ABSTRACT
In 1941, F. O. Matthiessen published American Renaissance, a book that did much to explain the meaning of the national culture that emerged in the nineteenth century to Americans of the twentieth. While the primary objects of his attention are literary texts, Matthiessen treats them as lenses, looking through them to observe the formation of a national identity-an identity that is at once coherent and contradictory. For example, he describes the massive nineteenth-century project of pioneering expansion as a deliberate rush “from one rapid disequilibrium to the next,” that was accompanied all along by a relentless “counter-effort” to create “islands of realization and fulfillment,” of “communal security and permanence,” that constitute the moments of “order and balance which […] we can recognize as among the most valuable possessions of our continent.” Some of those are moments are literary while others are material, notably, he suggests, “the New England green” and “Shaker communities” (172).
