“Always as a Means, Never as an End”: Orestes Brownson's “Transcendentalist” Criticism and the Uses of the Literary

This essay examines how Orestes Brownson used literary criticism as a medium to distance himself from the Transcendentalist movement. It argues that Brownson's qualified rejection of Transcendentalism played a crucial role in the formation of his professional identity as a literary critic and public intellectual in the mid-nineteenth-century literary sphere.