AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Galaxy Books) by Francis Otto Matthiessen ISBN: 0-19-500759-X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1968 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $32.50

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: An American Literary Studies Classic
Comment: This is THE foundational text for anyone interested in the one of the most important (if not THE most important) periods in U.S. literary/cultural history. Published in the early 1940s, this book was a groundbreaker and a milestone in that it helped establish the idea of an "American" literature at a time when most academics scoffed at such an idea, believing that U.S. novelists, poets, and essayists were inferior to and/or derivative of Anglo-European authors.

Matthiessen is very much concerned with the idea of a native literature, and connects his own project with the concern of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman over this notion--the idea that America could stand on its own, apart from Europe, artistically and intellectually, as an independent cultural force to be reckoned with (for this reason he does not include Poe, whom M. views as outside the main stream of American culture and essentially aristocratic and European, rather than democratic and American, in his outlook).

Elaborating upon the relationship of the Puritan's spiritual/intellectual/aesthetic concerns to similar (if secularized) concerns to the intellectual preoccupations of mid-19th-century writers, M. makes his case that the roughly contemporaneous achievements of Emerson, THoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman represented a true "American Renaissance" following the earlier, more austere periods of Puritanism and the Enlightenment.

In the last 15 years or so, scholars and critics, like William V. Spanos and the New AMericanists, have begun to turn a more critical eye toward M.'s foundational text, focusing on the problematic political implications of the book's valorization of American exceptionalism and its complicity in COld War ideology. And David Reynolds has made a compelling case for the close relationship of these "great authors" to the popular culture of their day, a relationship M. largely refused to acknowledge.

These are legitimate concerns and valid arguments. In spite of the flaws in _American Renaissance_, however, it is a beautiful book, written with great insight into some of the most confounding (but nonetheless magnificent) texts ever produced. Matthiessen illuminates works like _Moby Dick_, _Leaves of Grass_, and "The Divinity School Address" with such clarity and intelligence that you can't help but be swayed and spellbound. It is a refreshing, if slightly nostalgic, break from the torturous, cold, and impersonal prose of the poststructuralists. If you are a student of American culture, you owe it to yourself to read this book. It will make an indelible impression upon you.

Similar Books:

	Title: Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville by David S. Reynolds ISBN: 0674065654 Publisher: Harvard University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1989 List Price(USD): $24.95
	Title: Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie A. Fiedler ISBN: 1564781631 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.95
	Title: The American Novel and Its Tradition by Richard Volney Chase ISBN: 080182303X Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1980 List Price(USD): $20.95
	Title: Studies in Classic American Literature (Twentieth Century Classics S.) by D. H. Lawrence ISBN: 0140183779 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 1991 List Price(USD): $12.95
	Title: American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century by Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis ISBN: 0226476812 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1959 List Price(USD): $13.00