Introduction: Transcendentalism and the Orient

Abstract To study nineteenth-century American Transcendentalist Orientalism is to study variants in American millennialism. Just as Samuel Sewall could write about his expectation of the coming New Jerusalem in America in his Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica (1697),1 so too in “The Transcendentalists,” Emerson could look forward to a more glorious state in America than history had yet recorded; so too the Fourierist Transcendentalists could eagerly look forward to the earthly millennium in which all “superstition” was left behind; and so too Samuel Johnson, O. B. Frothingham, and other late Transcendentalists could look forward to human “progress” culminating in a “religion of humanity.” This belief in progress conditions and is reflected in the whole of Transcendentalist Orientalism; it is both the reason that Transcendentalist Orientalism came into being and its greatest obstacle to actually understanding Asian religions.