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Transcendental Reading Group 2021



Jan-Margaret Fuller-Women in 19th Century

Feb-Emerson-Nature & Self Reliance 

March-Narrative of Sojourner Truth & the topic of Abolition

April-Frederick Douglass-his 3 autobiographies

May-Jones Very & the topics of Mental Illness and Disability

June-Julia Ward Howe-The Hermaphrodite (and/or HBStowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and/or LMAlcott’s Long Fatal Love Chase)

July-Thoreau-Walden

Aug-Elizabeth Peabody-Record of a School (Bronson Alcott’s Temple School)

Sept-Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins-Life among the Piutes (ed. by Mary Peabody Mann)

Oct-Nathaniel Hawthorne-Mosses from an Old Manse

Nov-Thomas Wentworth Higginson-Army Life in a Black Regiment

Dec-Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (as much as we can fit in!)


I'm so psyched!

By March I was having other ideas. Maybe we should have read Frederick Douglass in February and focused women into March, Women's history month. But then I realized there was more of an emphasis on women, because the list was created by a woman--and I greatly thank her for organizing this.

I began to think there could be a year of Transcendental Poetry, or Transcendental women, or history, or African-American experience, or native american experience, or even theology. 

If I were redoing it to my tastes, I would go (maybe next year)

January: Emerson
February: Frederick Douglass, Thomas Wentworth Higginson
March: Truth and Fuller
April: LM Alcott, Peabody sisters
May: Hawthorne
June: Melville
July: Dickenson
August: Whitman
September: Thoreau, Frederick Olmsted
October Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins-Life among the Piutes, and Native American issues
November: Jones Very, Ellery Channing, Julia Ward Howe and other poets
December: Poe--the anti-transcendentalist and painters of the times, plus daguerreotypes. 
 


Links from the FB page:

Studying Thoreau: Biographies (YouTube)

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON (Atlantic) He writes on the subject

Reading Walden podcast



Thomas Wentworth Higginson visits Emily Dickinson, “my partially cracked poetess at Amherst,” for the first time

Laura Ingalls Wilder documentary on American Masters


I'm so upset that Thoreau burnt down 300 acres. I didn't know about that. 

Margaret Fuller's books on Project Gutenberg

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