A Literature Review of Recent Research on Transcendentalism in China and Abroad

Ralph Waldo Emerson set up a series of ideas which are called “Transcendentalism” by later generations. Transcendentalism is an important intellectual and cultural movement with a religious color in New England in the 1830s. Since the end of the nineteenth centuries, researches on transcendentalism both in America and in other countries have probed into different aspects of transcendentalism deeply. Based on the influence of transcendentalism, comments on transcendentalism, the reflection of transcendentalism in literary works and relationships between transcendentalism and other thoughts, this thesis reviews transcendentalism studies both in China and abroad

Eliot, Emerson, and transpacific modernism

First author draftAccepted manuscrip

Brilliance of a fire: innocence, experience and the theory of childhood

This essay offers an extensive rehabilitation and reappraisal of the concept of childhood innocence as a means of testing the boundaries of some prevailing constructions of childhood. It excavates in detail some of the lost histories of innocence in order to show that these are more diverse and more complex than established and pejorative assessments of them conventionally suggest. Recovering, in particular, the forgotten pedigree of the Romantic account of the innocence of childhood underlines its depth and furnishes an enriched understanding of its critical role in the coming of mass education - both as a catalyst of social change and as an alternative measure of the child-centeredness of the institutions of public education. Now largely and residually confined to the inheritance of nursery education, the concept of childhood innocence, and the wider Romantic project of which it is an element, can help question the assumptions underpinning modern, competence-centred philosophies of childhood

Listening to Emerson's "England" at Clinton Hall, 22 January 1850

Ralph Waldo Emerson's delivery of his essay “England” at Manhattan’s Clinton Hall on 22 January 1850 was one of the highest-profile of his performance career. He had recently returned from his triumphant British speaking tour with a radically revised view of transatlantic relations. In a New York still in shock from the Anglophobic urban riots of the previous winter, media observers were prepared to find a great deal of symbolism in both Emerson's new message and his idiosyncratic style of performance. This essay provides a detailed account of the context, delivery and conflicting newspaper readings of this Emerson appearance. Considering the lecture circuit as part of broader performance culture and debates over Anglo-American physicality and manners, it reveals how the press seized on both the “England” talk itself and aspects of Emerson's lecturing style as a means of shoring up civic order and Anglo-American kinship. I argue for a reexamination of the textual interchanges of nineteenth-century oratorical culture, and demonstrate how lecture reports reconnect us to forgotten means of listening through texts and discursive contests over the meaning of public speech

T.S. Eliot and others: the (more or less) definitive history and origin of the term “objective correlative”

This paper draws together as many as possible of the clues and pieces of the puzzle surrounding T. S. Eliot’s “infamous” literary term “objective correlative”. Many different scholars have claimed many different sources for the term, in Pound, Whitman, Baudelaire, Washington Allston, Santayana, Husserl, Nietzsche, Newman, Walter Pater, Coleridge, Russell, Bradley, Bergson, Bosanquet, Schopenhauer and Arnold. This paper aims to rewrite this list by surveying those individuals who, in different ways, either offer the truest claim to being the source of the term, or contributed the most to Eliot’s development of it: Allston, Husserl, Bradley and Bergson. What the paper will argue is that Eliot’s possible inspiration for the term is more indebted to the idealist tradition, and Bergson’s aesthetic development of it, than to the phenomenology of Husserl

On Puritanism and Transcendentalism in The Scarlet Letter

《红字》是美国本土作家纳撒尼尔•霍桑的杰出代表作。霍桑是19世纪美国最杰出的浪漫主义作家之一，也是美国文学的奠基人之一。《红字》代表了霍桑的最高文学成就。本文对比清教主义与超验主义对《红字》的影响，分析《红字》主题的多元性以及霍桑思想的价值。 本文共分为五部分。第一部分是导论，包括霍桑及其作品简介。第二部分讨论了《红字》中所蕴含的清教主义思想，以及霍桑矛盾的清教主义思想。本章先探索了清教主义的内涵及其对霍桑的影响。其次通过分析《红字》中三位主角的人物心理，结合原型批评的方法解释了《红字》中所蕴含的清教主义思想，如“原罪”意识、“上帝的绝对权威”意识。最后通过分析三位主角人物性格的...Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the most outstanding American romanticists in the nineteenth century as well as one of the founders of American literature. As for his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, it is generally regarded as the highest achievement in his literary career. The paper aims to illustrate the influences of Puritanism on Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter. This thesis mainly ...学位：文学硕士院系专业：外文学院_英语语言文学学号：X200811005

“Unitarianism, Universalism, and Unitarian Universalism”

Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religious tradition with denominational roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and theological roots stretching back to the Radical Reformation and the patristic period. Originally two traditions of liberal Christianity, its current non-creedal form includes Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, pagan, mystical, process, and humanist spiritualities

Nature Writing, American Exceptionalism, and Philosophical Thoughts in Edward Bliss Emerson\u27s Caribbean Journal

Through the use of qualitative content analysis (Patton, 2002), this essay examines the philosophical thoughts presented in the journal and family letters of Edward B. Emerson for 1831-1834, written in the Caribbean while he was seeking relief from consumption (tuberculosis). The analysis focused on the themes of nature writing, American Exceptionalism, and the journal as evidence of a liminal life-death event. Edward was actively engaged in the genres of travel and nature writing, where Transcendentalist ideas were not evident. In contrast, important elements of that movement emerged in his philosophical expressions. Edward evinced an acute and creative mind until the end of his life, and his philosophical thoughts can be placed under the rubric of the philosophy of life. Edward\u27s texts manifest a prejudiced contempt toward the people and culture of Puerto Rico and showed a sense of elitism that reflects American Exceptionalism, but his beliefs of human perfectibility seem to derive from a religious model of absolute moral conceptions. Edward\u27s liminal intimations of mortality elicited a textual silence on consumption and death. The figure of the tragic hero fits Edward\u27s life and demise