In 1820 in the Edinburgh Review, the Scottish critic, Sydney Smith took aim at the budding culture of the United States with these snide questions: “Who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue?” . His implication, of course, was that no one did because what passed for arts and letters in the United States was unworthy of notice. Over 300 years after the arrival of Columbus, this assertion, even if an exaggeration, only heightened the cultural inferiority complex already felt by many Americans in relation to Europe. But the fact was that a major reason that few people read American books in 1820 was that the lack of copyright regulations allowed American booksellers to print large numbers of English books and sell them cheaply without paying royalties. There was little incentive for publishers to produce books by American writers and pay them the required royalties when pirated British books yielded high profits. When an international copyright law was passed in 1830, American writers like Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper found readerships at home and abroad. By the 1850s, many American writers were being read in Europe. (Source: A Companion to American Literature, by Paul Lauter, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering -- curious as it may sound to you -- is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity. Between myself and the memory of joy lies a gulf no less deep than that between myself and joy in its actuality. (Source: Oscar Wilde, Quotes of Oscar Wilde)
There are as many ways of thinking about the transcendentalists as there are literary historians to think about them. One could focus on the pedigree of the name, “transcendentalist,” and its connections to Kant and his ideas about knowledge not of objects in Locke’s empirical tradition but of our “mode of knowing objects.” One could examine it as a more or less religious reaction to the desiccated Unitarianism of the early nineteenth century, tracing its development in the debates between George Ripley and Andrews Norton, and in Emerson’s dispensing with doctrine in his “Divinity School Address” and “The Lord’s Supper.” One could describe it as an aesthetic movement, an offshoot of continental and British romanticism, as in Emerson’s “The Poet” or in Elizabeth Peabody’s short-lived magazine, Aesthetic Papers. One could analyze it as a brief, small, but influential social movement, how the founding of the Transcendental Club and its magazine, The Dial, helped create a fresh and vital culture in the United States for many years in and after the middle of the nineteenth century. These are all useful and interesting approaches to the transcendentalists like William Henry Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, George Ripley, Henry David Thoreau, and others.
But I want, rather, to focus on three somewhat different considerations. First, the question of reform in American society and politics and how to accomplish it. Second, how it was possible for most of the transcendentalists to sustain their optimism in the face of changing and in many respects undesirable social realities. And third, how such optimism could be translated into the practices of thinking, speaking, and writing. (Source: A Companion to American Literature, by Paul Lauter, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)