The Asian Soul of Transcendentalism by Todd Lewis and Kent Bicknell

“The treatment of Transcendentalism by twentieth-century teachers of literature and American history has followed a long tradition of focusing primarily on the European and American cultural influences on its major figures, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson and Louisa May Alcott. Their work is seen as fitting into various Western currents such as German Romanticism, Unitarian theology, neo-Platonism, and American utopian thought. In this framework, their writings were of great significance, constituting the headwaters of Western environmentalism, Northern abolitionism, voting rights for women, advocacy of public education and curricular reform, inter-faith mysticism, and diet and health movements, among others…”