THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

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THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

• A Literary Coming of Age
• 1840 - 1860

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English Critic Sydney Smith

• Literaturethe Americans have nonein the four
  corners of the globe, who reads an American book?!

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True American Literary Giants Emerge

• Herman Melville
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Edgar Allan Poe

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The Rise of Periodicals

• The Dial
• Harpers Magazine
• The New York Times
• The Atlantic Monthly

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The American Renaissance

• American culture came into its own
• American literature distanced itself from the
  conventional forms of European literature
• The 1840-1860 period produced more literary
  masterpieces than any other time in American
  literature

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The American Renaissance

• New England became known for intellectual inquiry
• Lyceums provided knowledge, teaching, discourse,
  and debate
• New England was the center of reform movements in
  education, abolition, and womens rights

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The American Renaissance

• Utopian projects grew in popularity
• New Englanders sought to create a more perfect
  society
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, through his writing and
  lectures, helped inspire new ways of thinking

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American Transcendentalism

• Transcendental philosophy has its roots in the
  German philosopher, Immanuel Kant
• Transcendentalism believes that ultimate true is
  found by transcending, or going beyond/above,
  normal human experience through use of intuitive
  thought

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American Transcendentalism

• Emerson introduced the philosophy of
  transcendentalism to Americans
• Emerson saw Platos idealism in modern
  transcendentalism
• American transcendentalists believed in human
  perfectibility

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American Transcendentalism

• Everything, including humans, are part of the
  Divine Soul
• Oneness with the natural world leads one to the
  spiritual or ideal world
• Intuition can lead one to an understanding of
  self and God
• Self-reliance and individualism overrule
  authority, custom, and tradition
• Spontaneous feelings and intuition, not the
  intellectual or rational mind should be followed

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American Transcendentalism

• Emerson was the Father of American
  Transcendentalism
• He felt the key to transcendentalist thought was
  the intuition
• Intuition is our ability to know things
  spontaneously through emotions, rather than
  through an intellectual process

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American Transcendentalism

• Optimism is at the heart of Emersons
  transcendentalism
• Emerson felt humans could find God directly in
  nature
• Since God is in all nature, God is within us, too
• Emerson called this concept the Divine Soul, or
  the oversoul

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The Anti-Transcendentalists

• Herman Melville
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Edgar Allan Poe

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The Anti-Transcendentalists

• These three men were also known as the Dark
  Romantics
• Despite their critical approach to
  transcendentalism, they had much in common with
  this philosophy
• The believed in the symbolism in nature, but did
  not see nature as necessarily good

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The Anti-Transcendentalists

• They explored the guilt associated with our
  Puritan ancestry
• They explored the conflicts between good and evil
  in humans
• They explored the psychological effects of sin,
  guilt, madness, derangement