have lately challenged this venerable project, and finally to preview this special issue: six essays originating at an international conference on Transcendentalism in July 2018 that together comprise—we believe—the most ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Two commonly held assumptions reappear throughout scholarship on Transcendentalism and religion. First, Emerson and his circle discovered—on behalf of American culture, as it were—that religion existed before and beyond Judaism and Christianity. And furthermore, by importing, translating, discussing, and appropriating texts from outside these traditions, the Transcendentalists were instrumental in establishing both a comparative interest in global religions and a post-Christian type of spirituality in the US. The second, more particular, assumption credits Emerson and other Transcendentalists with discovering Asian religions as sources of ancient wisdom, initiating an American fascination with Hinduism, Buddhism ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Lawrence Buell’s 1984 report on “the de-Transcendentalization of the Emerson image” suggested that an attack was underway on the assumptions that had established “Emerson’s stature as a pivotal American cultural hero.”1 This proposition generated both shock and applause in the turbulent discourse of 1980’s criticism. Looking back at this period, it is important to note that this shift in Emerson studies developed just as another Transcendentalist was emerging “as a pivotal American cultural hero[ine]”—Margaret Fuller. Buell had brought attention to Fuller’s public conversations for women a decade earlier in his Literary Transcendentalism (1973), the same year that Joel Myerson had edited Fuller’s most significant ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: To be “called,” as a prophet or priest, requires a gift, “grace,” which entails special powers—a privileged sensibility—combined with special obligations, such as public service for a higher good. In this essay, I wish to examine the discourse of higher calling in two nineteenth-century spaces of literary practice, one defined by poets and what some have called sage writers (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Longfellow, Ruskin, Arnold, Carlyle, Whitman), the other by journalist novelists (Dickens, G. H. Lewes, W. M. Thackeray, George Eliot, W. D. Howells, Henry James, Mark Twain).1 The sage network cultivates a notion of “literature as world-disclosure” that frames writers as spiritual virtuosi who compete with ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In “Experience” (1844), Emerson writes, “Our life seems not present, so much as prospective.”1 Here and elsewhere he expresses an intuition of human and natural vitality as a process of becoming and a progression toward a glimpsable but not yet existent, more harmonious state. “Not for the affairs on which it is wasted,” he continues, “but as a hint of this vast-flowing vigor” (3:42). That is, our life hints toward the eventual manifestation of the “unbounded substance”—one of his many terms for the divine power—mentioned a few lines earlier. Emerson describes a hopeful path, a “tendency or direction,” toward the future realization of something higher that is intimated but not yet actual (3:42). “Life is hereby ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: “Criticism is the easiest of all arts, or the most difficult of all.”The Transcendentalists still seem to evaporate into “a heap of fog and duskiness” whenever their impact is weighed.1 Consider this special issue’s animus: the jury is still out on whether the Transcendentalists’ worth is, in fact, transcendental. Perhaps it’s because we too rarely reckon with their “burly image-breaker,” Theodore Parker.2 “Next only to Emerson—and in the world of action even above Emerson,” Perry Miller concluded, Parker “was to give shape and meaning to the Transcendental movement in America.”3 Within this world of action, Parker was not at all foggy but volcanic, a rumbling pulpit that made waves in nearly every major issue of ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-21T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The sciences are now and will remain from now on so intermingled with the entire culture that we need to turn to the humanities to understand how they really function.“Think we must.” So urges Donna Haraway in her recent book titled Staying with the Trouble (2016). But what is it that we must think, and what is “the trouble” we must stay with rather than run from, the trouble that must activate us to think anew' Haraway’s target is “those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics” that insist on human exceptionalism, centering the autonomous human actor while sending the natural environment to the background. Her “we”—that is, we who call ourselves humanists—must step up and own the resulting trouble ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-21T00:00:00-05:00
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