Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendental writings influenced Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, whose works are considered the cornerstones of the American literary movement. This title, The American Renaissance, part of Chelsea House Publishers' Bloom's Period Studies series, features a selection of critical essays analyzing the writers and works that defined the American Renaissance. In addition to a chronology of the important cultural, literary, and politcal events that shaped this period, this text includes an introduction and editor's note written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.
Author(s): Harold Bloom
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 350
The American Renaissance......Page 4
Contents......Page 6
Editor’s Note......Page 8
Introduction......Page 10
Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”......Page 36
Method and Scope......Page 50
Shakespeare and Melville......Page 60
Nathaniel Hawthorne......Page 86
Introduction to Walden and Civil Disobedience......Page 104
Whitman’s Image of Voice: To the Tally of My Soul......Page 136
The Curse of Kehama......Page 156
“The Poet”......Page 186
Hawthorne, Melville, and the Fiction of Prophecy......Page 210
The Literary Significance of the Unitarian Movement......Page 250
Introduction to Leaves of Grass......Page 268
Margaret Fuller’s Aesthetic Transcendentalism and Its Legacy......Page 282
A Mourner Among the Children: Emily Dickinson’s Early Religious Crisis......Page 306
Chronology......Page 352
Contributors......Page 356
Bibliography......Page 360
Acknowledgments......Page 362
