The American Renaissance

1. The American Renaissance A literary coming of age 1840-1860

2. The American Renaissance • In the mid 1800’s, it was not clear whether America would ever produce a writer as good as William Shakespeare. • Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville thought that we could, and wrote that Americans should support American authors.

3. A literary coming of age • In the mid 19th century, writers like Hawthorne, Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau produced some of the early masterpieces of American Literature. • The Americans called this time a renaissance, comparing it to the European Renaissance (a period of tremendous artistic and intellectual growth). • It was really more of a “coming of age,” as America was finally finding ways to compare to other literature around the world.

4. Ralph Waldo Emerson • Much of this burst of American literature can be attributed to a focus on self-improvement and intellectual inquiry taking place in New England. • Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the primary forces behind this flowering of culture. • He helped inspire numerous reform movements that aimed to improve public education, end slavery, elevate the status of women, and generally improve social conditions.

5. The Transcendental Club • Numerous utopian projects were developed in the 1840’s – plans for creating a perfect society. • Emerson belonged to a club of Transcendentalists. • Transcendentalism was based on the philosophy of idealism, as well as the ideas of previous American thinkers. • Transcendentalists viewed Nature as a doorway to a mystical world holding important truths.

6. A Transcendentalist’s View of the World • Everything in the world (including human beings) is a reflection of the Divine Soul. • The physical facts of the natural world are a doorway to the spiritual or ideal world. • People can use their intuition to behold God’s spirit revealed in nature or their own souls. • Self-reliance and individualism must outweigh external authority and blind conformity to custom and tradition. • Spontaneous feelings and intuition are superior to deliberate intellectualism and rationality.

7. Emerson’s optimistic outlook • Emerson believed in the power of intuition. • Intuition is our ability to learn directly without conscious use of reasoning. • He emphasized the importance of each individual. • He had an optimistic outlook – he believed that each of us could access God and do the right thing if we trusted ourselves and not society.

8. The Dark Romantics • The flip side to Emerson’s optimistic coin came in the form of the Dark Romantics – Melville, Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. • These writers acknowledged the existence of sin, pain, and evil in human life.