American Renaissance (literature)

This period in American Literature ran from about 1830 to around the Civil War. A central term in American studies, the American Renaissance was for awhile considered synonymous with American Romanticism and was closely associated with Transcendentalism.

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. Walter Channing in a November 1815 issue of the North American Review called for the people to form "a literature of our own," which was later echoed by other literary critics. 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 become the identity of writers worthy of American literature. From this wave of literary nationalism the American Renaissance can be seen as being born.

There are many criticisms associated with the American Renaissance, and some critics even question if it ever actually took place. One of the most prominent criticisms being that authors during this period are seen as simply taking styles and ideas from past movements and culture and reforming them into new, contemporary works.

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. There is also criticism that women authors and women's issues were generally left out of discussion and publication.

The notion of an American Renaissance has been criticized for overemphasizing a small number of white male writers and artifacts of high culture. 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."

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