This is the first full-length biography of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, one of the three notable Peabody sisters of Salem, Massachusetts, and sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Marm. It traces the intricate private life and extraordinary career of one of nineteenth-century America's most important Transcendental writers and educational reformers. Peabody was a reformer devoted to education in the broadest, and yet most practical, senses. She saw the classroom as mediating between the needs of the individual and the claims of society. She taught in her own private schools and was an assistant in Bronson Alcott's Temple School. In her contacts with Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendental circle in the 1830s, and as publisher of the famous Dial and other imprints, she took a mediating position once more, claiming the need for historical knowledge to balance the movement's stress on individual intuition. She championed antislavery, European liberal revolutions, Spiritualism, and, in her last years, the Paiute Indians. She was, as Theodore Parker described her, the Boswell of her age.
In this absorbing book, Bruce Ronda examines the representations of Brown chronologically, ranging from Thoreau's "Plea for Captain John Brown" - with its ardent defense of Brown as a patriot, Transcendentalist, and true New Englander - through treatments by anonymous southern writers and well-known authors such as John Greenleaf Whittier, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Frederick Douglass, William Dean Howells, and E. A. Robinson. Ronda then considers the major treatments of Brown in the early to mid-twentieth century by W. E. B. DuBois, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Robert Penn Warren. Of particular interest are discussions of a 1930s poem by Muriel Rukeyser, Truman Nelson's 1960 novel The Surveyor, and artwork by Jacob Lawrence. He concludes with studies of novels by three contemporary authors: Russell Banks, Michelle Cliff, and Bruce Olds."--BOOK JACKET.
The Fate of Transcendentalism examines the mid-nineteenth-century flowering of American transcendentalism and shows the movement’s influence on several subsequent writers, thinkers, and artists who have drawn inspiration and energy from the creative outpouring it produced. In this wide-ranging study, Bruce A. Ronda offers an account of the movement as an early example of the secular turn in American culture and brings to bear insights from philosopher Charles Taylor and others who have studied the broad cultural phenomenon of secularization. Ronda’s account turns on the interplay and tension between two strands in the transcendentalist movement. Many of the social experiments associated with transcendentalism, such as the Brook Farm and Fruitlands reform communities, Temple School, and the West Street Bookshop, as well as the transcendentalists’ contributions to abolition and women’s rights, spring from a commitment to human flourishing without reference to a larger religious worldview. Other aspects of the movement, particularly Henry Thoreau’s late nature writing and the rich tradition it has inspired, seek to minimize the difference between the material and the ideal, the human and the not-human. The Fate of Transcendentalism allows readers to engage with this fascinating dialogue between transcendentalist thinkers who believe that the ultimate end of human life is the fulfillment of human possibility and others who challenge human-centeredness in favor a relocation of humanity in a vital cosmos. Ronda traces the persistence of transcendentalism in the work of several representative twentieth- and twenty-first-century figures, including Charles Ives, Joseph Cornell, Truman Nelson, Annie Dillard, and Mary Oliver, and shows how this dialogue continues to inform important imaginative work to this date.
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