World of Walden Pond: Transcendentalism as a Social and Intellectual Movement

This course examines the 19th century phenomenon of Transcendentalism: this country’s most romanticized religious, philosophical, and literary movement. Focusing especially on Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller, we’ll examine the ideas of the Transcendentalists in the age of reform and evaluate the application of their principles to abolition, feminism, and nature. The central problem which they wrestled with will be the focus, too, of our investigations: the tension between individualism and conformity.