Transcendentalist Periodicals and the Orient

Abstract Throughout its history, the Transcendentalist movement generated periodicals in order to disseminate its various viewpoints. Although these journals at first seem remarkably diverse-ranging from the quasi-millennialism of The Harbinger to the literary elite published in The Dial to the liberal religious contentiousness of The Radical and The Index-in fact Transcendentalist periodicals maintained some continuity from the 1830s to the 1880s. With occasional exceptions, all the periodicals share a secular millennialism, a religious liberalism, and an editors’ and contributors’ attraction to what might be called nascent comparative religion. All of the Transcendentalist periodicals can be defined by their relation to Emersonian Transcendentalism, and all reflect, sometimes in peculiar ways, the characteristic American ideology of progress that conditioned virtually the whole of Transcendentalist Orientalism.