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• Amazon Sales Rank: #84350 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-02
• Released on: 2008-09-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

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• ISBN13: 9780809016440
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Gura (Jonathan Edwards) has written possibly the best single volume on the Transcendentalists. Though he analyzes the essays and lectures of Emerson, Fuller and the Alcotts, Gura (a professor of literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) also introduces lesser-known figures who were influenced by their thought. These fellow travelers help explain how the influence of Transcendentalism eventually spread beyond a handful of Boston intellectuals: businessman William B. Greene translated Transcendentalist values into economic thinking with the production of pamphlets like Mutual Banking and Equality, and Eliza Thayer Clapp, a Unitarian Sunday school teacher, integrated Transcendentalist ideas into girls' religious instruction. Gura situates Transcendentalism against the backdrop of American Protestantism, showing how the movement emerged in part from early–19th-century debates about how to read the Bible. He also explores Transcendentalists' involvement in all manner of reform movements, including women's rights and, in the 1850s, abolition. When the Civil War won that battle, they turned away from social engagement for several decades, and the individualism of Transcendentalism unwittingly underwrote the postbellum political economy of market capitalism. Gura's fresh, penetrating analysis will reshapes our understanding American of intellectual history and the 19th century. 8 pages of b&w illus. (Nov.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Michael Dirda

Like art, music and literature, works of scholarship matter most when they trouble our minds and spirits right now. Even those perennial perplexities -- about love and religion and the proper government of the self and our role as citizens -- can and should be made relevant to our current confusions and grounded in the present, particular moment. Then, the deepest scholarship, like the greatest art, not only enriches our lives, but also implicitly asks us to examine them, even to cross-examine them.

On the surface, a history of transcendentalism hardly seems especially electrifying or contemporary. Isn't this a subject for one of those standard and rather tired seminars regularly offered in American studies programs, sometimes with a subtitle like "Emerson, Fuller and Thoreau"? But there's nothing perfunctory or dryly academic about American Transcendentalism. Philip F. Gura writes a lean, impassioned prose, chockablock with anecdote and information. By mixing a dozen brief biographies with sustained narrative -- about contemporary religious belief, social commitment, just and unjust wars, the rights and plights of women and African Americans -- Gura underscores how much we remain the descendants of these still too little known thinkers and crusaders. Above all, his exciting, even eye-opening book shows us that from 1830 to 1850 a group of New England preachers and intellectuals confronted what has proved to be the great polarizing tension in American history, that between hyperindividualism and the claims of social justice and human brotherhood.

In essence, transcendentalism may be regarded as an American branch of European romanticism, for its major figures all rejected John Locke's empiricism in favor of German idealist philosophy: The inner life of the spirit mattered more than experience gained through the senses. In particular, the decrees of Calvinists and the dogma of Catholics had nothing to do with true religion, only with the wranglings of theology. In spiritual matters, one needed only to hearken to the innate promptings of the soul, follow one's own intuition. The new "Higher Criticism" of the Bible, much of it originating in Germany but resembling the rationalizing impulse of New England Unitarianism, argued that the scriptures were nothing more than a historical document, written by men, not spoken by God. Biblical texts, therefore, asked for interpretation rather than unthinking idolatry. The immensely learned Theodore Parker even maintained that one needn't believe in miracles, the New Testament or the divinity of Jesus to be a Christian. True, vital, emotionally satisfying Christianity came from within, not from "outward laws or injunctions." Nature, too, might reveal the glory of God: As Thoreau once wrote, "I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows."

Before long, this inward focus, this transcending of the merely sensual, eventually came into conflict with the chief societal aspect of religious practice, the obligation to help others, especially the less fortunate. Emerson, writes Gura, somewhat coolly insisted that one should aim to "purify one's own soul and live with full integrity, becoming a model, rather than a nagging goad, to others." Yet, argued several transcendentalists, if each of us possesses the same innate spiritual impulses, are we not all brothers and sisters? Such a democratic view of our inner selves -- Gura likens it to the political vision upon which this country was founded -- soon led a second branch of the movement into social activism, particularly on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised.

