front cover of Above the American Renaissance
Above the American Renaissance
David S. Reynolds and the Spiritual Imagination in American Literary Studies
Harold K. Bush
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
Above the American Renaissance takes David S. Reynolds's classic study Beneath the American Renaissance as a model and a provocation to consider how language and concepts broadly defined as spiritual are essential to understanding nineteenth-century American literary culture. In the 1980s, Reynolds's scholarship and methodology enlivened investigations of religious culture, and since then, for reasons that include a rising respect for interdisciplinarity and the aftershocks of the 9/11 attacks, religion in literature has become a major area of inquiry for Americanists. In essays that reconsider and contextualize Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Abraham Lincoln, and others, this volume captures the vibrancy of spiritual considerations in American literary studies and points a way forward within literary and spiritual investigations.

In addition to the editors and David S. Reynolds, contributors include Jeffrey Bilbro, Dawn Coleman, Jonathan A. Cook, Tracy Fessenden, Zachary Hutchins, Richard Kopley, Mason I. Lowance Jr., John Matteson, Christopher N. Phillips, Vivian Pollak, Michael Robertson, Gail K. Smith, Claudia Stokes, and Timothy Sweet.
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Not Altogether Human
Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance
Hardack Richard
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012

front cover of Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts
Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts
Transition States in the American Renaissance
Bruce Mills
University of Missouri Press, 2005
In Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts, Bruce Mills examines how the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Margaret Fuller draw from representations of and theories concerning animal magnetism, somnambulism, or hypnosis rendered in newspapers, literary and medical journals, pamphlets, and books. Although some recent studies have begun to consider the relevance of animal magnetism or mesmerism to nineteenth-century literature and culture, this book moves more deeply into what might be termed the canon of mesmeric study.
            Through the works of Poe and Fuller, Mills argues, we can more fully understand the era’s response to dynamic cultural forces. Rather than simply using “American” subject matter as demanded in early calls for a national literature, Poe and Fuller, as well as Lydia Maria Child and Walt Whitman, increasingly rooted their epistemology and literary forms in psychological findings that accommodated the fluidity of democratic realities and principles.
            For many influential writers of the period, then, the call for a national literature had evolved into attention to the state of one’s own mind, to those manifestations of the highest states of mind, and to the effects of literary choices on readers’ psychological states. In the history and philosophy of mesmeric consciousness, Poe, Fuller, and others discerned those principles that offered the promise of answering a central question: how does one create an aesthetic that effectively explores, accommodates, and fosters the harmonious interplay of transition states in a democratic culture?
            Given its content and approach, Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts should evoke interest among Poe and Fuller scholars as well as teachers, students, and historians intent upon understanding the emerging democratic sensibilities of the American Renaissance.
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Reconstituting the American Renaissance
Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation
Jay Grossman
Duke University Press, 2003
Challenging the standard periodization of American literary history, Reconstituting the American Renaissance reinterprets the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and the relationship of these two authors to each other. Jay Grossman argues that issues of political representation—involving vexed questions of who shall speak and for whom—lie at the heart of American political and literary discourse from the revolutionary era through the Civil War. By taking the mid-nineteenth-century period, traditionally understood as marking the advent of literary writing in the United States, and restoring to it the ways in which Emerson and Whitman engaged with eighteenth-century controversies, rhetorics, and languages about political representation, Grossman departs significantly from arguments that have traditionally separated American writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Reconstituting the American Renaissance describes how Emerson and Whitman came into the period of their greatest productivity with different conceptions of the functions and political efficacy of the word in the world. It challenges Emerson’s position as Whitman’s necessary precursor and offers a cultural history that emphasizes the two writers’ differences in social class, cultural experience, and political perspective. In their writings between 1830 and 1855, the book finds contrasting conceptions of the relations between the “representative man” and the constituencies to whom, and for whom, he speaks. Reconstituting the American Renaissance opens up the canonical relationship between Emerson and Whitman and multiplies the historical and discursive contexts for understanding their published and unpublished works.

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Romantic Cyborgs
Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance
Klaus Benesch
University of Massachusetts Press
Literary critics have long regarded the rejection of technology as a distinguishing feature of American Romanticism. Yet as Klaus Benesch shows in this insightful study, the attitude of antebellum writers toward the advent of the machine age was far more complicated than often supposed. Although fraught with tension, the relationship between professional authorship and evolving technology reflected a pattern of adjustment rather than opposition, as writers sought to redefine their place within a culture that increasingly valued the engineer and the scientist. According to Benesch, major writers such as Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, and Rebecca Harding Davis recognized technology as a powerful engine of social change—a driving force that threatened to subordinate their creative faculties to the inexorable dictates of industrial production. In response, they conjured up "cybernetic" self-representations that attempted to preserve the autonomy of the individual author in the face of ongoing technological encroachment. These biomechanical images helped writers construct a hybrid identity that reconciled new modes of technological production with older, more organic models of professional writing. In the end, Benesch argues, Romantic literary discourse is marked as much by admiration for the technological as by strains of resentment and cultural anxiety about its negative effects. As such, it prefigures in important and previously unacknowledged ways the modernist and postmodernist sensibilities that would follow.
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