Literature

13 Pages 3212 Words

h-century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. Instead, the transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend the limitations of the material world. The transcendentalists found their chief source of inspiration in nature. Emerson’s essay Nature (1836) was the first major document of the transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it. His other key transcendentalist works include The American Scholar (1837), a volume in which he addressed the intellectual’s duty to culture, and "Self-Reliance" (1841), an essay in which he asserted the importance of being true to one’s own nature.

Henry David Thoreau, a friend and protégé of Emerson’s, put transcendentalist ideas into action. Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) is his journal of a two-year experiment in living as simply and self-reliantly as possible in a small hut that he built on the shores of Walden Pond, near Concord. His essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849) is a statement against government coercion that records his short stay in jail after he refused to pay a tax in support of the Mexican War (1846-1848). In this essay Thoreau asserted that each individual indirectly supported the wrongs of a nation—for example, slavery or war—simply by paying taxes and voting for government representatives. To express disapproval of government policies, he advocated passive resistance, or nonviolent protest through noncompliance.

B2 Historical Fiction: Cooper, Hawthorne, and Others
The self-confidence and nationalism of the newly created United States of America energized fiction as well as nonfiction. Historical fiction was an expression of romanticism in its inquiring of human nature and emotions and its romanticizing of the American past and the American frontier. The first generations of Puritans in New Englan...