AML 3311 - Spring 2026 - Kilgore

Why was so much groundbreaking 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 historically significant texts in today’s expanded canon were also published during the same time frame—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), and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1854). In a survey of “major figures” from 1850 to 1855, we will work to understand this literary revolution by looking at the historical, political, and social context of every text we read.