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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism

Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism

Fuller, Randall

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralLiterary Criticism19th Century United States History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 019284363X
ISBN13: 9780192843630
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Jan 23 2025
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.74
Height: 0.91 Width: 6.50 Depth: 9.40
Language: English
A group biography of five women who played path-breaking roles in the transcendentalist movement

In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society to answer the great questions of special importance to women: What are we born to do? How shall we do it? The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of remarkable thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the transcendentalist movement.

Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, however, trace its emergence to a group of young intellectuals (primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) dissatisfied with their religious, literary, and social culture. Yet there is a forgotten history of transcendentalism--a submerged counternarrative--that features a network of fiercely intelligent women who were central to the development of the movement even as they found themselves silenced by their culturally-assigned roles as women.

Bright Circle is intended to reorient our understanding of transcendentalism: to help us see the movement as a far more collaborative and interactive project between women and men than is commonly understood. It recounts the lives of Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Lydia Jackson Emerson, and Margaret Fuller as they developed crucial ideas about the self, nature, and feeling even as they pushed their male counterparts to consider the rights of enslaved people of color and women.

Many ideas once considered original to Emerson and Thoreau are shown to have originated with women who had little opportunity of publicly expressing them. Together, the five women of Bright Circle helped form the foundations of American feminism.

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