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 were idealistic and optimistic because they believed they could find answers to whatever they were seeking. All they had to do was learn to read, through their intuition, the external symbols of nature and translate them into spiritual facts.

Detailed explanation-4: -The idea, roughly speaking, is that it is too much for us to be able to know how things must be beyond the limits of our experience, and so claim metaphysical knowledge of things-in-themselves.