American Romanticism, Education, and Social Reform argues that American Transcendentalism was an attempt to institutionalize and popularize Romantic literary practice. The Transcendentalists tried to make Romantic education “the generating idea of society itself,” so self-reliance needed to become a cultural practice available to everyone.

American Romanticism and the Popularization of Literary Education focuses on three Romantic educational genres and their institutional and media contexts: the conversation, literary journalism, and the public lecture. The genres discussed in this book illustrate the ways in which the Transcendentalists engaged nineteenthcentury media and educational institutions in order to fully realize their projects. The book also charts the development from the semi-public conversational platforms such as Alcott’s Temple School and Fuller’s conversations for women in the 1830s to the increasingly public periodical culture and lecture platforms of the 1840s and the early 1850s. This expansion caused a reconsideration of the meaning and function of Romanticism.

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One: Universal Education: American Romanticism and the Institutions of Education

Chapter Two: Intelligent Sympathies: Conversations and the Institutionalization of Romantic Education

Chapter Three: The Problem of Audience: Nineteenth-Century Periodical Culture and Romantic Popular Education

Chapter Four: Public Intellectuals: The Romantic Lecture, Professionalization, and Politics

Conclusion

Bibliography

About the Author