Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Impressively informed and heroic . . . An original piece of work that gives the literary canon and its contexts a good shaking." --Justin Kaplan, The New York Times Book Review
"A monumental revisionist study of 19th-century American literature that challenges both popular critical conceptions of Emerson, Whitman, Poe, et al., as well as fashionable schools of literary analysis. . . . A tremendous work of scholarship." --Kirkus
"More than 40 years ago the critic F.O. Matthiessen published The American Renaissance, his landmark study of the flowering of American writing in the years before the Civil War . . . David Reynolds's large, richly suggestive book expands Matthiessen's thesis, not only adding Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson as central figures but also focusing on the forgotten mass of popular literature of the time." --The Economist
"What Reynolds challenges in a book of remarkable verve, comparable in length and richness to Matthiessen's book but otherwise very different, is the view that the foremost figures of the nation's literary past were isolated and estranged from the American mainstream...Reynolds has excellent things to say about all of his chief writers...[He] offers fresh insights into the deliberate paradoxes of democratic republicanism...Social historians will gain intriguing new material from this book." --Marcus Cunliffe, American Historical Review
"Beneath the American Renaissance is a welcome contribution to American literary scholarship, much of which has attempted to preserve a cultural hegemony . . . Reynolds merits praise for his painstaking survey of popular writing and the brilliance with which he locates elements of popular culture in the major texts." --American Literature
"A rich, grand, transforming book, an inspired feat of literary and historical imagination." --Kenneth Silverman, New York University
"This is one of those rare books whose accomplishment equals its ambition....Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance should be read by all serious students of American culture...I believe that Beneath the American Renaissance will stand beside F.O. Matthiesen's great American Renaissance (1941) as a foundation to our knowledge about this seminal period in American cultural history. --Philip F. Gura, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
David S. Reynolds is Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include
Walt Whitman's America, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, John Brown, Abolitionist, and
Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America.
Table of Contents
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