Читать книгу A Journey Into the Transcendentalists' New England - R. Todd Felton - Страница 11

When the nineteenth century dawned across the sixteen United States of America, the nation was only twenty-four years old. Although European settlers had been living in the “New World” for hundreds of years, the fledgling country had not yet made its mark on Western culture and art.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the situation was quite different. In the intervening hundred years, the United States had produced important figures in every field of the arts and social sciences whose international reputations remain strong today. Because so many of these artists and thinkers were influenced by ideas and theories connected with Transcendentalism, understanding the movement’s central tenets can shed new light on works in the fields of literature, philosophy, theology, and social activism created during this time.

It was also the unique combination of the “new times” with the particular ethos of New England that allowed the Transcendentalism of Emerson and other New England writers to play its central role in the “American Renaissance”—the flowering of arts and literature that took place in the 1800s. Exploring the interaction between place and idea can give us a deeper appreciation of the role of Transcendentalism as a defining cultural force in America.