![]() ![]() Matthiessen, writing during the heyday of the New Criticism, emphasized close readings of a restricted canon of literary works with an eye to exploring the ambiguities, paradoxes, and ironies of works that, from this vantage point, were most notable for their thematic density and stylistic innovation. Critics have since added two other authors-Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson-to Matthiessen’s five, and the period is commonly understood to have begun with the publication of Emerson’s pamphlet Nature in 1836 and to have lasted at least until the mid-1860s, when Dickinson produced her major poetry. ![]() No period in American literary history has yielded so rich an array of writings. Matthiessen, who identified the period from 1850 to 1855 as an “extraordinarily concentrated moment of literary expression.” 1 These years saw the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and other writings Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The phrase “American Renaissance” was introduced in 1941 by the critic F. These oppressed groups produced a literary corpus of their own that was once neglected but that has assumed a significant place in the American canon. Integrating themes and images from this variegated popular culture, the major authors also projected in their works the paradoxes of a nation that promoted both individualism and union, that touted freedom but tolerated chattel slavery, that preached equality but witnessed widening class divisions and the oppression of women, blacks, and Native Americans. ![]() This transnational influence mingled with the styles and idioms of an emerging popular culture that was distinctively American, divided between conventional, sentimental-domestic writings and sensational or grotesquely humorous ones. The American authors were strongly influenced by foreign literature, from the ancients to the Romantics. ![]() When this metaphysical impulse collided with 19th-century skepticism and secularism, the result was literature that ranged from the exhilarating to the disquieting, from Emerson’s affirmations to the ambiguities of Hawthorne and Melville. Calvinist preachers from John Cotton through Jonathan Edwards had devoted their lives to probing ultimate questions about death, God, and human nature. Americans probed these themes with special intensity largely because of the nation’s Puritan heritage. Pessimistic ones included haunted minds, perverse or criminal impulses, doubt, and ambiguity. Optimistic themes included nature’s miraculous beauty, spiritual truths behind the physical world, the primacy of the poetic imagination, and the potential divinity of each individual. A distinction is traditionally made between the so-called light or optimistic authors (Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman) and the dark or gloomy ones (Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville), with Emily Dickinson, occupying a middle ground, shifting between the light and the dark. The richest period in American literary history, the American Renaissance (1830–1865) produced Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson. ![]()
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