America hadn't created many literary movements by July 1840, when
Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Margaret Fuller began publication of an idealistic journal of social criticism and poetry called "The Dial".
Based in
Concord, the journal was published on a quarterly basis between July 1840 and April 1844, and helped to create the sense of an exciting movement of writers, theologians and intellectuals working together to promote their ideas. Other key members of this group included
Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, James Greeman Clarke, George Ripley, W. E. Channing and W. H. Channing. This movement became known as American (or, New England) Transcendentalism.
The term 'Transcendentalism' had earlier referred to a group of German philosophers such as Fichte and Schelling who espoused similar ideas. Schelling's '
System of Transcendental Philosophy' is highly abstract, and in fact the younger New England thinkers had most likely encountered this philosophy in literary treatments by advocates of the movement such as Goethe, Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle.
Transcendentalism has also been seen as an American outgrowth of the British
Romantic movement and other European progressive trends.
