The Wikipedia entry isn’t too bad.
I spend some time on the Transcendentalists in the college-level American Intellectual History course that i teach, and one of the sites i recommend to my students is the American Transcendentalism site hosted by the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The site has some good introductory stuff, as well as a whole bunch of texts by some of the big names (and the lesser-known names) of American Transcendentalism. Many of the texts incorporate study notes, which help the reader understand some of the references and literary devices used by the authors. It really is a very good site.
Another good site is Transcendentalists.com.
The Transcendentalists did, as you note, value what we might call intuition over empiricism. They were reacting against what they saw as the rather cold, non-spiritual rationality of the Enlightenment, yet they were also, in many ways, Enlightenment figures who believed in the progressive and transformative possibilities of science and reason. What they sought was to infuse the new, Enlightenment-based understanding of nature and the natural world with deep, personal spirituality that was based in an understanding of religion, but was not really denominational or institutionalized. God, for them, was the god of nature, and it was nature that provided the inspiration and the medium for their intuitive spirituality. One scholar, writing mainly about the European Romantics (with whom the American Trascendentalists had much in common), described their worldview as “Natural Supernaturalism,” and i think that’s a pretty good term for it.
There’s one interesting terminological issue to note with the Transcendentalists. When they used the word “reason,” they did not mean the logical, discursive reason of the Enlightenment. When folks like Emerson used “reason,” they were referring to a person’s individual, intuitive understanding of the world. The term they reserved for the cold reason of the Enlightenment was “understanding.”
So, when Emerson says, in his Divinity School Address…
…he is saying that the reason of the Enlightenment (what he calls understanding) cannot teach or inform the more personal, spiritual intuition (what he calls reason) that we all have.
The whole doctrine of Transcendentalism was one that focused very much on individual truth, and that often exhorted people to follow their own truth, even at the expense of society’s laws and morals. Probably the quintessential essay in this regard is Emerson’s “Self Reliance,” which is a classic of Romantic individualism. Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (also called “Civil Disobedience”) is another great essay that discusses the need to follow one’s own moral compass. Because they believed that society often suppressed or killed people’s natural intuition, some Transcendentalists believed that people needed to learn to see with the eyes of a child; children were often held up as examples, because they had not yet had their personal truths quashed by society. When Emerson, in his essay on nature, talks about becoming a “transparent eyeball,” he is making a similar allusion to unmediated sensory experiences of the world.
The quest for personal truth could also, in the hands of some Transcendentalists, lead to a desire to capture the deep, dark side of the human spirit. Herman Melville exemplifies this trend in his review essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in which he says that what fascinates him most about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing is the darkness and blackness in it. This attitude to seeking out the depths of the human experience re-emerged among some twentieth century modernist literary figures like Lionel Trilling, who saw the desire to find the blackness in human experience as one of the key characteristics of modern literature.
This is not to say that the Transcendentalists were always morose, or that they were completely averse or hostile to society (even though it seems that way in some of their essays). Indeed, they often believed that, if everyone followed his or her own truth honestly and faithfully, it would lead to a more harmonious society. there were also Transcendentalists who laid out particular ideas about how society might work, and connected these ideas to religion. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s essay, “A Glimpse of Christ’s Idea of Society,” is a good example. And Emerson and Thoreau wrote a good deal about contemporary political events (such as the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850) and how they affected society.
Anyway, i won’t ramble on any longer. And i’m not really sure i can be of any help with the “transcendental aspect of reading a story.” But check out the links above; they should give you a pretty good introduction to the topic.