Chapter 1: American Renaissance The term "American Renaissance" comes from a 1941 book, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman by F. O. Matthiessen. Matthiessen's study of the period did not question its Romantic aspects but shifted the focus to the development of a distinctly American literature. American Renaissance, additionally called New England Renaissance, period from the 1830s generally until the end of the American Civil War in which American writing, in the wake of the Romantic development, came of age as an outflow of a national soul. Regarding writing or style, the American Renaissance is the "Romantic Period in American Literature." The abstract scene of the period was ruled by a gathering …show more content…
The Transcendentalists added to the establishing of another national society in light of local components. They supported changes in chapel, state, and society, adding to the ascent of free religion and the nullification development and to the arrangement of different idealistic groups, for example, Brook Farm. The abolition movement was likewise reinforced by other New England writers, including the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier and the author Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) dramatized the plight of the black slave. Transcendentalism was a form of philosophical romanticism that placed reliance on man’s intuition and conscience. The word comes from the Latin meaning “climbing beyond.” The Transcendental movement held that man’s inner consciousness was divine, that nature revealed the whole of God’s moral law, that ultimate truth could be discovered by man’s innermost feelings, and that a morality guided the conscience. Transcendentalism was based on the doctrines of various European philosophers and Eastern mysticism. In many ways, Transcendentalism attempted to fulfill the possibility of creating a uniquely American literary