Emerson and Thoreau Represent American Identity Essay -- Comapare and

Compare and contrast the way in which Emerson and Thoreau represent American Identity.Identity means who a person is, or the qualities of a person or group which make them different from others, (Cambridge go on Learners mental lexicon, Third Edition). Every individual, group and country has their make identity which makes them different from others and it shows uniqueness of oneself. Reaction against the existing philosophy takes surface when there is conflict in interest amongst the philosophers. It was from the late eighteenth blow until mid nineteenth century that the philosophical and literary movement (Transcendental Movement) took endue in America as a result of extreme freethinking of the enlightenment. transcendental philosophy, an idealist philosophical tendency among writers in and around Boston in the mid-19th century. Growing out of Christian Unitarianism in the 1830s under the influence of German and British Romanticism, transcendentalism affirmed Kants principle o f intuitive familiarity not derived from the senses, while rejecting organized religion for an extremely individualistic jubilancy of the divinity in each human being (Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary foothold, p. 262). Thus, being the transcendentalists, both Emerson and Thoreau represented American Identity by influencing American to participate in the construction of American identity done and through their writings and actions. Therefore, this essay will compare and contrast the way in which Emerson and Thoreau represented American Identity firstly it will argue Emersons influence on the American scholars to create American Identity through creation of an intellectual scholars, which was unique and free from European influence and secondly it will discuss th... ... really awakened the people and society on the whole to mildew on creating and establishing the real American identity. The American Dream, the judgement that everyone in the US has the chance to be succes sful, rich and happy if they work hard, (Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary, Third Edition). Emerson and Thoreau are the men who make the American Dream come true in New England in the 1830s and continued through the 1840s and 1850s, but the energy that had earlier made Transcendentalism a unique movement to create American Identity had subsided for several(prenominal) reasons.Works CitedCambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary, Third Edition.Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick.The American Scholar by Ralph Waldo Emerson.Walden by Henry David Thoreau.The Bedford Anthology of American Literature by Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson.