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Jan 4, 2022 · The term American Renaissance, as applied to literature, was popularly established by the Harvard scholar F. O. Matthiessen in his 1941 book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman.
The richest period in American literary history, the American Renaissance (1830–1865) produced Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson.
American Renaissance, period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the American Civil War in which American literature, in the wake of the Romantic movement, came of age as an expression of a national spirit.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The volume uses the best of current literary studies, from digital humanities to psychoanalytic theory, to illuminate an era that reaches far beyond the Civil War and continues to shape our understanding of American literature.
In a 1983 essay on Matthiessen, Leo Marx refers to American Renaissance as a "masterwork" and, like Gunn, understands Matthiessen as "bringing . . . together" in the volume, unproblematically, the historical and formalist approaches to literary study.
This volume offers a rich range of engagements with the age of the American Renaissance, often circling back to the question of why we still study, teach, and learn from the writings of this era. Three main sections organize along lines of chronology and thematics.
American Renaissance. The authors who began to come to prominence in the 1830s and were active until about the end of the Civil War—the humorists, the classic New Englanders, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and others—did their work in a new spirit, and their achievements were of a new sort.
