Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

This year a major scholarly collection broadens the contexts in which we consider Ralph Waldo Emerson, while perennial debates over his pragmatism are enlivened by placing his ideas alongside their applications in national and transnational politics. A major trend in scholarship involves the quality of Henry David Thoreau’s scientific fieldwork, and interesting studies address the gendered dimensions of his Walden experiment. In a literary-historical manifestation of the adage that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” both Margaret Fuller specifically and the Transcendentalists generally are buoyed by the long-overdue consideration of a “female genealogy of Transcendentalism” in a remarkable new collection of essays that expands the definitions of the movement laterally, revealing a web of new influences among women.