In Orestes Brownson's hellfire essay "The Laboring Classes" -- Gura calls it "as powerful a piece of economic and social analysis as had appeared in the United States" -- we hear the voice of moral outrage, half Isaiah, half Karl Marx. The working poor were often worse off than slaves, asserted Brownson, because slaves were valuable property, and so housed, clothed and cared for, while laid-off workers were usually left utterly destitute, with absolutely nothing. Brownson directly assails not only rich capitalists but also our elected officials, "shedding crocodile tears over the deplorable condition of the poor laborer," but only truly interested in protecting property or in putting money in their own pockets. In truth, says Brownson, wage labor "is a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slaveholders." He was hardly alone in his anger and heartache over American callousness. After taking a job at the New-York Tribune, Margaret Fuller crusaded with comparable passion in her reports on the conditions of the impoverished, the imprisoned and those committed to insane asylums.

Given such critiques of the status quo, many transcendentalists were early on attracted to various schemes of social improvement. Bronson Alcott established the Temple School, aimed not at inculcating facts by rote, but at encouraging inner growth and self-fulfillment. His former assistant, Elizabeth Peabody, then opened a bookshop -- devoted principally to foreign scholarship and literature -- that immediately became a center for Boston intellectual life. Here one could find the exhilarating prescriptions of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Emanuel Swedenborg and Charles Fourier -- concisely summarized by Gura -- on how humankind could better its spiritual, civic and even sexual life. It was at Peabody's "Foreign Library" that Fuller offered her "Conversations," a series of afternoon courses mainly intended for women. In due course, Fuller would build upon those ideas to produce a landmark volume of American feminism, her classic Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Meanwhile, magazines like the Boston Quarterly Review, the Christian Examiner and the Dial provided forums for speculative thought and visionary argument. Most famously, George Ripley founded Brook Farm, arguably the country's first secular utopia, intended to provide a model for a freer, more fulfilling way of life than any that American competitiveness could offer.

Brook Farm eventually failed, but the ideals upon which it was based have continued to haunt American history. Gura makes clear that the 1830s and 1840s were as exciting as the 1960s, at once a time of intellectual ferment, social commitment and rousing calls to action. When the Mexican War threatened, for instance, Thoreau stood up for civil disobedience; in a sermon against slavery, Parker stressed that the laws of morality and God took precedence over any "statute of an accidental president unintentionally chosen for four years." Today's reader cannot help but pause over this last phrase.

By the 1850s the full horror of slavery took center stage for the transcendentalists, several of whom became eminent abolitionists. Parker, for instance, eventually joined the Secret Six who helped finance John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Following the Civil War, transcendentalist thought and purpose didn't disappear -- Gura devotes a chapter to four latter-day exponents of the movement -- but the Gilded Age favored a grotesque Emersonian individualism rather than any shared social ideal. It was now the era of the robber baron and the plutocratic businessman, those early-modern exemplars of American cupidity, swagger and conspicuous display.

Philip F. Gura's American Transcendentalism -- the distillation of a lifetime's thought and research -- reminds us that this country once honored high ideals of how one might live, both for oneself and for others. Our better natures still call to us -- if only we would listen. As Emerson once said, "Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat, up again old heart!" For there is "victory yet for all justice."

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Philip F. Gura’s bona fides are impeccable. He is professor of American literature and culture at the University of North Carolina and has written books on transcendentalism, early American history, and the American theologian Jonathan Edwards. Far from being one of those ubiquitous, cleverly packaged academic tomes in sheep’s clothing, Gura’s book breathes life into an important period in American history. Even though Gura limits his study to around 300 pages (plus notes), a strategy that results in a "lean, impassioned prose chockablock with anecdote and information" (Washington Post), a couple of critics still wonder if the lay reader’s interest will hold. What is the best reason for us to read this synthesis? "The deepest scholarship, like the greatest art, not only enriches our lives," The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda reminds us, "but also implicitly asks us to examine them, even to cross-examine them."
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

The philosophies that inspired Emerson, Thoreau, & all the rest
It's the question that you dread to be asked, if you're a follower of Emerson or Thoreau: "What the heck IS transcendentalism, anyway? Where did it come from?" You stutter and you stammer and you explain what the concept means to you, which is probably not what someone else would say. And you hope that if the inquirer was merely being polite, you won't have to launch into any further details about the influence of German, French, and English writers and philosophers on New England Unitarians in the 1830s. If you're lucky, you'll be able to steer the conversation toward a safer topic. Like the contemporary political scene. Or the war in Iraq.

