Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville

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.

Since its initial publication, David Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance has become a seminal resource for understanding American literature. It ranks alongside classics like F.O. Matthiessen's The American Renaissance, R.W.B. Lewis's The American Adam, and Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations as a book that defined how we apprehend our literary past. With its combination of sharp critical insight, engaging observation, and narrative drive, it represents the kind of masterful cultural history for which Reynolds is now known. Now back in print in an affordable paperback edition that includes a new foreword by Sean Wilentz that recollects the book's impact and influence, a lost gem returns. It is poised to find an appreciative new readership in anyone interested in the genesis of America's most significant literary epoch and the iconic figures-Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville-who defined it.

David S. Reynolds is Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York. He is the author of Walt Whitmans America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Introduction

Part I God's Bow, Man's Arrows: Religion, Reform, and American Literature

Chapter One: The New Religious Style

Chapter Two: The Reform Impulse and the Paradox of Immoral Didacticism

Chapter Three: The Transcendentalists, Whitman, and Popular Reform

Chapter Four: Hawthorne and the Reform Impulse

Chapter Five: Melville's Whited Sepulchres

Part II: Public Poison: Sensationalism and Sexuality

Chapter 6 The Sensational Press and the Rise of Subversive Literature

Chapter 7 The Erotic Imagination

Chapter 8 Poe and Popular Irrationalism

Chapter 9 Hawthorne's Cultural Demons

Chapter 10 Melville's Ruthless Democracy

Chapter 11 Whitman's Transfigured Sensationalism

Part III: Other Amazons: Women's Rights, Women's Wrongs, and the Literary Imagination

Chapter 12: Types of American Womanhood

Chapter 13: Hawthorne's Heroines

Chapter 14 The American Women's Renaissance and Emily Dickinson

Part IV The Grotesque Posture Popular Humor and the American Subversive Style

Chapter 15 The Carnivalization of American Language

Chapter 16 Transcendental Wild Oats

Chapter 17 Whitman's Poetic Humor

Chapter 18 Stylized Laugher in Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville

Epilogue Reconstructive Criticism: Literary Theory and Literary History

Notes

Index