Literature and Culture during the American Renaissance

The literary period known as the American Renaissance isn't what it used to be, though perhaps scholars are getting closer to understanding what it actually was. Now generally considered to cover virtually the whole of the antebellum era, the title American Renaissance, as applied to literature, was first used to characterize the five-year period from 1850 to 1855, and it was used to refer to the interrelated work of five writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman. The American Renaissance was, among other things, a time of great developments, technological and otherwise, in printing, publishing, and distribution. The embodiments of the nation's ideological contradictions, African-American writers led the way in the quest for a discursive and philosophical stability that remains the single most influential feature of the literature that emerged from the period we still have reason to call the American Renaissance.