ENGL405: The American Renaissance

America changed dramatically during this time.

Read this introductory overview of antebellum American literature's relationship to technological development and industrialization during the era.

Orestes Brownson penned one of the most powerful critiques of capitalism in the antebellum United States, "Laboring Classes". Although Brownson was a leading transcendentalist, representing its more social-activist wing (as opposed, perhaps, to Emerson), in the years following the publication of this essay, he became increasingly conservative, renouncing his radical past and transcendentalism and converting to Catholicism. Read this essay and take notes on Brownson's ideas.

The election of 1824 was significant for being the only presidential election thus far where the winner of the most electoral votes did not win the election. Read this article to learn how this election's outcome set the stage for those that followed.

Read this short overview of the emergence of consumerism in nineteenth-century America.

There was relatively little immigration into the United States from 1770 to 1830. Large-scale immigration resumed in the 1830s from Britain, Ireland, Germany, and other parts of western Europe, and the pace of immigration accelerated in the 1840s and 1850s. Most immigrants were attracted by the cheap farmland available in the United States, and some were artisans and skilled factory workers attracted by the first stage of industrialization. Poor economic conditions in Europe drove many people to seek land, freedom, opportunity, and jobs in the new nation of America. Read through these sections to think about how immigration influenced the new social order being formed during this time. Think also about how these groups of immigrants might have faced racism and discrimination upon their entrance into the US.

This essay details the changes in newspaper production with the rise of the Penny Press and also explains the emergence of urban mass culture. While many authors during this time attempted to draw together diverse audiences by uniting disparate elements of American culture, they also delineated themselves from what they saw as an undisciplined and unrefined subculture. As such, authors like Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, and Melville prefigured the further division of elite and mass culture that came to define much of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth literary and cultural debates.

The US was experiencing profound economic changes during this time, and those changes led to equally important social and cultural transformations. The formation of distinct classes, especially in the rapidly industrializing North, was one of the most striking developments. The unequal distribution of newly created wealth led to divisions along class lines. Perhaps most interestingly, the middle class began to form during this period. Read this essay to learn about these important changes in culture.

Blackface minstrelsy arose during this period. Read this essay to understand what it entailed and why it became so popular.

You were introduced to Melville's work before; now you will read his two most famous short stories, "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids", with an eye toward the consequences of swift economic change. Melville's "Bartleby" is one of the most famous American short stories, and has increasingly been read in terms of the development of capitalism in the antebellum era. Make sure to think about the ways in which Melville uses symbolism, imagery, repetition, dialogue, and allusion in these two stories.

This essay introduces some of the interpretations of Melville's most famous short story.

Melville's diptych "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" offers a clear critique of the division of labor (and leisure) during the period.

First published anonymously in The Atlantic Monthly in 1861, Rebecca Harding Davis' novella "Life in the Iron-Mills" largely disappeared from American literary history until it was republished in 1972 by the Feminist Press. In the decades since then, however, Davis' short work has been appreciated as an important early description of the moral and social costs of industrialization, a key work bridging the sentimentalism of the mid-nineteenth century and the realism of the latter part of the century, as well as a significant meditation on art and the role of the artist in industrial capitalism". Read this introductory essay to Davis' important novella.

Read Davis' novella. Trace the way that you see Davis bridge sentimentalist fiction with more realist styles, often more visible toward the end of the nineteenth century. Ask yourself the following questions while reading:

• Look at the title. What is the significance of it?
• Who is the "I" or narrative voice in the text?
• Who is the "you" that the narrative voice addresses?
• What is the effect of this direct address of the reader?
• Find descriptions of Hugh and Deb. What do they look like, what do they do, how do they talk? What is their relationship?
• Look at the descriptions of the sculpture of the woman made from korl (waste product of the mills). How is it described? What details are important? How do different characters describe it? What symbolism might be involved here?
• Several men meet Hugh at the mill; among them are Kirby (the overseer and son of a mill owner), Doctor May, and Mitchell (Kirby's brother-in-law). What position(s) do each of these three men take towards Hugh? What do they say to him?
• What has happened to Hugh and to Deb at the end of the story? Did you expect these outcomes for these characters? What do these endings suggest?
• What do you make of the final two paragraphs where the narrator returns? Why is this here? How does it help the ending?
• What additional insight does this give us into the narrator ("I") and the "you" from the earlier part of the story?

You have already been introduced to Thoreau as a writer. Read this short essay on get a better sense of him as an activist.

In this influential political manifesto, also known as "Civil Disobedience", we find a passionate response to the US-Mexican War and the slavery controversy. With this work, Thoreau influenced such twentieth-century leaders as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.