AML 3311 Spring 2023 Kilgore

Why was so much great US literature published between 1850 and 1855? That’s the question we will try to answer in this course. Over seventy years ago, F. O. Matthiessen coined the term the “American Renaissance” to describe the inventive outpouring of national literature in this half-decade—classics such as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Thoreau’s Walden (1854), and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). While scholars have long since criticized and revised Matthiessen’s exclusively white, male club of “renaissance” writers, it remains a curious fact that many of the most significant texts in today’s expanded canon were also published in the same half-decade—among them, Sojourner Truth’s “I Am a Woman’s Rights” (1851), William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854), Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1854), and Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). In a survey of “major figures,” 1850-1855, we will work to understand this broad literary revolution across US letters. To do so, we will consider the historical context, publishing world, political movements, and aesthetic forms/genre experimentation that situate this body of literature.