American Romanticism and the Popularization of Literary Education

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.

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American Romanticism, Education, and Social Reform: The Great Work of Mutual 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 nineteenth-century 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 conversation 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. The 1830s and 1840s saw a redefinition of what Romantic literary practice was. As the Romantics’ attempt to institutionalize and popularize their educational ideals increasingly involved them in the institutional structures of the nineteenth-century educational field, they encountered the exclusionary mechanisms which limited educational opportunities, just as much as they had to come to terms with their own role in an educational system which recreated social privilege.