Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:

  • 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.