LITR 5535: American Romanticism, University of Houston-Clear Lake

 What is meant by “the American Renaissance?”

 Literary historians have traditionally recognized the decades before the American Civil War (the 1820s through the 1860s) as “the Romantic period in American literature,” which occurred about a generation after the Romantic movement in European literature. (English Romanticism--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and others--is traditionally defined as the period between 1789 and 1832.)

            The name "the American Renaissance" came from the 1941 book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman by F. O. Matthiessen. (PS 201 / M3 / 1968 in UHCL library stacks)

While not denying the Romantic aspects of this period, Matthiessen redefined the period as the “first maturity” of American literature, in which masterpieces of the USA achieved a status comparable to those of the "European Renaissance" of the 16th & 17th centuries. In this usage, "Renaissance" means “a flowering" or “a culture on the rise."  He limited the American Renaissance to the work of five central figures in a six-year period, 1850-1855, though he also paid brief attention to Emily Dickinson’s work.

Following are the time-frame and the major authors and works of Matthiessen’s American Renaissance:

 

The “alternative” American Renaissance

In recent decades, literary and cultural history have expanded the concept of the American Renaissance to cover a broader range of time (1820-1860, even 1820-1900) and particularly to include more popular and representative authors.

The alternative tradition to the classical American Renaissance that has received the most scholarly attention has been the movement in popular women’s domestic romances that coincided with the classical American Renaissance period:

1850 Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World

1851-2 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

1854 Susan Maria Cummins, The Lamplighter

1855 Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall

 

Examples of scholarship describing this alternative American Renaissance of women’s literature include Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction (Cornell UP, 1977); Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word (1985); Jane P. Tompkins, Sensational Designs (1984). (copies in UHCL's Neumann Library)

Another "American Renaissance" that is drawing increased scholarly attention is the first great period in African American literature, especially in written prose:

1845 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself

1847 Frederick Douglass, The North Star (weekly newspaper, later known as Frederick Douglass's Paper [until 1860]);

1847 William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself

1850 Sojourner Truth, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bondwoman of Olden Time (recorded by Olive Gilbert)

1853 William Wells Brown, Clotel; or the President's Daughter ("first full-length African American novel")

1855 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

1859 Frances E. W. Harper, "Two Offers" (first short story by an African American woman)

1859 Harriet Wilson, Our Nig (first novel by an African American woman)

1861 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Plus many other "slave narratives" and abolitionist writings, speeches, poems, & songs

 

Comparing the classical American Renaissance and the alternate American Renaissance.  (All of these descriptions may be questioned.  They oversimplify categories for the sake of comparison. In fact, the categories frequently overlap.)

 

Classical: “excellence,” refined style, appealed to elite tastes (intellect, humanistic traditions, compositional integrity); usually didn’t sell well on first publication, but eventually well-represented in libraries and reading lists, and stayed in print in school anthologies

 

Alternative: “representative” or “popular”; looser, freer style; appealed to wide tastes (sentiment, religion, sensation); sold well on publication, but most (except Uncle Tom’s Cabin) fell out of print after nineteenth century until feminist scholarship rediscovered and republished them in the late twentieth century. Much of the African American tradition continued to be studied at historically black colleges and universities.

 

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The "American Renaissance" as a cultural movement: As with the European Renaissance, the American Renaissance was marked by the growth of cities, by westward expansion ("Manifest Destiny," including the founding of Texas), by "modernization," especially in terms advances in science, technology, and literacy, and also by a reactionary interest in popular religion and in the occult.