Abstract
The landscape of American Transcendentalism has become overly familiar to those who study literature and environment. We have drawn too close to it, and thereby—if Heraclitus is right—risk estrangement. Needed then is a knowledgeable guide from outside the field to reorient our vision. Enter the venerable Philip Gura. This latest book by the author of A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 and Jonathan Edwards: America's Evangelical leads the reader on an extensive historical tour of a terrain we only thought we knew. Rest assured, none of the familiar landmarks are overlooked—e.g., the writings of Thoreau, Fuller, and especially Emerson—but Gura spends most of his time meandering along the curious back roads and overgrown paths of Transcendentalism, where we encounter the likes of James Marsh, George Ripley, Elizabeth Peabody, and Octavius Brooks Frothingham, just to name a few. Time spent in these wooly precincts of American thought is well worth it, because, as Gura points out, “We cannot overestimate the excitement the Transcendentalists' ideas generated and the commitment they engendered” (xii).
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