"This volume includes fifty original essays from a group of renowned scholars as well as a compact chronology and specialized bibliographies. It offers a rich, authoritative, interdisciplinary account, providing scholars with the definitive resource on this seminal movement in American culture."--From the dust jacket.

The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism offers an ecclectic, comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to the immense cultural impact of the movement that encompassed literature, art, architecture, science, and politics.

The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most expansive collection of critical essays on Emerson to date, a survey that approaches Emerson from the vantages of climate change, racial justice, print culture, the digital humanities, the new religious studies, hemispheric American Studies, health humanities, and affect theory among other critical perspectives. Curated between a forward by editor Christopher Hanlon--who makes the case for a capacious and contemporary Emerson--and Cornel West--the activist-scholar whose influential work on Emerson merges with a career of advocacy for economic and racial justice?this collection assesses the history and state of Emerson scholarship while charting pathways for new work on this most essential American writer. Comprised of new works by leading figures in nineteenth-century Americanist literary studies, the volume suggests directions into underexamined facets of Emerson's writing, life, and reputation. From Emerson's engagements with energy infrastructure and the processes of extraction that undergirded the locomotives he rode and the energy economies he sometimes extolled; to the vicissitudes of age he experienced alongside the romantic tropes of youthful vigour he both re-circulated and re-tooled; to Emerson's poetry, both in its philosophical formulations and in its reflections of the material circumstances of nineteenth-century print culture; to Emerson's resonance beyond the United States, elsewhere in the western hemisphere; to the Black press and its refractions of Emersonian transcendentalism in the midst of ante- and post-bellum justice struggles; to the legacies of Emerson to be found in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Rachel Carson, and in the versions of ?Emerson? to be found in children's literature; to his often-fraught and often-fruitful engagements with reform movements of various sorts; to the prospects for digital processes of re-reading Emerson and his contemporaries' styles of textual production and engagement, The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson is a necessary resource for students, scholars, and general readers committed to the study of Emerson, transcendentalism, and current critical approaches to United States literature.

Kant's influence on the history of philosophy is vast and protean. The transcendental turn denotes one of its most important forms, defined by the notion that Kant's deepest insight should not be identified with any specific epistemological or metaphysical doctrine, but rather concerns the fundamental standpoint and terms of reference of philosophical enquiry. To take the transcendental turn is not to endorse any of Kant's specific teachings, but to accept that the Copernican revolution announced in the Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason sets philosophy on a new footing and constitutes the proper starting point of philosophical reflection. The aim of this volume is to map the historical trajectory of transcendental philosophy and the major forms that it has taken. The contributions, from leading contemporary scholars, focus on the question of what the transcendental turn consists in--its motivation, justification, and implications; and the limitations and problems which it arguably confronts--with reference to the relevant major figures in modern philosophy, including Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein. Central themes and topics discussed include the distinction of realism from idealism, the relation of transcendental to absolute idealism, the question of how transcendental conclusions stand in relation to (and whether they can be made compatible with) naturalism, the application of transcendental thought to foundational issues in ethics, and the problematic relation of phenomenology to transcendental enquiry.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of Nathaniel Hawthorne and demonstrates why he continues to be a critically significant figure in American literature. The first section focuses on Hawthorne's interest in and knowledge of past (Puritan and colonial) and contemporary nineteenth-century history (women's, African American, Native American) as the inspiration for his writings and the source of his literary success. The second section explores his fascination with social history and popular culture by examining topics as mesmerism, utopian life styles, theatrical performances, and artistic innovations. The third section looks at how Hawthorne succeeded and excelled in the literary marketplace, as an author of children's literature, literary sketches, and historical romances. In the fourth section, Hawthorne's literary precursors, peers, colleagues, and successors are analyzed. In the final section, Hawthorne's attachment to family, nature, and home is examined as the source of creative inspiration and philosophical questing.

