American Literature
Transcendentalism and its importance for the development of the Americans' outlook. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry David Thoreau.
Literature of Abolitionism. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as a powerful exposure of slavery.
Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the Eastern region of the United States as a protest to the
general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian church
taught at Harvard Divinity School. Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the inherent goodness of both people and nature.
Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions--particularly organized religion and political parties--ultimately corrupted the purity of
the individual. They had faith that people are at their best when truly "selfreliant" and independent
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