Transcendentalism Essay Series
Content tagged with Transcendentalism Essay Series
Transcendentalism and the Politics of Failure
Fuller, Journalism, and Redemptive Prison Reform in New York
Nietzsche at the Feet of Emerson: Education, Transfusion, and Transcendentalism's Living Legacy
Exploring Nietzsche’s reading of Emerson, Nicholas Low asks what it means to inherit Transcendentalism as a tradition that demands transformation rather than adherence, and how that legacy bears on Nietzsche's challenge to "become who you are."
A Holy Liberty to Act—To Be: Mary Moody Emerson and Margaret Fuller on Self-Actualization
A chance encounter with a historic Denver house leads Noelle A. Baker to uncover an unexpected convergence between Mary Moody Emerson and Margaret Fuller's Transcendentalism and the history of transgender community formation.
The Transcendentalist Eye
For Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, to see was to behold the sacred in the commonplace. In this essay, Richard Higgins treats sight within Transcendentalist tradition as a discipline for bringing wonder and spiritual awakening into focus.
Margaret Fuller’s Reproductive Method and the Making of Women’s Voices
Margaret Fuller redefined education as a "reproductive" act. Ulrike Wagner examines how Fuller's criticism and series of Conversations translated Romantic philology into a democratic pedagogy, positioning women’s voices as a medium through which knowledge...
A Missing Witness to Fuller: Mickiewicz, Emerson, and the Woman Reformer
By examining a lesser-known witness to Margaret Fuller’s life and legacy—the Polish writer and political activist Adam Mickiewicz—Gosia Sklodowska shows how his recognition of Fuller as a fully embodied, prophetic reformer exposes the limits of the...
Thomas Merton's Living Thoreauvian Legacy
Examining a fragile ink drawing tucked away in an archive, Alda Balthrop-Lewis considers Thomas Merton's reprisal of Henry David Thoreau’s image of sleepers and railroads from the book Walden to ask whether those who have been run over might yet learn to...
The Largesse of Thoreau and Whitman
Jane Bennett returns to the first and only meeting of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman for how it helps disclose a personhood large enough to be human and ahuman at once, illumining the self's animal, mineral, and even atmospheric vibrancy.