The American Renaissance period in American literature ran from about 1830 to around the Civil War. A central term in American studies, the American Renaissance was for a while considered synonymous with American Romanticism and was closely associated with Transcendentalism.
Overview
Scholar F. O. Matthiessen originated the phrase "American Renaissance" in his 1941 book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. The thematic center of the American Renaissance was what Matthiessen called the "devotion" of all five of his writers to "the possibilities of democracy". He presented the American Renaissance texts as "literature for our democracy” and challenged the nation to repossess them.
Often considered a movement centered in New England, the American Renaissance was inspired in part by a new focus on humanism as a way to move from Calvinism. Literary nationalists at this time were calling for a movement that would develop a unique American literary style to distinguish American literature from British literature. Following this call, there was a wave of literary nationalism in America for much of the 1820s that saw writers such as Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper rise to importance in American literature. This move toward expressing nationalism through literature is considered central to the emergence of the American Renaissance.
Some critics say that authors fail to address major political issues during this period, such as slavery, even as they had large influence on the writing of the time. William E. Cain noted the "extreme white male formation" of Matthiessen's list of authors and stated that by "devoting hundreds of pages of analysis and celebration to five white male authors, Matthiessen unwittingly prefigured in his book what later readers would dispute and labor to correct."
Some critics argue that literature written by women during this period was not as popular as first thought, and that it took a distant second place in popularity to works written by men. Matthiessen and other scholars are even known to exclude women and minority authors, especially African Americans. Critics also argue that there is no separate style or genre, such as sentimental-domestic fiction, distinguished by gender. and criticize Matthiessen for not including women in the original canon.
Notable authors
Most often associated with the American Renaissance movement are
Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men and Self-Reliance,
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables,
Herman Melville's Moby-Dick,
Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and
Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Most of the main writers associated with the American Renaissance were actually rather unknown during this time and had small followings.