American renaissance

This article discusses a style of literature, for other American Renaissance meanings see American Renaissance (disambiguation) .

American Renaissance is a term coined in 1941 by FO Matthiessen for literary studies , more precisely American Studies , for the period from 1830 to 1865 in the history of literature.

Literary history and socio-cultural basics

The most important representatives of the American Renaissance include Herman Melville , Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman , Edgar Allan Poe , Emily Dickinson and the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson , Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller .

During this period between 1830 and 1865, many of the poems and especially the short stories and novels that are considered major masterpieces of American literature were written, including world-famous novels such as Moby-Dick by Herman Melville or The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau's diary-like book Walden . Numerous stories that are still considered classics today, such as Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener or Benito Cereno as well as Hawthorne's collection of short stories Twice-Told Tales or his story My Kinsman, Major Molineux , were written in this literary era, as was Walt Whitman's famous lyrical magnum opus , the poetry cycle Leaves of Grass .

In traditional literary-historical or literary-scientific discourses, a distinction is usually made between carefree or optimistic authors, the so-called " light or optimistic authors " (Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman), and gloomy or pessimistic (" dark or gloomy ") writers, to which in particular Poe, Hawthorne and Melville are counted. Emily Dickinson occupies an intermediate position in this classification, with her alternation between more cheerful and darker forms of expression. The authors assigned to the group of optimists in such a categorization therefore try in their literary work in particular the wondrous beauty of nature as the source of divine revelation, the spiritual truths beyond physical-material reality and the primary importance of the poetic imagination as well as that potentially in everyone To fathom the intrinsic divinities of the individual , while the authors classified as pessimistic prefer to address the gruesome and the horrible and create characters who are haunted by ghostly thoughts and perverse or criminal impulses (" haunted minds, perverse or criminal impulses ") . Accordingly, thematically in her works, aspects of doubt or concern as well as the contradiction or ambiguity of man and his nature (“ doubt, and ambiguity ”) come to the fore.

In exploring or deepening them, America’s national Puritan heritage finds its further expression. The pressing ultimate questions of previous Calvinist preachers from John Cotton to Jonathan Edwards about death, about God and the essence of human nature meet the skepticism and secularism of the 19th century and lead to a literary movement that is both exhilarating as also expresses the disturbing, of Emerson's positive assertions of the creative power of man in harmony with nature, his freedom and self-determination as the engine of renewal on the one hand and the ambiguous, ambivalent views and perspectives of Hawthorne and Melville on the other.

The expression "American Renaissance" as such goes back to the European Renaissance , meaning a phase of artistic and social change.

The authors of the "American Renaissance" were for the most part strongly influenced by European literature from antiquity to romanticism ; What was characteristic, however, was the connection between this transnational character and the endeavor to create a clearly audible development of an independent literature in a specifically American form, both in terms of content and narrative as well as linguistic and stylistic aspects.

From a traditional literary historical point of view, this period of the 19th century between the 30s and 60s is regarded as the first great climax of American literature, in which the cultural independence of the United States is shown for the first time and the connection to the level of world literature is achieved. At the same time, in this so-called "Golden Age of Literature in the New World ", the special characteristics of American culture and identity emerge clearly.

According to this view, the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne and Melville in particular establish a canon of classics that literarily express the national experience of the historical new beginning with all its contradictions or ambivalences as an innovative experiment in human history. Like the real pioneers ( pioneers ) on the western border to civilization ( frontier ) show these authors therefore a comparable literary pioneer spirit that they can postpone artistic innovation with the same energy the limits.

After this presentation, the young nation finds its own, unmistakable voice and literary-symbolic self-definition for the first time, in which the continuity of the great cultural achievements to date, as before in the European Renaissance, is combined with a specifically American claim to epochal emancipation and radically new. With its metaphor of awakening and awakening, the literature of the American Renaissance consequently frees itself from its heteronomy and reflects on the power of a new democratic culture that is supported both by people as individuals and by the nation as a whole. This awakening is linked, as it were, with the American continent as a whole. The literature of this epoch thus becomes the prophetic symbol of the “New Age”, in which America's world-historical mission as an obvious destiny ( Manifest Destiny ) is fulfilled.

Regardless of this common, as it were, symbolic function of the history of the literature of the American Renaissance , it unites, in a split form, rather conventional, sentimental, inner-American writings on the one hand, and more far-reaching, grotesquely humorous forms of expression on the other.

In bringing together or integrating themes and images from an extremely complex, new national folk culture, the more important American authors of this time deal with the paradoxes of a nation that propagated both individualism and unanimous cohesion and collective unity, a nation that preached freedom but at the same time tolerated slavery , preached equality as an innate human right, but at the same time experienced widening social and ethnic differences or tensions as well as the oppression of women, blacks and indigenous Indians, the so-called Native Americans .

