AML 5017 Kilgore Spring 2021

Why was so much great US literature published between 1850 and 1855? That’s the question we will explore 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 opened up Matthiessen’s exclusively white, male club of “renaissance” writers to the brilliant literary production of women and people of color, it remains a curious fact that many of the most groundbreaking texts in today’s expanded canon were also published in the same half-decade. Reading a variety of works both popular and unknown, I will make the case that the 1850s represents not a renaissance but a cultural revolution whereby literature took up the mantle of imaginative protest, declaring literary independence against the consolidation of US Empire. We will work together to understand this broad literary revolution across US letters by considering the historical context, publishing world, political movements, and aesthetic forms/genre experimentation that situate this body of literature.

Likely Reading List:

• Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative (185?)
• Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) and “I Am a Woman’s Rights” (1851)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852)
• Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
• William Wells Brown, Clotel (1853)
• Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave (1853) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
• Herman Melville, shorter works including “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), The Encantadas (1854), and Benito Cereno (1855)
• James M. Whitfield, America and Other Poems (1853)
• Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall (1854)
• John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird), The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854)
• Maria Susanna Cummins, The Lamplighter (1854)
• Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854)
• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)