The Great Awakening

[Anonymous <remailer@htp.org>]

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Jim Choate wrote:
>Bob Hettinga wrote:
>> BTW, Emerson, Dickenson, Whitman, Thureau, etc., were part
>> of the same ideological outpouring which, in the theological arena, was the
>> Great Awakening. A lot can be said for the view that this was American
>> Romanticism, as Chopin, Byron, the Brontes, Austen, etc., were all
>> happening in roughly the same couple of generations. Later, like libertines
>> and enthusiasts throughout history, they became extremely repressive. We
>> eventually came to call them Victorians. (Sound familiar, you baby boomers?)
>
>After thinking about this I am certain that you are speaking of a movement
>other than the Great Awakening. I can't remember or find a convenient name
>for the religous/ethical awakening that occured prior to the Civil War.

"THE GREAT AWAKENING

"A conservative reaction against the world view of the new science was 
bound to follow, and the first half of the eighteenth century witnessed a 
number of religious revivals in both England and America.  They were 
sometimes desperate efforts to reassert the old values in the face of the 
new and, oddly enough, were themselves the direct product of the new cult of 
feeling, a philosophy which argued that man's greatest pleasure was derived 
from the good he did for others and that his sympathetic emotions (his joy as 
well as his tears) should not be contained."

 -- The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Third Edition, Volume 1

Being a New Englander, Bob should know about the revivalist of Northampton, 
Massachusetts: Jonathan Edwards.  His name is synonymous with the "Great 
Awakening."

As for the religious/ethical awakening that occurred prior to the War 
between the States, that has generally come to be known as "American 
Transcendentalism," especially the works of Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau.

Nerthus

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