Book Review

Canada and the United States

Editors Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright have brought together twenty essays from a May 1997 conference on Transcendentalism sponsored by the Massachusetts Historical Society. All but one published here for the first time, these essays examine the Transcendentalist movement and its adherents, products, and consequences under several headings: religion, cosmopolitanism, society, reform, and cultural legacy. The collection as a whole is bracketed by historiographical essays by Capper and Lawrence Buell.	1
In one sense, as Wright notes in his preface, this volume demonstrates the high "quality and diversity of current writing on the movement" (p. ix). Here are well-written essays based on careful and often highly original scholarship, ranging from portraits of lesser-known Transcendentalists like William B. Greene and Christopher Cranch to a significant reexamination of the involvement of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller in the women's rights movement and a consideration of the communitarian movement in light of recent theories about the nature of American dissent.	2
In another sense, however, this collection reveals a certain anxiety about the future, a concern about the place of Transcendentalism in the disciplinary maps drawn by interpreters of American history and writing. Capper sets this cautionary tone in his opening essay, "'A Little Beyond': The Problem of the Transcendentalist Movement in American History," by noting that "Transcendentalism, once a mainstay of American thought, has virtually vanished from the historical radar screen" (p. 3). Capper traces the historiography of the Transcendentalist movement from the memoirs of its participants through the work of (among others) O. B. Frothingham, Lewis Mumford, Vernon Parrington, and Perry Miller to Anne C. Rose's Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830–1850 (1981). In calling for a new synthetic study of Transcendentalism, Capper hopes for a fresh examination of Alexis de Tocqueville's triad of religion, individualist democracy, and national identity as central to understanding the place of the movement in American history. So far, he suggests, no such synthesis has emerged.	3
A similarly mixed portrait of the treatment of Transcendentalism from the literary side, Buell's "Transcendentalist Literary Legacies" reminds readers that "Transcendentalism is no longer so central a preoccupation within American literary studies as it once was" and that it has "ceased to be an unproblematically crucial point of explicit reference in U.S. literary scholarship" (p. 605). The expansion of the literary canon to include the works of women writers, slave narrators, sensationalist authors, western settlers, and others makes the Transcendentalists not quite so central to literary history, while new attention given to authorship, reading, and publishing shifts the focus away from the tiny coterie of New England writers toward larger trends in literary production and consumption. New scholarship on social movements like women's rights, antislavery, and communitarianism has made the religiocentric Transcendentalists less crucial, or has reoriented our interest in them as only one part of an evolving middle-class culture.	. . .