back to original page |Contexts and Comparisons||Chapter 7 -
Romanticism| Romanticism takes on different characteristics in
different cultures. Even within the British Isles, England and
Scotland produced idiosyncratic forms of Romanticism, as each
country on the continent of Europe endowed the movement with
distinctive national traits. Early in the nineteenth century,
Unitarianism, a rational religion produced by the English
Enlightenment, paved the way for the emergence in the United
States of a literary and philosophical movement,
Transcendentalism, whose chief proponent was Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882). Like the English Romantics, Transcendentalists
valued the individual over the group, feeling over reason, and
God's creation, the natural world, over that merely human
creation, the city. Influenced by German philosophers like Kant,
indebted to New England's Puritan traditions, and thus
ultimately derived from Plato, the wellspring of Western
idealistic philosophy, Transcendentalism also owed much to As