The Orient in Romanticism and Transcendentalism

In order to modify Schwab's several conceptual mistakes and to make amends for his occasional omissions appearing on his The Oriental Renaissance, this study attempts to elucidate the nature of the Orient in Romanticism and Transcendentalism from a comparative perspective. While arguing about the Orientalism both in the Romantics and in the Transcendentalists. the scholar seems to have executed his study of the Oriental influences on the West only in favor of the Hindu, even if the Chinese influences played a more important role in leading the Romantic movement Especially, he omitted that the conception of Chinese garden as an new aesthetic standard happened during the eighteenth century, paved the way for the European Romantic movements. Secondly, he gave the priority of the emergence of "an Oriental Renaissance" to a surge of interest in the study of Sanskrit. But India could claim no monopoly and should share its popularity with China. Thirdly. Schwab treats the characteristics of the Orient in New England Transcendentalism in the same vein as that of European Romanticism But its response to the Orient was quite different from that of Romanticism. For the American Transcendentalists, the Orient was the home of the oldest philosophic truths: for the European Romantics, it was a source of poetic glamour.