ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -As a group, the transcendentalists led the celebration of the American experiment as one of individualism and self-reliance. They took progressive stands on women’s rights, abolition, reform, and education. They criticized government, organized religion, laws, social institutions, and creeping industrialization.

Detailed explanation-2: -Transcendentalists advocated the idea of a personal knowledge of God, believing that no intermediary was needed for spiritual insight. They embraced idealism, focusing on nature and opposing materialism.

Detailed explanation-3: -Transcendentalists who had advanced social reforms that included efforts to increase rights for women, labor, and the indigent redirected their energies toward extinguishing the institution of slavery.

Detailed explanation-4: -American transcendentalism is essentially a kind of practice by which the world of facts and the categories of common sense are temporarily exchanged for the world of ideas and the categories of imagination.