Criticism and New Perspectives in Young Literature Studies

The classical canon founded by Matthiessen is viewed increasingly critically by today's literary scholars, as it includes exclusively male, white authors and excludes writers such as Poe. The literary-historical perspective of the national self-definition is also narrowed one-sidedly to Anglo-Saxon, Protestant authors of the socially dominant WASP group.

In addition, the classics canonized here are by no means only affirmative towards the American project , but sometimes take an extremely critical stance towards the politics, society or culture of this age and are characterized above all by a fundamental disagreement with the predominant American culture and ideology.

Thoreau, for example, tries to show a pacifist- ecological alternative to economic aggressiveness; Hawthorne exposes the false self-righteousness of a guilty America; Melville notices the collapse of fixed self-images or world views and the atomization of society. In his poems, Whitman also defies the Victorian taste that was still prevalent at the time.

Paradoxically , in the texts of these classics it is often precisely their cultural-critical distancing that embodies the specifically American self-image with its basic values ​​of individualism and liberal democracy .

Nevertheless, with the construct of the American Renaissance, a relatively narrowly defined area of ​​highly literary texts was established in the literary historiography of the United States for a long time, which formed the more or less institutionalized basis of American Studies .

In the heyday of New Criticism, Matthiessen limited himself largely to the intrinsic close reading of the works of those five authors, which included his narrow canon of the American Renaissance at the time, and directed his perspective to the exploration of the ambiguities, paradoxes and ironies in those publications which, in his opinion, were characterized by their thematic density and their stylistic innovations.

This work-immanent or formalistic approach was taken up and continued by subsequent critics and literary scholars such as Lionel Trilling , Charles Feidelson Jr., Richard Chase and Richard Poirier, according to which writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville were an outstanding linguistic and stylistic innovation or Transcendence and philosophical depth created in a cultural environment that offered little material for literature. This view of the original lead authors of the American Renaissance as alienated rebels in an unproductive cultural context was subsequently continued by post-structuralist literary critics or literary scholars and the proponents of the New Formalism , who retained their interest in the "text as such" and largely in the social or biographical context faded out.

Only in more recent literary research are areas explicitly excluded from the perspective of gender (gender) or race (race), such as literature written by female authors or the literature of ethnic minorities. Likewise, other types of text such as biographical or political texts and, above all, the broad field of everyday and mass culture are taken into account in the literary and cultural history of this epoch.

This shows that there is not just one center of the American Renaissance in this epoch, but also various centers that cannot simply be reduced to the uniform formula of a culturally identical nation.

literature

• FO Matthiessen: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford University Press , London / New York 1941.
• Larry J. Reynolds: European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance. Yale University Press, New Haven Connecticut / London 1988.
• David S. Reynolds: Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1988. (New edition Oxford University Press, New York 2011)

Web links

• David S. Reynolds: American Renaissance. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature. August 2016.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Matthiessens view of the writers of the American Renaissance initially included Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman; In the following discussion, later critics and literary scholars added Poe and Dickinson to the original canon of these five writers named by Matthiesen. According to today's understanding, the beginning of this literary movement is marked by the publication of Emerson's pamphlet Nature in 1836 and lasted at least into the mid-1860s when Emily Dickenson's major works were published. See David S. Reynolds: American Renaissance. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature. published online in August 2016 at literature.oxfordre.com . Retrieved March 13, 2018.
2. ^ David S. Reynolds: American Renaissance. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature. published online in August 2016 at literature.oxfordre.com . Retrieved March 11, 2018.
3. ^ David S. Reynolds: American Renaissance. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature. published online in August 2016 at literature.oxfordre.com . Retrieved March 11, 2018.
4. ^ David S. Reynolds: American Renaissance. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature. published online in August 2016 at literature.oxfordre.com . Retrieved March 11, 2018.
5. ^ Hubert Zapf : "American Renaissance" and New American Studies. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 85-87, here pp. 85f.
6. ^ David S. Reynolds: American Renaissance. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature. published online in August 2016 at literature.oxfordre.com . Retrieved March 12, 2018.
7. ↑ z. B. William E. Cain: FO Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism. University of Wisconsin Press 1988, pp. 164-168. See online books.google.de . Retrieved January 1, 2015.
8. ↑ See the presentation by Hubert Zapf: "American Renaissance" and New American Studies. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 85-87, here p. 87.
9. ↑ See the presentation by Hubert Zapf: "American Renaissance" and New American Studies. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 85-87, here pp. 85f.
10. ↑ See the presentation by Hubert Zapf: "American Renaissance" and New American Studies. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 85-87, here p. 87.
11. ↑ See also the section Early Critical Approaches in David S. Reynolds: American Renaissance. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature. published online in August 2016 at literature.oxfordre.com . Retrieved March 13, 2018.
12. ↑ See the presentation by Hubert Zapf: "American Renaissance" and New American Studies. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 , pp. 85-87, here p. 87.