American
Renaissance : Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman
by Francis
Otto Matthiessen
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. -- Chuck Grey Jr.
Other Matthiessen titles:
