The Puritan And Transcendentalist Movement

The Puritan and Transcendentalist movements emerged far apart in history, and both philosophies clash on various levels. However, the fundamentally important for the American literature history writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson lived during the same period of time, which was 19th Century American, and each of them presented their fundamental nature of thoughts and ideas through these conflicting philosophies. Emerson, in addition to Henry David Thoreau discussed realities through their transcendentalist ideas, while Hawthorne’s and William Bradford’s writings were more traditional and were focused through the mindset of Puritanism. This paper will explore these two American movement via a comparative literature discussion