Revolution in the Renaissance

Revolution in the Renaissance BETSY ERKKILA F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: An and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) not only named a period and defined a canon (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman); it also set the critical, evaluative, nationalist, and New-England-centered terms within which future readings and interpretations of American literature would occur.1 Over the past two decades scholars have contested and revised the critical methodology, canonical writers, readings, texts, and "boundaries" set in place by Matthiessen's now-classic study. But, oddly, despite the many fine books written on antebellum American literature, none has supplanted either Matthiessen 's massively influential study or his term: "American Renaissance." Why not? I would suggest that, in order to rewrite the period, the canon, and the term, we need to revolutionize our approach to the American Renaissance as a meaningful category of analysis . While Charlene Avallone in her 1997 PMLA article has proposed that we throw out the term "American Renaissance" because it represents the elite heuristic of an exclusive group of white men, I want to argue that the term has, in accord with Bakhtin's notion of the dialogism of language, already been "populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others" through the revisionary scholarship of the past two decades.2 Rather than give up the designation—which retains its resilience in the American critical imaginary despite recent efforts at renunciation —we might want to revolutionize and resignijy our underESQ \V.49\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS | 200J 17 "Horrid Massacre in Virginia, " Scene of Nat Turner's insurrection, from Samuel Warner, Authentic and Impartial Narrative of the Tragical Scene Which Was Witnessed in Southampton County (Virginia) . . . ([New York]: Warner and West, 1831). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-38902. REVOLUTION IN THE RENAISSANCE standing of "American Renaissance" by continuing to saturate it with the multiple and expanded meanings it has begun to assume in the scholarship of new generations of Americanists.3 We also need to revolutionize our critical thinking about the American Renaissance by bringing together what Matthiessen, Lionel Trilling, and other Cold War critics sought to keep separate as literature and history, aesthetics and politics , imagination and world.4 One reason we have been unable to replace Matthiessen's single-volume study of the American Renaissance—and reach the larger public that our editors want us to address—is that we have given up the notion of criticism as story or narrative in favor of a kind of criticalpariicularism·. whereas Matthiessen tells a comparative, transatlantic, and interdisciplinary story that begins in the English Renaissance with Shakespeare, Milton, and the metaphysicals and then migrates across the Atlantic to New England Puritanism, the American Renaissance, and Henry James and T. S. Eliot in the twentieth century, recent Americanist studies have tended to be organized chapter by chapter as expert, but too often separate (and previously published), readings of individual writers and individual works that bear only a very loose comparative connection to some overarching argument about literature, society, and world. If we want to write critical narrative that brings different races, sexes, classes, genres, regions, and nationalities together in relation to a common story, struggle, crisis, or theme, we need connective tissue. What might that be? One way of reimagining difference and particularity in relation to commonality , writing critical narrative, and even reengaging the question of aesthetic innovation that has all but disappeared from recent work in the field might be to revive the ellipsis of revolution that drops out of Matthiessen's American Renaissance as it drops out of Perry Miller's famous essay "Jonathan Edwards to Emerson."5Though in some ways Matthiessen takes a long transatlantic view, his American Renaissance is at the same time an idyllic moment of specifically national literary creation (1850—55) cordoned off from its prehistory in late-eighteenthcentury revolutions in the Americas and France and destroyed by technology, the factory, and "rising forces of exploitation" 19 BETSY ERKKILA in the post—Civil War period.6 We need to revise and more fully historicize Matthiessen's story and chronology by relocating the Revolution not outside but inside the American Renaissance , as its...