American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions

• 1. Introduction: Transcendentalism and the Orient 2. Predecessors: The First Meetings of East and West The German Tradition and the East The English Romantics and the Orient Fair Joseph Priestley: Moses and the Hindoos 3. Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and the Orient Emerson's "Asia Mine" Thoreau Sauntering Eastward Alcott's Universal Bible 4. The Dissenters: Melville and Brownson Melville as Gnostic Orestes Brownson and Tradition 5. The Ambience: Orientalism in General-Interest American Magazines The Popular Climate West and East Concluding Remarks 6. Ambience and Embodiment of Transcendental Dreams Converting the World Images of America's Golden Age Transcendental Dreams and Earthly Fiction 7. Transcendentalist Periodicals and the Orient Literary Religion and Social Reform: The Western Messenger, The Dial, The Present, The Harbinger, and The Spirit of the Age The Universal and the Particular: The Cincinnati Dial, The Radical, The Index, and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy 8. Patterns in Literary Religion: The Orient and the Second Cycle of Transcendentalism Beginnings: Lydia Maria Child and The Progress of Religious Ideas Unitarian Transcendentalism: James Freeman Clarke and Elizabeth Peabody Universal Religion: John Weiss and Samuel Johnson The Sympathetic Universalism of William Rounseville Alger Octavius Brooks Frothingham's Religion of Humanity and Moncure Conway's Anthropocentrism 9. Conclusion Drawing Conclusions in the Drawing Room Artists and Asia Popular Ramifications The Twentieth Century Bibliography Index

A major scholarly study of the importance of oriental thought on the group of Americans known as the Transcendentalists. It is a study that shows wide and deep reading in comparative religion and philosophy, and it greatly enlightens us with regard to how Hindu and Buddhist ideas came to shape the work of many intellectual thinkers.