THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

A Literary Coming of Age

1840 - 1860

English Critic – Sydney Smith

Literature…the Americans have none…in the four corners of the globe, who reads an American book?!

True American Literary Giants Emerge

Herman Melville Nathaniel

Hawthorne Ralph Waldo

Emerson Henry David

Thoreau Edgar Allan Poe

The Rise of Periodicals

The Dial Harper’s Magazine The New York

Times The Atlantic

Monthly

The American Renaissance

American culture came into its own American literature distanced itself

from the conventional forms of European literature

The 1840-1860 period produced more literary masterpieces than any other time in American literature

The American Renaissance

New England became known for intellectual inquiry

Lyceums provided knowledge, teaching, discourse, and debate

New England was the center of reform movements in education, abolition, and women’s rights

The American Renaissance

Utopian projects grew in popularity New Englanders sought to create a

more perfect society Ralph Waldo Emerson, through his

writing and lectures, helped inspire new ways of thinking

American Transcendentalism

Transcendental philosophy has its roots in the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant

Transcendentalism believes that ultimate true is found by transcending, or going beyond/above, normal human experience through use of intuitive thought

American Transcendentalism

Emerson introduced the philosophy of transcendentalism to Americans

Emerson saw Plato’s idealism in modern transcendentalism

American transcendentalists believed in human perfectibility

American Transcendentalism

Everything, including humans, are part of the Divine Soul

Oneness with the natural world leads one to the spiritual or ideal world

Intuition can lead one to an understanding of self and God

Self-reliance and individualism overrule authority, custom, and tradition

Spontaneous feelings and intuition, not the intellectual or rational mind should be followed

American Transcendentalism

Emerson was the Father of American Transcendentalism

He felt the key to transcendentalist thought was the intuition

Intuition is our ability to know things spontaneously through emotions, rather than through an intellectual process

American Transcendentalism

Optimism is at the heart of Emerson’s transcendentalism

Emerson felt humans could find God directly in nature

Since God is in all nature, God is within us, too

Emerson called this concept the Divine Soul, or the oversoul

The Anti-Transcendentalists

Herman Melville Nathaniel

Hawthorne Edgar Allan Poe

The Anti-Transcendentalists

These three men were also known as the Dark Romantics

Despite their critical approach to transcendentalism, they had much in common with this philosophy

The believed in the symbolism in nature, but did not see nature as necessarily good

The Anti-Transcendentalists

They explored the guilt associated with our Puritan ancestry

They explored the conflicts between good and evil in humans

They explored the psychological effects of sin, guilt, madness, derangement