American Renaissance (literature)

In American literature, the American Renaissance was a period during which many of the literary works most widely considered American masterpieces were produced. The period is generally defined as the mid-19th century but especially the years roughly from 1850 to 1855. Major works from those years include Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men (1850, though most of Emerson's best-known texts were published earlier), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), and Walt Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855).

Overview

Scholar F. O. Matthiessen originated the phrase "American Renaissance" in his 1941 book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Although Mathiessen limited his definition to the period between 1850 and 1855, the term has since expanded to a broader range of time. In The American Renaissance Reconsidered, for example, Eric Sundquist expands the years covered by the American Renaissance to "the 1830s through the Civil War."^[1]

The notion of an American Renaissance has been criticized for overemphasizing a small number of white male writers and artifacts of high culture.^[2] William E. Cain noted the "extreme white male formation" of Mathiessen's list of authors and stated that by "devoting hundreds of pages of analysis and celebration to five white male authors, Mathiessen unwittingly prefigured in his book what later readers would dispute and labor to correct."^[3] The demographic exclusivity of the American Renaissance began eroding toward the end of the twentieth century. Emily Dickinson, who began her poetry in the late 1850s, made her way into the canon. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) rose to prominence in the late 1970s. African American literature gained increasing recognition.^[4]

The American Renaissance continues as a central term in American studies. The American Renaissance was for long considered synonymous with American Romanticism^[5] and was closely associated with Transcendentalism.^[6]

Often considered a movement centered in New England, the American Renaissance was inspired in part by a new focus on humanism as a way to move from Calvinism.^[7]

The thematic center of the American Renaissance was what Matthiessen called the "devotion" of all five of his writers to "the possibilities of democracy." He presented the American Renaissance texts as "literature for our democracy” and challenged the nation to repossess them.^[8]

References