"This Handbook provides a structured overview of William James's intellectual work. James was a pioneer of the "new" physiological psychology of the late nineteenth century. He was also a founder of the pragmatist movement in philosophy and made influential contributions to metaphysics and to the study of religion as well. This Handbook's chapters are organized either around major themes in James's writing or around his conversations with interlocutors"--

Traditional histories of the American transcendentalist movement begin in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s terms: describing a rejection of college books and church pulpits in favor of the individual power of “Man Thinking.” This essay collection asks how women who lacked the privileges of both college and clergy rose to thought. For them, reading alone and conversing together were the primary means of growth, necessarily in private and informal spaces both overlapping with those of the men and apart from them. But these were means to achieving literary, aesthetic, and political authority—indeed, to claiming utopian possibility for women as a whole. Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism is a project of both archaeology and reinterpretation. Many of its seventeen distinguished and rising scholars work from newly recovered archives, and all offer fresh readings of understudied topics and texts. First quickened by the 2010 bicentennial of Margaret Fuller’s birth, the project reaches beyond Fuller to her female predecessors, contemporaries, and successors throughout the nineteenth century who contributed to or grew from the transcendentalist movement. Geographic scope also widens—from the New England base to national and transatlantic spheres. A shared goal is to understand this “genealogy” within a larger history of American women writers; no absolute boundaries divide idealism from sentiment, romantics from realists, or white discourse from black. Primary-text interludes invite readers into the ongoing task of discovering and interpreting transcendentally affiliated women. This collection recognizes the vibrant contributions women made to a major literary movement and will appeal to both scholars and general readers.

This is the first collective study of the development of philosophy in America, from the 18th century to the present. Leading experts examine distinctive features of American philosophy, trace notable themes, and consider the legacy of key figures. A fascinating resource for anyone interested in modern philosophy or American intellectual history.

Introduces contemporary American philosophy of technology through six of its leading figures. The six American philosophers of technology whose work is profiled in this clear and concise introduction to the field--Albert Borgmann, Hubert Dreyfus, Andrew Feenberg, Donna Haraway, Don Ihde, and Langdon Winner--represent a new, empirical direction in the philosophical study of technology that has developed mainly in North America. In place of the grand philosophical schemes of the classical generation of European philosophers of technology (including Martin Heidgger, Jacques Ellul, and Hans Jonas), the contemporary American generation addresses concrete technological practices and the co-evolution of technology and society in modern culture. Six Dutch philosophers associated with Twente University survey and critique the full scope and development of their American colleagues' work, often illustrating shifts from earlier to more recent interests. Individual chapters focus on Borgmann's engagement with technology and everyday life; Dreyfus's work on the limits of artificial intelligence; Feenberg's perspectives on the cultural and social possibilities opened by technologies; Haraway's conception of the cyborg and its attendant blurring of boundaries; Ihde's explorations of the place of technology in the lifeworld; and Winner's fascination with the moral and political implications of modern technologies. American Philosophy of Technology offers an insightful and readable introduction to this new and distinctly American philosophical turn. Contributors are Hans Achterhuis, Philip Brey, René Munnik, Martijntje Smits, Pieter Tijmes, and Peter-Paul Verbeek.

The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of Western Music is the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin's provocative, erudite telling of the story of Western music from its earliest days to the present. Each book in this superlative five-volume set illuminates-through a representative sampling of masterworks-the themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to a significant period in the history of Western music. Music in the Early Twentieth Century , the fourth volume in Richard Taruskin's history, looks at the first half of the twentieth century, from the beginnings of Modernism in the last decade of the nineteenth century right up to the end of World War II. Taruskin discusses modernism in Germany and France as reflected in the work of Mahler, Strauss, Satie, and Debussy, the modern ballets of Stravinsky, the use of twelve-tone technique in the years following World War I, the music of Charles Ives, the influence of peasant songs on Bela Bartok, Stravinsky's neo-classical phase and the real beginnings of 20th-century music, the vision of America as seen in the works of such composers as W.C. Handy, George Gershwin, and Virgil Thomson, and the impact of totalitarianism on the works of a range of musicians from Toscanini to Shostakovich