The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance

This volume offers a new introduction to the American Renaissance, exploring many of the key themes, genres, and social and cultural contexts that inform the best new scholarship in the field.

Christopher N. Phillips (Edited by)

9781108420914, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 March 2018

272 pages, 7 b/w illus.
23.6 x 15.6 x 2 cm, 0.51 kg

'… excellent … The contributors are expert authorities on their subjects, and their footnotes indicate a robust engagement with both classic and recent works of American literary scholarship.' John Hay, The New England Quarterly

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.

Subject Areas: Literary companions, book reviews & guides [DSRC], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]