Explore American literature published between the 1830s and 1860s, focusing on the socio-cultural contexts that led to the dramatic outburst of literary creativity in this era.
As most famously defined by F. O. Matthiessen in his groundbreaking book, The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), the term "American Renaissance" demarcates a period of tremendous literary activity between the 1830s and 1860s that marked the cultivation, for the first time, of a distinctively American literature. For Matthiessen and many other critics, its key figures – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville – sought to define and explore a new American identity, carving out inventive modes of expression and self-identification. In the years since Matthiessen's important work and especially in the past several decades, this characterization of the literary period has been challenged on several fronts, especially for overstating the innovations of these few authors; for the exclusion of women, people of color, and more popular authors from its account of the United States during a period of social and cultural upheaval and transition; and for its acceptance of the myth of American exceptionalism or superiority.
We begin this course by looking at context: What was it in American culture and society that led to the dramatic outburst of literary creativity in this era? Each unit starts with a broad overview of the literary period and different ways of framing it before moving on to examine the economic, political, and social changes that were transforming the United States and making a profound impact on the literary production of the era: industrialization and urbanization, the development of mass politics, the debate over slavery, and Western expansion. Following that context, you will explore some of the period's most famous works, approaching them by genre category and important literary contributions (Units 2–4). Because of the varied ways that authors in this course invoke literary tropes and techniques like myth, symbolism, imagery, simile, metaphor, narrative structure, allusions, apostrophe, and others in their works, what we find during this period is indeed an American Renaissance of texts that respond to societal changes and upheavals. Overall, we attempt to define the emerging American identity represented in this literature and think about the larger implications of this robust textual output (Units 5–7).
- Unit 1: The American Renaissance in Context
- Unit 2: Continuity and Change in Poetic Form
- Unit 3: The Invention of the Short Story
- Unit 4: The Development of the Novel and its Various Forms
- Unit 5: Nature and Technology: Creating and Challenging American Identity
- Unit 6: The Question of Women's Place in Society
- Unit 7: The Slavery Controversy and Abolitionist Literature
- Discriminate among the key economic, technological, educational, social, cultural, and religious transformations underpinning the American Renaissance;
- Define the transformations in American Protestantism exemplified by the Second Great Awakening and Transcendentalism;
- List the key tenets of Transcendentalism and relate them to Romanticism more broadly and to social and cultural developments in the antebellum United States;
- Analyze Emerson's place in defining Transcendentalism and his key differences from other Transcendentalists like Thoreau, Fuller, and Sophia and George Ripley;
- Delineate competing conceptualizations of poetry and its construction and purpose, with particular attention to Poe, Emerson, and Whitman;
- Examine Dickinson's place as a woman in the nineteenth century and define the formal innovations and particular content of her poetic works in light of this context;
- Describe the emergence of the short story, the Gothic, and crime fiction as forms, with reference to specific stories by Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville;
- Distinguish among forms of the novel, with reference to specific works by Hawthorne, Lippard and Thompson, and Fern;
- Elucidate the ways that writers such as Melville, Brownson, Davis, and Thoreau saw industrialization and capitalism as a threat to US society;
- Develop the relationship between Thoreau's interest in nature and his political commitments and compare and contrast his thinking with Emerson and other transcendentalists;
- Articulate the conventional gender roles of women during this time and think about how those roles were beginning to change because of the ways in which women fought for equality in both the public and private spheres;
- Analyze the different ways that sentimentalism constrained and empowered women writers to critique gender conventions and spurred the Women's Civil Rights Movement, with reference to specific works by writers such as Fern, Anthony, Fuller, Alcott, and Stowe; and
- Define and evaluate the ways that the slavery question influenced major writers and literature during this period.