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The Complicity of Imagination examines the rich and complex relationship between four nineteenth-century authors and the culture and politics of seventeenth-century England. Challenging the notion that antebellum Americans were burdened by a sense of cultural inferiority in both their thought and their writing, this 1997 study portrays an American Renaissance whose writers were deeply enough read in the literature and controversies of seventeenth-century England to appropriate its cultural artifacts for their own purposes. By exploring the broader cultural implications of intertextual relationships, this book demonstrates how literary texts participate in the artistic, political and theological tensions within American culture.

This article exhibits the situations that led the Transcendentalists to turn to Scottish Common Sense philosophy and the reasons behind this turn. In contrast to eighteenth-century British Enlightenment philosophy, the Transcendentalists tended to define their metaphysics and their epistemology and rejected the neoclassical literary authors on their college curriculum. It was in defiance of those philosophies that the young Emerson at Harvard adopted the Scottish Common Sense philosophies of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. The article explains that the turn signaled the Transcendentalists' desire not only for a less skeptical philosophy of human knowledge but also for an unequivocal explanation of moral conduct. The article also examines the indebtedness of Transcendentalists towards the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. Though they explicitly rejected it in the area of epistemology and metaphysics, it had a much less acknowledged adoption in the field of moral philosophy.

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