American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman

Rating:
Summary: A great work of American scholarship
Review: The American Renaissance 1850-1855 was the time in which American Literature truly came into greatness. Melville( Moby Dick 1851) Whitman ( Leaves of Grass 1855) Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. Matthiessen identifies the phenomenom understands that this is the real birth- note of American literature not simply as an insular provincial form but as a world- waking work. He writes with great understanding of the works themselves.
It has been many years since I read this work in graduate- school but I have no doubt it holds up , despite the waves of various critical schools that have tried to undermine its authority.
It is as literary criticism a great work which identifies and interprets great creative works.
It is an essential item in the American library , and a real help to anyone who wants to understand one of the great moments in the history of world- literature.

Rating:
Summary: An American Literary Studies Classic
Review: This is THE foundational text for anyone interested in the one of the most important (if not THE most important) periods in U.S. literary/cultural history. Published in the early 1940s, this book was a groundbreaker and a milestone in that it helped establish the idea of an "American" literature at a time when most academics scoffed at such an idea, believing that U.S. novelists, poets, and essayists were inferior to and/or derivative of Anglo-European authors.

Matthiessen is very much concerned with the idea of a native literature, and connects his own project with the concern of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman over this notion--the idea that America could stand on its own, apart from Europe, artistically and intellectually, as an independent cultural force to be reckoned with (for this reason he does not include Poe, whom M. views as outside the main stream of American culture and essentially aristocratic and European, rather than democratic and American, in his outlook).

Elaborating upon the relationship of the Puritan's spiritual/intellectual/aesthetic concerns to similar (if secularized) concerns to the intellectual preoccupations of mid-19th-century writers, M. makes his case that the roughly contemporaneous achievements of Emerson, THoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman represented a true "American Renaissance" following the earlier, more austere periods of Puritanism and the Enlightenment.

In the last 15 years or so, scholars and critics, like William V. Spanos and the New AMericanists, have begun to turn a more critical eye toward M.'s foundational text, focusing on the problematic political implications of the book's valorization of American exceptionalism and its complicity in COld War ideology. And David Reynolds has made a compelling case for the close relationship of these "great authors" to the popular culture of their day, a relationship M. largely refused to acknowledge.

These are legitimate concerns and valid arguments. In spite of the flaws in _American Renaissance_, however, it is a beautiful book, written with great insight into some of the most confounding (but nonetheless magnificent) texts ever produced. Matthiessen illuminates works like _Moby Dick_, _Leaves of Grass_, and "The Divinity School Address" with such clarity and intelligence that you can't help but be swayed and spellbound. It is a refreshing, if slightly nostalgic, break from the torturous, cold, and impersonal prose of the poststructuralists. If you are a student of American culture, you owe it to yourself to read this book. It will make an indelible impression upon you.