American Renaissance

Catalog description

This course covers the literature of the era that literary critic F. O. Matthiessen famously termed the “American Renaissance,” the period of literary nationalism between 1820 and 1865 in which American authors, in writing “literature for democracy,” brought briterature to its “first maturity” and “affirmed its rightful heritage in the whole expanse of art and culture.” Readings by authors such as Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Dickinson, Fuller, Douglass, Jacobs, Stowe, Webb, and Rollin Ridge.