The New England Renaissance occurred during the middle of the 19th century. Characterized by rapid social changes including developments in industry, technology, and transportation, the New England Renaissance changed the face of American society. Inventions like the telegraph and steel plow, improvements in rail roads, and a renewed faith in the unlimited power of human potential were characteristic of the era. New philosophies posited the human soul as being connected universally to a collective soul known as the ôover-soulö and celebrated a reverence of nature. Known as transcendentalism, a philosophical movement known as anti-transcendentalism would rise in response. Authors like Emerson and Thoreau were leading exponents of transcendentalism in the writing of the era, contrasted by anti-transcendentalism authors such as Hawthorne and Melville. If any characteristic of the New England Renaissance is most symbolic of the era, it is the flourishing of transcendentalist and anti-transcendentalist literature of the period.
As industry grew in American society, a movement known as transcendentalism arose in New England. Transcendentalism represented a response to what many found to be industrialismÆs focus on materialism to the point of dehumanization. The transcendentalistÆs believed that people learn knowledge intuitively, rejecting traditional dogma and belief systems. Ration provided the only means of discovering the truth and the universal over-soul. In his essay ôThe Over-Soulö, Emerson explained the nature of the individual soul and its relationship to all beings and nature, ôthat great nature in which we restàthat Unite within which everymanÆs particular being is contained and made one with all otherö (Perrin 1998, 1).
The thinking of transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau stemmed from the philosophies of men like John Locke and Immanuel Kant. Locke argued that we can only know what we know ôby d...