【正文】 and now she had her wish, for what could be more beautiful than to devote her life to father and mother, trying to make home as happy to them as they had to her? And if difficulties were necessary to increase the splendor of the effort, what could be harder for a restless, ambitious girl than to give up her own hopes, plans, and desires, and cheerfully live for others? The spirit of Individualism and selfreliance are totally reflected on Jo and she is the central person in Little Women who we admire. Simone de Beauvoir had written that the first time we see a woman take up her pen in defense of her sex.4 Jo was the person who took up her pen in defense of women?s right and aimed at establishing equal rights and legal protection for women. What?s more, there is another character who also can reflect the transcendentalism well. She was Meg who was also concerned with issues of gender difference and campaigned for women39。 the publication of the transcendentalist literary and philosophical journal, The Dial and the establishment of an experiment in utopian munal living, Brook Farm. One thing almost all those associated with the movement did share, however, was a mon heritage of Unitarianism. Perhaps more than anything else, this fact helps to explain the development of transcendentalism and its later and larger significance for American culture. The transcendentalists broke with Unitarianism for two reasons. First, they objected to the Unitarian desire to cling to certain particulars of Christian history and dogma. Emerson called this clinging a noxious exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual, and he asked instead for a direct access to God, unmediated by any elements of Scripture and tradition. And second, the transcendentalists lamented the sterility of belief and practice they found in the Unitarian faith. According to Thoreau, it is not man39。s childhood experiences with her three sisters. The first part of the book was an immediate mercial and critical success, prompting the position of the book39。內(nèi)江師范學(xué)院本科畢業(yè)論文 1 Abstract: American famous writer, Louisa May Alcott?s novel Little Women fully reflects the transcendental ideas. This novel based on the American Civil War contains plex cultural contexts and thus, can be read from many perspectives. This thesis attempts to read this novel from the perspective of Transcendentalism, and try to tap the Transcendentalism embodied in thought, in order to broaden people39。s second part titled Good Wives, also a huge success. Both parts were first published as a single volume in 1880. Alcott followed Little Women with two sequels reprising the March sisters, Little Men (1871) and Jo39。s sin but his boredom and weariness that are as old as Adam. The American Adam needs to exchange his bondage to tradition for a freedom to experiment: old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. In some ways transcendentalism attempted to recapture for the American spirit the fervor of the original Puritan enterprise. That zeal, with its attendant bliss and agony, had been suppressed or exiled to the wilderness of the American religious experience by the end of the eighteenth century. Transcendentalism was one of the first and most dramatic protests against civil religion in America. Though it did not live up to the expectations of its adherents, many of them expected nothing less than a total regeneration of social and spiritual life through the application of the principles of idealism in America, transcendentalism has had a lasting impact. In the years immediately preceding the American Civil War, several of the transcendentalists were important participants in the abolitionist movement, and in the decades to follow, widely divergent individuals and movements would find inspiration in the transcendental protest against society. 內(nèi)江師范學(xué)院本科畢業(yè)論文 8 For example, Henry Ford, who once said that history is bunk and declared Emerson39。s rights and interests. Meg Pretty Meg, the oldest, was sixteen, and already showed domestic tastes and talents, though she detested the drudgery of household work。 but to do it cheerfullythat was another thing! She had often said she wanted to do something splendid, no matter how hard。 idealism as it appears in 1842.2 That description mentions two of the very elements, an emphasis upon heightened spiritual awareness and an interest in various types of philosophical idealism, that make transcendentalism so difficult to describe. In actuality, we cannot speak of a well anized and clearly delineated transcendentalist movement as such. Instead, we find a loosely knit group of authors, preachers, and lecturers bound together by a mutual loathing of Unitarian orthodoxy, a mutual desire to see American cultural and spiritual life freed from bondage to the past, and a mutual faith in the unbounded potential of American democratic life. Located in the Concord, Massachusetts, area in the years between 1835 and 1860, the transcendentalists formed not a tight group but, rather, a loose federation. Though a movement such as transcendentalism cannot be said to have had one distinct leader, Emerson was clearly its central figure. The publication of his Nature in 1836 is generally considered to mark the beginning of an identifiable movement. The next two decades were to see numerous new works from Emerson and poems, essays, and books from other transcendentalist figures, such as Henry David Thoreau, Orestes Bronson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Gee Ripley, and 內(nèi)江師范學(xué)院本科畢業(yè)論文 7 Theodore Parker. Never forming an official affiliation, these figures and others associated with them banded together for the formation of an informal discussion group called the Transcendental Club。 關(guān)鍵詞 ： 《 小婦人》；超驗主義 ；個人主義；自助 內(nèi)江師范學(xué)院本科畢業(yè)論文 2 Thesis Stateme