The American Literary Renaissance Reconsidered

In-person only

For registration, contact the Cornwall CT Library

In the 1940s, Harvard scholar F. O. Matthiessen reinvented U. S. literary history by resurrecting the almost forgotten writers from the years before the Civil War: Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman. Matthiessen’s roll call of the greats still dominates much of what we see as the move from the early Republic to the Civil War crack-up in 1861. However, Matthiessen’s scholarship omitted swaths of writers who didn’t fit his notion of Transcendentalism. In this literary seminar, we’ll take our cue from his work but expand his cast of authors by including other voices, broadening the scope of what it meant to be an U. S. citizen in the fateful years before the chaos.

Session #1: Walt Whitman, LEAVES OF GRASS, 1855 edition, the first poem (“I celebrate myself. . . .”—skip the Preface)