Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1307841 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 724 pages

Review

"[Matthiessen's] exploration of the haunted mind of Hawthorne, of Emerson's integrity, of the mental hell in which Melville lived, of Whitman's schizophrenia, of Thoreau's chosen solitude, [has] produced a book unequaled in American critical writing."--The New Republic

About the Author
F. O. Matthiessen was a Californian by birth but grew up in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York. Educated both here and abroad, he started teaching in 1927, first at Yale and then at Harvard, where he was Professor of History and Literature. He made the field of American poetry one of his major interests and wrote critical estimates of Emerson, Poe, Eliot, and other contemporary poets. He was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and a Senior Fellow of the Kenyon School of English.

Customer Reviews

THE American Study
It is hard to find a more seminal work on American Literature than American Renaissance. Until today, any self-respecting American Studies scholar or expert for American Literature has to come to terms with this massive shedding of ink on some of the best American texts ever published.
Though I find myself at times lost in the wealth of Mr. Matthiessen's allusions and remarks, especially when he weaves all too great a narrative from the swatches he collected, I remain fascinated with this genuinely passionate account of a harmony where many believed (and still today believe) to hear only cacophony. Suspiciously quiet about his personal leanings and politics (a fact that, with all due respect, could simply not remain untouched by more recent cultural, gender, and Marxist critics), Matthiessen takes us back to an age that holds more of today than we sometimes think, and that already foreshadows in its depth what more superficial ages would later repeat ad nausea.
It is not a novel, nor a Michener book, but if you are seriously interested in 19th century American literature (and he does give Whitman the respect he deserves), this may very well be one of the most readable studies on the subject. Sadly shortcutting Dickinson, Poe, and other authors that are excavated only today, this book still points calmly and self-assuredly to those novels and poems that stand out. All these dead, white men wrote texts that we simply cannot ignore, and whether we love Cervantes, Joyce, DeLillo, whether Tan, Faulkner, Burroughs, or Lacan, we have to see that the whale's whiteness and Walden's silence are with us always.

A great work of American scholarship
The American Renaissance 1850-1855 was the time in which American Literature truly came into greatness. Melville( Moby Dick 1851) Whitman ( Leaves of Grass 1855) Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. Matthiessen identifies the phenomenom understands that this is the real birth- note of American literature not simply as an insular provincial form but as a world- waking work. He writes with great understanding of the works themselves.
It has been many years since I read this work in graduate- school but I have no doubt it holds up , despite the waves of various critical schools that have tried to undermine its authority.
It is as literary criticism a great work which identifies and interprets great creative works.
It is an essential item in the American library , and a real help to anyone who wants to understand one of the great moments in the history of world- literature.