Transcendentalism超验主义.ppt

Transcendentalism The Transcendental Club If Irving, Bryant and others had started a lively Romantic Movement, Transcendentalism energized it. It was transcendentalism that inspired many American writers to greatness. Even writers who disagreed with certain respects of Transcendentalism, such as Hawthorne and Melville, were influenced by many of its concepts. Literary historians now refer to this phenomenon as American Renaissance. The Club and Its Membership In 1836, an informal group met in Concord, Massachusetts, to discuss theology, philosophy and literature. At first they called themselves the Symbosium of Hedge Club. But later called by the neighbors the Transcendentalists since they always engaged in lofty discourses. Its membership involves, clergymen such as Theodore Parker, George Ripley, James F. Clarke; Learned women such as Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Peabody, Margaret Fuller; and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Two Major Activities The Club sponsored two major activities: 16 issues of The Dial (a quarterly, with Margaret Fuller as the first editor, then Emerson) between 1840 and 1844; established in 1841 Brook Farm, a utopian community in which individuals were supposed to be better enabled towards self-realization and which ended in failure in 1847. Transcendentalism as a Philosophy As an intensified expression of Romanticism, Transcendentalism shares the romantic characteristics: the emphasis on intuition, the exaltation of the individual over society, the new and thrilling delight in nature, fascination with the Gothic and the “Oriental”, and the desire to build a national literature and culture. In addition, Transcendentalism, as a type of Romanticism peculiar to New England, assumed a specific moral and philosophical tone. The moral implications came from the environment where Puritan idealism persisted, but the philosophical tone was largely defined by Emerson. As a way of knowing