American Renaissance

Catalog description

"The American Renaissance" is a term made famous by F.O. Matthiessen in his book by the same name. Matthiessen posited that though 1776 marked the creation of the United States, the middle of the nineteenth century marked the rebirth of the nation in the form of a literary renaissance. The term originally only encompassed five writers—Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman—but has since expanded to encompass practically all of American Romanticism, American slave narratives and abolitionist texts, progressive American literature, popular American fiction, and Native American texts. This course will study a diverse variety of works from this era and question whether or not they truly signal an American renaissance.