An engaging, full-color illustrated guide to the romantic and transcendentalist era in American literature, this updated volume provides important information on the foundations of romantic thought, romanticism and the new nation, gothic romance and sentimentalism, transcendentalism, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and romanticism and poetic voice. New to this edition is a section discussing American idealism.Topics include: The foundations of romantic thought Transcendentalism and nature The literature of social reform movements The emergence of the American poetic voice American idealism And more. Writers covered include: Emily Dickinson Frederick Douglass Ralph Waldo Emerson Washington Irving Herman Melville Edgar Allan Poe Harriet Beecher Stowe Henry David Thoreau Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Walt Whitman And many others.