Transcendental utopias : individual and community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden / Richard Francis.

Main entry:

Francis, Richard, 1945-

Title & Author:

Transcendental utopias : individual and community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden / Richard Francis.

Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1997.

Description:

xiii, 256 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Ch. 1. Nature versus History -- Ch. 2. Brook Farm and Masquerade -- Ch. 3. Brook Farm: The Law of Groups and Series -- Ch. 4. Brook Farm as Sacrifice -- Ch. 5. Fruitlands: Convergence -- Ch. 6. Fruitlands: Divergence -- Ch. 7. Walden: The Community of One.
Dust jacket.

Summary:

New England Transcendentalism was a vibrant and many-sided movement whose members are probably best remembered for their utopian experiments, their attempts to reconcile the contingent world of history with what they perceived as the stable and patterned world of nature. Richard Francis has written the first book to explore in detail the ideological basis of the three famous experiments during the 1840s: Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Henry David Thoreau's "community of one" on the shores of Walden Pond.
Francis suggests that at the heart of Transcendentalism was a belief that all phenomena are connected in a repetitive sequence. The task was to explain how human society could be reordered to benefit from this seriality. Some members of the movement believed in evolutionary progress, whereas others hoped to be the agents of a sudden millennial transformation. They differed, as well, in their views on whether the fundamental social unit was the individual, the family, the phalanstery, or the community. The story of the three communities was, inevitably, also the story of particular individuals, and Francis highlights the lives and ideas of such leaders as George Ripley, W.H. Channing, Bronson Alcott, Charles Lane, and Theodore Parker.

Resources:
Book review (H-Net)

ISBN:

0801430933 (cloth ; acid-free paper)
9780801430930 (cloth ; acid-free paper)

Subject:

Thoreau, Henry David 1817-1862 Walden
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, or life in the woods.
Brook Farm Phalanx (West Roxbury, Boston, Mass.)
Brook Farm Phalanx.
Fruitlands
Harvard (Mass.) Fruitlands.
Utopias Massachusetts Case studies.
Transcendentalism (New England)
Utopies Massachusetts Études de cas.
Transcendantalisme (Philosophie américaine)
Utopias.
Transzendentalismus
Transcendentalisme.
Utopieën.
Walden or life in the woods (Thoreau)
Collective settlements United States History 19th century.
Utopias United States.
Fruitlands (Harvard, Mass.)
Walden Woods (Mass.)
Massachusetts.
Massachusetts Harvard Fruitlands.
Massachusetts Walden Woods.
Utopias -- Massachusetts -- Case studies

Form/genre:

Case studies.
Utopian fiction Massachusetts Case studies.
Études de cas.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 180179
Call No.: ID HX655.M4.F73; ID:98-B63
Status: Available

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