Transcendental Wordplay : Ohio University Press : 9780821413241 : 0821413244 : 31 Aug 2000 : Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, America was captivated by a muddled notion of &;etymology.&; New England Transcendentalism was only one outcropping of a nationwide movement in which schoolmasters across small-town America taught students the roots of words in ways that dramatized religious issues and sparked wordplay. Shaped by this ferment, our major romantic authors shared the sensibility that Friedrich Schlegel linked to punning and christened &;romantic irony.&; Notable punsters or etymologists all, they gleefully set up as sages, creating jocular masterpieces from their zest for oracular wordplay. Their search for a primal language lurking beneath all natural languages provided them with something like a secret language that encodes their meanings. To fathom their essentially comic masterpieces we must decipher it. Interpreting Thoreau as an ironic moralist, satirist