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American Transcendentalism Summary and Reviews

American Transcendentalism

A History

by Philip F Gura

American Transcendentalism by Philip F Gura X
American Transcendentalism by Philip F Gura
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About this book

Book Summary

American Transcendentalism is a comprehensive narrative history of America’s first group of public intellectuals, the men and women who defined American literature and indelibly marked American reform in the decades before and following the America Civil War. Philip F. Gura masterfully traces their intellectual genealogy to transatlantic religious and philosophical ideas, illustrating how these informed the fierce local theological debates that, so often first in Massachusetts and eventually throughout America, gave rise to practical, personal, and quixotic attempts to improve, even perfect the world.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Gura has written possibly the best single volume on the Transcendentalists .... Gura's fresh, penetrating analysis will reshapes our understanding American of intellectual history and the 19th century." - Publishers Weekly.

"Philip Gura has given us the most comprehensive and concise overview of Transcendentalism to appear in fifty years. By carefully re-historicizing the movement, in all its diversity, he provides the term ‘Transcendentalistism’ with much needed definition. An important book on a subject indispensable for study of the American mind." - John McWilliams, Professor, Middlebury College.

This information about American Transcendentalism was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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