The American Renaissance
As most famously defined by F. O. Matthiessen in his groundbreaking book,The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman(1941), the “American Renaissance” demarcates a period of tremendous literary activity between the 1830s and 1860s that marked the cultivation, for the first time, of a distinctively American literature. For Matthiessen and many other critics, its key figures—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herma...