Phil Gura has made our lives much easier by publishing this history of the American transcendentalist movement. Now all the loose ends are tied up in this one, valuable volume. He traces those European ideas back to their sources, then shows how they surfaced in America. Those were the days when folks read pieces of literature and philosophy in their original languages, and aspiring scholars took the time to translate those works into English. Those were the days when religious debate was a common occurrence, and men of the cloth published opinionated pamphlets that others vocally supported or viciously denigrated in the popular press or in their own esoteric periodicals. American religions were still in a period of evolution and transition, and the Transcendentalists emerged as a result. You'll have to read this book to find out how that happened.

And while you're poring over it, you should also have one of the published compendiums by your side: either Lawrence Buell's "The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings" or Joel Myerson's "Transcendentalism: A Reader." That way, you'll be able to read the actual selections referred to throughout the text. It will all make sense, and you will come away with a more complete understanding of the individuals many people feared could do undue damage to American religious thought in the mid-1800s.

Perhaps one of the most useful parts of the book comes early, when Gura identifies the Transcendentalists by name on pages 7 and 8. It's nice to have a succinct list, and it sets the stage for those players to resurface throughout the text. Transcendentalism was bigger than Emerson and Thoreau, and it included both men and women. According to Gura, transcendentalism was embodied by: Amos Bronson Alcott, Cyrus Bartol, Charles Timothy Brooks, Orestes Brownson, William Ellery Channing, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Cranch, Caroline Healey Dall, John Sullivan Dwight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Convers Francis, Margaret Fuller, William Henry Furness, William Batchelder Greene, Frederic Henry Hedge, Sylvester Judd, Charles King Newcomb, Samuel Osgood, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, George Ripley, Sophia Ripley, Samuel Robbins, Caleb Stetson, Thomas T. Stone, Caroline Sturgis, Ellen Sturgis, Henry David Thoreau, Jones Very, Anna Ward, and Charles Stearns Wheeler. Transcendentalism's "second generation" was represented by Moncure Conway, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Longfellow, Franklin Sanborn, David Wasson, and John Weiss. Once you know the WHO, you can attend to the WHERE and WHY.

This book will no doubt become one of the standards on the subject and a welcome update to Frothingham's 1876 "Transcendentalism in New England: A History." Scholars of American literature, philosophy, or religion should put this title on their to-read lists.

American Transcendentalism
In "American Transcendentalism: A History" Philip Gura, has written a learned and detailed account that is both inspiring and critical of an important movement in American thought. Gura is the William Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Many readers have only a vague notion of what the Transcendentalist movement was about together with a notion that Emerson and Thoreau were at its center. Gura shows that the movement was, indeed, quite loose, with many people finding many different meanings and goals in Transcendentalism. He also shows that Emerson was, at least initially, not at the center of the movement and that he differed from many of his fellow Transcendentalists in key ways. The movement flourished from the 1830s to the 1850s, was basically subsumed by the Civil War, and then reappeared in several modified forms in post-War American. Ultimately, it was largely replaced (or modified) as the paradigmatic American philosophy by William James and his fellow pragmatists.

Transcendentalism was a form of philosophical idealism which stressed the immediacy of individual consciousness as a means of understanding what was valuable in experience. In addition to its subjectivism, transcendentalism had a strong universalist component as it found that every person would share essentially the same intuitions of value and meaning if they looked inside themselves. Transcendentalists opposed the empiricism of John Locke, which they found despiritualized people and reality, and they opposed as well conservative Calvinist theology. Broadly speaking, the movement sought a spirituality not tied to the teachings of a specific organized religion or to a claimed revelation. Teachings that lead towards this goal are still highly attractive to many Americans, and the Transcendentalists thus amply deserve a hearing to see what may be learned from them.

