The American Renaissance and Transcendentalism

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The American RenaissanceandTranscendentalism
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Search for American Literary Identity

• By the mid-19th century, people were wondering
  if America could produce great writing

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Hawthorne Melville

• Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville became
  friends
• Saw a dark side to human existence sought to
  record this aspect of human nature in their works
• Melville wrote a patriotic essay urging Americans
  to create their own literary identity

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Declaration of Literary Independence

• American Renaissance
• Means rebirth
• Describes the explosion of American literary
  genius

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Pioneers of American Literature

• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Herman Melville
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Inspired reform movements to
• Improve public education
• End slavery
• Elevate status of women
• Improve social conditions
• Inspired utopean projects - plans for creating a
  perfect society

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Transcendentalism

• Transcend to exist above and apart from the
  material world
• By meditation, by communing with nature, and
  through work and art, man could transcend his
  senses and attain an understanding of beauty,
  goodness, and truth

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Roots of Transcendentalism

• Puritans
• Jonathan Edwards God reveals himself through the
  physical world
• Romantics
• William Cullen Bryant death is simply part of
  the life cycle

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A Transcendentalists View of the World

• Everything in the world, including human beings,
  is a reflection of the Divine Soul. Each
  individual soul is made up of the same stuff as
  the universal soul (kind of like the idea of The
  Force in Star Wars)

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A Transcendentalists View of the World

• The physical facts of the natural world are a
  doorway to the spiritual or ideal world (the
  spiritual world is simply a reflection of the
  natural world and vice-versa)
• People can use their intuition to behold Gods
  spirit revealed in nature or their own souls

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A Transendentalists View of the World

• Self-reliance and individualism must outweigh
  external authority and blind conformity to custom
  and tradition (like Romanticism, the individual
  is the most important)
• Spontaneous feelings and intuition are superior
  to deliberate intellectualism and rationality
  (like Romanticism)

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Emerson Transcendentalism

• Emersons utopian group known as The
  Transcendental Club
• Most influential transcendentalist
• Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual
  fact

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Emerson Transcendentalism

• Intuition over logic
• Intuition our capacity to know things
  immediately through emotions rather than
  reasoning
• Contrasts with rational thinking of someone like
  Benjamin Franklin
• Opposed deism (the idea that the universe was
  rationally designed by divinity who endowed
  humanity with reason)

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Emerson Transcendentalism

• Optimism Idealism
• God can be found directly in nature and the
  individual - discover this, and you will find
  meaning in life
• Natural events can be explained on a spiritual
  level (think Thanatopsis)

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Thoreau Transcendentalism

• Stayed secluded in a cabin at Walden Pond in
  Massachusetts to rediscover the grandeur and
  heroism of a simple life led close to nature
• Wrote in a style that imitated nature
• Walden is one of the most well-known works
  produced in America

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Thoreau Transcendentalism

• Protested Mexican War
• Refused to pay poll tax
• Radical abolitionist
• Resistance to Civil Government
• Essay on passive resistance
• Inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Thoreau Transcendentalism

• I should have told them at once that I was a
  Transcendentalist - that would have been the
  shortest way of telling them that they would not
  understand my explanations."

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Sources

• Lit Book p 206-214, 230-231
• http//www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/icon/transcend.html
• http//www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/
• http//www.google.com