AML 3311 Fall 2020

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 since opened up Matthiessen’s exclusively white, male club of “renaissance” works to the contemporaneous literary production of women writers and authors of color, it remains a curious fact that many of the most influential texts in today’s revised canon of US literary history were also published in the same half-decade—among them, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), 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’ My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). In a survey of US literature, 1850-1855, we will work together to explain 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.