Gura's book is full of intellectual and spiritual excitement as young unitarian scholars and ministers learned of and translated works of German and other European scholars on the Higher Criticism of the Bible and on philosophical idealism subsequent to Kant. It is inspiring to read of such intellectual ferment and growth. Early Transcendentalists, such as George Ripley, sponsored large-scale projects to translate the work of German thinkers, critics, and poets into English for American readers. Schliermacher and Swedenborg, although perhaps not the leading influences on the Transcendentalists, were among those who most fascinated me in Gura's account.

Much of Gura's history shows how the Transcendentalists ultimately diverged over issues of social activism. Many Transcendentalist thinkers were devoted, given their commitment to the equality of people, to social change and to reform. This led to Ripley's experiment at Brook Farm and to the work of preachers such as Theodore Parker to work for better social conditions for the poor and to oppose the Mexican War and slavery.
Emerson and his followers tended to be skeptical of social activism and to turn inward. It was more than a difficult task, for Emerson, for every person to work on cultivating him or herself before trying to impact the behavior of others. This tension in approach between self and other-directedness is, of course, still much alive.

Besides the history of the movement, I found most intruiging the lengthy summaries Gura offers of the primary works resulting from the movement. He discusses works such as Emerson's essays and Thoreau's Walden (which Gura says "embodies a love affair with America as the writer struggles to square his devotion to conscience with the republican ideals on which the nation was founded." p. 269) and the writings of the early feminist Margaret Fuller. But Gura also introduces the reader to the work of Theodore Parker, Orestes Brownson, and Bronson Alcott. A host of lesser-known but fascinating writers are also included, such as the novelist Sylvester Judd the minister William Greene, who became fascinated with Jewish mysticism and wrote a work called "The Blazing Star, with an Appendix Treating of the Jewish Kabbala" (1872) the teacher Eliza Thayer Clapp, Samuel Johnson (1822-1882), an early student of comparative religion, and Octavius Frothingham, a religious thinker in his own right and the first historian of Transcendentalism. I wanted to hear more of, and to read, these and other Transcendentalists that find a place in Gura's history.

Many historians of American philosophy, such as Bruce Kuklick in his "History of Philosophy in America" make a great deal of the split between a philosophy of individualism -- contemplation of the relationship between science and religion and of the good life for the individual -- and a call for social action, as exemplified, for some, in the philosophy of John Dewey, in understanding the United States and its intellectual history. This tension first played itself out in the Transcendentalist movement and it continued, as Gura points out, through the pragmatists. Emerson's thought was appropriated, probably unfairly, as supporting the materialism and lust for success of post-Civil War America.

In their quest both for spiritual awareness and for social justice, the Transcendentalists still have much to teach. Gura's thoughtful book will provide a gateway into Transcendentalism for many readers.

Robin Friedman

American Trancendentalism by Gura
This is an excellent work on the Transcendentalist
movement in America. Famous names; such as,
Emerson and Thoreau are contained in the work.
The tireless efforts of Brownson are extolled with
regard to improvements in the plight of laborers.
Margaret Fuller's efforts on behalf of women are set
forth in detail. The reformer, Alcott brought about
new education methods/methodologies.

The presentation is in the
tradition of deep religious and philosophical
thinking in Europe and America. The 1850s brought about
a considerable opposition to slavery and this aspect
is highlighted in the book. The transcendentalist,
Ellis spoke about the origination of ideas via
Divine Revelation. The scientist, Dr. Benjamin Fain
developed this connection in his work-
Creation Ex Nihilo.

The Transcendentalists worked from Biblical associations
to create unique utopian reforms. Emerson believed in the
notion of a primitive universal language to facilitate
commuication.

Charles Fourier envisioned a grand Ediface of Association
consisting of a medieval-like elongated building with
multiple stalls lining the front. This style of architecture
epitomized a unique housing arrangement integrally related
to the form of social organization within.

There is a unique discussion on spontaneous reason in
the "essential nature of things" . This comports with
life itself. Much thought is inspirational and spontaneous
in nature and implementation. The work is a marvel for
students of the American Religious Experience , as well
as American History buffs and philosophical thinkers.
In addition, the work has a number of very realistic
portraits of famous transcendentalists and important
edifices of the period. It is well worth the
price of admission.