Imagined Life: American Independent Cinema and Transcendentalism

Imagined Life: American Independent Cinema and Transcendentalism examines the prevailing characteristics of American independent cinema and explores its longstanding debt to the Transcendentalists. This nineteenth-century New England group, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller, subscribed to an idealistic philosophy based upon an intuitive and imaginative understanding that knowledge transcends logic and empiricism. By analysing a range of American independent films, this book reveals a vital nexus operating in contemporary America between this uniquely North American philosophy and quintessentially American film. Just as the Transcendentalists strategised immersion, observation and reflection and sought empathy as the key to meaning, which came when adherents acquired trust in themselves to comprehend what was morally right, so this volume argues that this same strategy informs and characterises the creative praxes prevalent in recent and contemporary American independent cinema. To the extent that American independent cinema continues to provide a forum for marginalised identities, whether these be racial, sexual, political or even philosophical, this study demonstrates that the conscience of America is sustained and strengthened in independent films that embody Transcendentalist ideas and praxes.

• Publication date: 30 November 2026
• Page count: 256
• Dimensions: Height 234 mm; Width 156 mm
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781399539128