| Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism Subjects: American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; American essays -- Women authors -- History and criticism; Transcendentalism in literature; Women and literature -- United States -- History -- 19th century; Transcendentalism (New England); 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. Jana L. Argersinger (Editor) JANA L. ARGERSINGER is a coeditor of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance and Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism and serves as president of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Phyllis Cole (Editor) PHYLLIS COLE is professor of English at Penn State University, Brandywine, and is the author of Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History , as well as essays on feminist themes in the transcendentalist movement. |