Literature and Culture during the American Renaissance

The literary period known as the American Renaissance isn’t what it used to be, though perhaps scholars are getting closer to understanding what it actually was. Now generally considered to cover virtually the whole of the antebellum era, the title American Renaissance, as applied to literature, was first used to characterize the five-year period from 1850 to 1855, and it was used to refer to the interrelated work of five writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman. ¹ This first and immensely influential characterization was the work of F. O. Matthiessen, whose monumental study of this short period of imaginative writing, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, was published in 1941. So successful was Matthiessen in making his case that one hardly even thinks to ask whether there was something that would be deservingly remembered as an American Renaissance. Rather, the questions raised over time about Matthiessen’s formulation of the period have been about the length of this momentous development in American cultural and literary history and the credentials of the writers who should be included as vital exemplars of this flowering of American letters. In time, though, more substantial challenges emerged, but even then, the term American Renaissance proved durable. Books and articles gave us “the American Renaissance Reconsidered,” directed us to “The Other American Renaissance,” took us “South of the American Renaissance,” reconstituted the American Renaissance, rewrote the American Renaissance, even questioned “What American Renaissance?” and eventually called out in resistance, “Death to the American Renaissance.” But the thing just wouldn’t die. ²