Reviews for American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman

The average rating for American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-06-04 00:00:00 Monica Martinez This is one of the definitive works of American literary criticism. If you are doing work with Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, or Melville, you really can't overlook Matthiessen. I docked him a star (not that he'll care--he's dead), however, because of the utter lack of representation in this book and the way this omission impacted the literary canon for decades. If you encountered a lot of dead white men in your U.S. lit classes, this guy is in large part to blame. It would have been much better if it was one of a multi-part series on the great American writers (hello, Harriet Beecher Stowe? Margaret Fuller? Frederick Douglas?), or if it simply stated its focus was on dead white men who were but a PART of this American Renaissance--not the whole of it. Nonetheless, it's a text American lit students need to know because the points he brings up about these 5 major writers are flat out brilliant stuff.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-11-29 00:00:00 Robert Partridge Doing some tv programming on Whitman for the Smithsonian Channel on Monday. Reviewing the cultural background