1 - Inventing American literature

Summary

The publication in 1941 of Harvard professor and scholar-critic F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman was an epochal event in the history of American literary studies. It summarized and extended work on American writers that had been underway for several decades and laid out a rich array of themes about language, literature, and culture for scholars and teachers to develop and refine in the years ahead.

Matthiessen's book was compelling in literary terms: it dramatized connections between American writers of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s and seventeenth-century masters of English prose and illuminated the myths, symbols, and theories of language that organized Walden, Leaves of Grass, and Moby-Dick. It proved all the more inspiring because of the sense of mission that motivated it; as Matthiessen (1902–50) explained in his preface, he sought to “repossess” a “literature for our democracy” that would enable readers to feel “the challenge of our still undiminished resources”. Matthiessen made the study of American literature an activity resonant with the patriotic spirit of reform. He led American scholars backward in time so that they could then return, enlightened and vitalized, for the labor of reimagining and reforming the present.

American Renaissance is such a constitutive fact that one can hardly conceive of American literary/critical life without it. But while American Renaissance now seems weighted with inevitability – its innovative terms became everyday terms that scholars relied upon, and later contested – it was a revelation, a moment of intellectual and spiritual awakening, for its first readers.