Examining the most frequently taught works by key writers of the American Renaissance, including Poe, Emerson, Fuller, Douglass, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Jacobs, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson, this engaging and accessible book offers the crucial historical, social, and political contexts in which they must be studied. Larry J. Reynolds usefully groups authors together for more lively and fruitful discussion and engages with current as well as historical theoretical debates on the area. The book includes essential biographical and historical information to situate and contextualize the literature, and incorporates major relevant criticism in each chapter. Recommended readings for further study, along with a list of works cited, conclude each chapter.

In Ruthless Democracy, Timothy Powell reimagines the canonical origins of "American" identity by juxtaposing authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau with Native American, African American, and women authors. Taking his title from Melville, Powell identifies an unresolvable conflict between America's multicultural history and its violent will to monoculturalism. Powell challenges existing perceptions of the American Renaissance--the period at the heart of the American canon and its evolutions--by expanding the parameters of American identity. Drawing on the critical traditions of cultural studies and new historicism, Powell invents a new critical paradigm called "historical multiculturalism." Moving beyond the polarizing rhetoric of the culture wars, Powell grounds his multicultural conception of American identity in careful historical analysis. Ruthless Democracy extends the cultural and geographical boundaries of the American Renaissance beyond the northeast to Indian Territory, Alta California, and the transnational sphere that Powell calls the American Diaspora. Arguing for the inclusion of new works, Powell envisions the canon of the American Renaissance as a fluid dialogue of disparate cultural voices.

The term American Renaissance designates a period in our nation's history when the literary "classics" appeared--works "original" enough to mark a beginning for America's literary history. But the American Renaissance, Donald Pease argues in his introduction, does not belong to the nation's secular history so much as it denotes a rebirth from it: "Independent of the time kept by secular history, the American Renaissance keeps what we could call global Renaissance time--the sacred time a nation claims to renew, when it claims its cultural place as a great nation existing within a world of great nations. Providing each nation with the terms for cultural greatness denied to secular history, the renaissance' is not an occasion occurring within any specific historical time or place so much as it is a moment of cultural achievement that repeatedly demands to be reborn." The American Renaissance Reconsidered examines this demand for rebirth in terms other than those ordained by the American Renaissance itself. In the seven pieces collected here it is reborn, not outside of, but within America's secular history, as the authors examine anew the period of the American Renaissance -- and the period in which its history was written. Contributing authors are Eric J. Sundquist, Jane P. Tompkins, Louis A. Renza, Jonathan Arac, Donald E. Pease, Walter Benn Michaels, and Allen Grossman.

This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.

The author uses Thomas Robbins' 1820 edition of Mather's work to show how a Puritanical political sentiment prompted American Renaissance writers to address the implications of democracy. Hawthorne, Stoddard, and Stowe used Mather's work to discover the importance of democratic concepts and categori

The 17th volume of Studies continues its tradition of presenting a wide range of scholarly articles. The essays and their authors are: A Calendar of the Letters of Mary Moody Emerson, by Nancy Craig Simmons; James Fenimore Cooper Goes to Sea: Two Unpublished Letters by a Family Friend, by Alan Taylor; The Temple School Journals of George and Martha Kuhn, by Alfred G. Litton and Joel Myerson; Bryant and Poe: A Reacquaintance, by William Cullen Bryant II; Bronson Alcott and Jacob Boehme, by Arthur Versluis; Bronson Alcott's 'Journal for 1838' (Part One), by Larry A. Carlson; Poe, Anna Cora Mowatt and T. Tennyson Twinkle, by James M. Hutchisson; Hawthorne's Moral Theatres and the Post-Puritan Stage, by Kurt Eisen; Confucius at Walden Pond: Thoreau's Unpublished Confucian Translations, by Hongbo Tan; Melville's Copy of Dante: Evidence of New Connections Between the Commedia and Mardi by Lea Bertani Vozar Newman; Whittier's 'Snowbound': 'The Circle of Our Hearth' and the Discourse on Domesticity, by James E. Rocks'; and an annotated list of the year's book publications, by Alfred G. Litton.