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1 - Inventing American literature

from LITERARY CRITICISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Sacvan Bercovitch
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Summary

The publication in 1941 of Harvard professor and scholar-critic F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman was an epochal event in the history of American literary studies. It summarized and extended work on American writers that had been underway for several decades and laid out a rich array of themes about language, literature, and culture for scholars and teachers to develop and refine in the years ahead.

Matthiessen's book was compelling in literary terms: it dramatized connections between American writers of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s and seventeenth-century masters of English prose and illuminated the myths, symbols, and theories of language that organized Walden, Leaves of Grass, and Moby-Dick. It proved all the more inspiring because of the sense of mission that motivated it; as Matthiessen (1902–50) explained in his preface, he sought to “repossess” a “literature for our democracy” that would enable readers to feel “the challenge of our still undiminished resources”. Matthiessen made the study of American literature an activity resonant with the patriotic spirit of reform. He led American scholars backward in time so that they could then return, enlightened and vitalized, for the labor of reimagining and reforming the present.

American Renaissance is such a constitutive fact that one can hardly conceive of American literary/critical life without it. But while American Renaissance now seems weighted with inevitability – its innovative terms became everyday terms that scholars relied upon, and later contested – it was a revelation, a moment of intellectual and spiritual awakening, for its first readers.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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  • Inventing American literature
  • Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book: The Cambridge History of American Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521301091.018
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  • Inventing American literature
  • Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book: The Cambridge History of American Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521301091.018
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Inventing American literature
  • Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book: The Cambridge History of American Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521301091.018
Available formats
×