Transient and Permanent: Massachusetts Historical Society Studies in American History

Comprising twenty essays by leading scholars, this insightful collection provides the best recent writing on the Transcendentalists, the New England religious reformers and intellectuals who challenged both spiritual and secular orthodoxies between the 1830s and the 1850s. The volume addresses Transcendentalism from many directions, illuminating the movement more clearly than ever before. The contributions consider aspects of the relationship between the Transcendentalists and their intellectual and social world, assess the movement's cultural legacy, and place Transcendentalism in the context of historical and literary scholarship, past and present.