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.

The award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance. With its combination of sharp critical insight, engaging observation, and narrative drive, it represents the kind of masterful cultural history for which David Reynolds is known. Here the major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson receive striking, original readings set against the rich backdrop of contemporary popular writing. Now back in print, the volume includes a new foreword by historian Sean Wilentz that reveals the book's impact and influence. A magisterial work of criticism and cultural history, Beneath the American Renaissance will fascinate anyone interested in the genesis of America's most significant literary epoch and the iconic figures who defined it.

In the view of David Leverenz, such nineteenth-century American male writers as Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were influenced more profoundly by the popular model of the entrepreneurial "man of force" than they were by their literary precursors and contemporaries. Drawing on the insights of feminist theory, gender studies, psychoanalytical criticism, and social history, Manhood and the American Renaissance demonstrates that gender pressures and class conflicts played as critical a role in literary creation for the male writers of nineteenth-century America as they did for the women writers. Leverenz interprets male American authors in terms of three major ideologies of manhood linked to the social classes in the Northeast-patrician, artisan, and entrepreneurial. He asserts that the older ideologies of patrician gentility and of artisan independence were being challenged from 1820 to 1860 by the new middle-class ideology of competitive individualism. The male writers of the American Renaissance, patrician almost without exception in their backgrounds and self-expectations, were fascinated yet horrified by the aggressive materialism and the rivalry for dominance they witnessed in the undeferential "new men." In close readings of the works both of well-known male literary figures and of then popular authors such as Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Francis Parkman, Leverenz discovers a repressed center of manhood beset by fears of humiliation and masochistic fantasies. He discerns different patterns in the works of Whitman, with his artisan's background, and Frederick Douglass, who rose from artisan freedom to entrepreneurial power. Emphasizing the interplay of class and gender, Leverenz also considers how women viewed manhood. He concludes that male writers portrayed manhood as a rivalry for dominance, but contemporary female writers saw it as patriarchy. Two chapters contrast the work of the genteel writers Sarah Hale and Caroline Kirkland with the evangelical works of Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. A bold and imaginative work, Manhood and the American Renaissance will enlighten and inspire controversy among all students of American literature, nineteenth-century American history, and the relation of gender and literature.

Newly available, here is the most comprehensive poetry collection from the half-century between 1820 and 1870. “Among anthologies, there is nothing comparable to Paul Kane’s Poetry of the American Renaissance.”—Harold Bloom

This volume explores the state of American culture, offering fair and politically balanced strategies for cultural renewal and promoting cultural health in today's society.

Studies the views of 5 prominent mid-19th century writers on the function and nature of literature and how they applied these views to their works.