The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Cambridge University Press, 3/31/2018
EAN 9781108431088, ISBN10: 1108431089

Paperback, 274 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English

The American Renaissance has been a foundational concept in American literary history for nearly a century. The phrase connotes a period, as well as an event, an iconic turning point in the growth of a national literature and a canon of texts that would shape American fiction, poetry, and oratory for generations. F. O. Matthiessen coined the term in 1941 to describe the years 1850–1855, which saw the publications of major writings by Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. This Companion takes up the concept of the American Renaissance and explores its origins, meaning, and longevity. Essays by distinguished scholars move chronologically from the formative reading of American Renaissance authors to the careers of major figures ignored by Matthiessen, including Stowe, Douglass, Harper, and Longfellow. The volume uses the best of current literary studies, from digital humanities to psychoanalytic theory, to illuminate an era that reaches far beyond the Civil War and continues to shape our understanding of American literature.

Introduction Christopher N. Phillips
Into the Renaissance
1. Reading the American Renaissance in a Pennsylvania library Christopher N. Phillips
2. Cooper, Simms, and the boys of summer Jeffrey Walker
3. The trouble with the Gothic
Poe, Lippard, and the poetics of critique Russell Sbriglia
4. Emerson and Hawthorne
or, locating the American Renaissance Gavin Jones and Judith Richardson
5. Cosmopolite at home
global Longfellow Christoph Irmscher
Rethinking the Renaissance
6. Sins of the rising generation
religion and the American Renaissance Zachary McLeod Hutchins
7. Uncle Tom's Cabin and the struggle over meaning
from slavery to race Barbara Hochman
8. The (im)possibilities of Indianness
George Copway and the problem of representativity Mark Rifkin
9. The poetess at work Alexandra Socarides
10. Fern, Warner, and the work of sentimentality Jennifer Brady
11. Melville
the ocean and the city Wyn Kelley
Beyond the Renaissance
12. Whitman, in and out of the Renaissance David Haven Blake
13. A Renaissance-self
Frederick Douglass and the art of remaking Zoe Trodd
14. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper 'in the situation of Ishmael' Melba J. Boyd
15. The corner-stones of Heaven
science comes to concord Laura Dassow Walls
Coda
War and the Renaissance Christopher N. Phillips.