The period before the American Civil War, which F.O. Matthiessen would celebrate as the ”American Renaissance” in 1941, is one of the most productive and exciting periods in the literary and cultural history of the United States. Among others, it boasted William Wells Brown, Lydia Maria Child, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Brent Jacobs, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. This class will combine literary analysis with socio-cultural history, discuss the relationship between the literature of the center and that from the periphery, and take a look at the contributions to American literary history by female writers. While Matthiessen’s ”American Renaissance” excludes authors who are not white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) and male, we will focus on the marginalized but loud voices of WASP and Black women authors during a period of unprecedented socio-political challenge, transformation, and, ultimately, open warfare.
During class, we will mainly approach the texts in our corpus from the perspectives of New Historicism, Critical Race Theory, and Gender Studies.
- Lehrende/r: Corinna Lenhardt