Radical Transcendentalisms - Historical Materialism

Alex Moskowitz and Ted Stolze (eds.)

Volume Editors: Alex Moskowitz and Ted Stolze

Radical Transcendentalisms seeks to recover the intense relation that the nineteenth-century Transcendentalist movement had with radical social reform, and to recover it from the long history of liberal, individualist accusations that have been hurled at it. The authors in this collection argue that Transcendentalism offers us a deep critique of capitalist social relations, and that we might reexamine this critique in order to draw inspiration for our contentious political present.

Biographical Note

Alex Moskowitz is Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. He teaches and writes about the senses, slavery, and political economy in early and nineteenth-century American and African American Literature.
Ted Stolze is Professor of Philosophy at Cerritos College. He has published primarily on Spinoza, Marxism, and contemporary French philosophy; and he is the author of Becoming Marxist (Brill, 2019).

Readership

This book will be especially relevant for academic libraries, scholars, and undergraduate and graduate students in American literature, history, philosophy, cultural studies, critical theory, and Marxism.

Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Radical Transcendentalisms
Alex Moskowitz

Part 1 Labour

1 Orestes Brownson and R.W. Emerson on Abolition and Labour Then and Now
Emily J. Dumler-Winckler

2 A Natural Critic of Political Economy: Thoreau, Marx, and the Temporal Problem of Labour
Alec Israeli

3 Louisa May Alcott’s Work and the Aesthetics of Labour
Ben Bascom

4 This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land: Henry George and Common Property
Nathaniel Windon

Part 2 Gender, Race, and Indigeneity

5 Cutting, Sending, Pasting: Margaret Fuller’s Radical Print Networks in 1840s England
Sonia Di Loreto

6 Transcendence: Toward a Black Feminist Transcendentalism
Marlas Yvonne Whitley

7 Abolitionist Feminism: Margaret Fuller’s Critique of Spinoza on Gender
Ted Stolze

8 ‘A Kind of Open, Living Book’: Reading Native Bodies in The Maine Woods
Sara Monahan

9 A Yard of One’s Own: H.D.’s Sea Garden and the New England Regionalists
Anna Beaudry

10 The Social Movement in Europe
Heinrich Börnstein

11 Review of Der Volks-Tribun: Organ Der Deutschen Sozial Reform-Association in New York / Tribune of the People: Organ of the German Social Reform-Association in New York, 5 Jan’y, 1846
Margaret Fuller

Part 3 Impact, Influence, Praxis

12 Transcending Transcendentalism: Tragic Happiness in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche
Irene Lopez Sanchez

13 Radical Return: Transcendentalist Legacies in Contemporary Fiction
Georgia Walton

14 Would Henry Thoreau Have Blown Up a Pipeline? The Radical Transcendentalism of ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’
Paul Downes

Index