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Whose Renaissance? Women Writers in the Era of the American Renaissance SHARON M. HARRIS What do we mean when we talk about an "American Renaissance "? Is it a particular set of writers and their innovative avenues of exploration? Is it a particular time period? The term has become so common in early U.S. literary studies that it has lost some of its meaning—and in that context I want both to define it somewhat more specifically and yet more broadly as well. Any renaissance is, it seems, in some ways temporally located —it signifies a discrete period of vigorous artistic and intellectual activity; though such boundaries should be fluid, the 1830s through the 1850s in American literature still seem to warrant this description. But equally so, "renaissance" can be read as "revival, " and we have barely begun to tap into the many ways in which this era saw a revival of extraordinary and diverse proportions. While my special interest is in women writers, the ideas I am addressing are applicable to all writers within the period. Early scholarship on the American Renaissance examined a small set of texts through a wide spectrum of aesthetic and philosophic interests. Much scholarship in the late twentieth century continued to circulate, with evocative results, around a limited group of extraordinary writers—the romantics and transcendentalists—and such key issues as self-reliance, the relation of humans to their environment, and religious liberal ESQ \V.49\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS \ 2003 59 SHARON M. HARRIS ism. Newer theoretical interests, such as feminist, postcolonial, and cultural studies, opened the field to include texts that address the early abolition movement, constructions of gender and sexuality, empire building, and the effects of immigration . This ongoing development of the field has worked effectively to maintain it as one of the most vital areas of study in the nineteenth century. It is in such rich soil that I wish to ground further ideas for scholarly growth, suggesting that in order to redefine the Renaissance in any meaningful way we must have a much fuller understanding—beyond the revisionary work already accomplished by David Reynolds, Joyce Warren , and others—of the extraordinary production of literature in the antebellum period, especially literature by women writers . Only then can our new definitions be based on a legitimate sense of what was innovative and notable about the "Renaissance ." This was not only a time marked by the rise of transcendental philosophy and romanticism in the United States, but also a time of extraordinary class diversity: slave and European immigrant populations were rapidly increasing, and the antislavery, labor, and religious reform movements burgeoned at the same time that indigenous populations were being removed and their rights to cultural difference challenged. It is little wonder that, in the midst of such enormous change, diversity of opinion was the primary trait of the day. A sampling of texts will serve to suggest the kinds of revitalized exploration we should be undertaking as we reconsider the boundaries of the American Renaissance; while I am presenting these texts largely by genre, it should be evident that their cultural and political themes cross genres in varied and challenging ways. In 1829» only a handful of women were publishing books. A few well-known writers—Catharine Beecher, Sarah Josepha Hale, Lydia Maria Child, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney—enjoyed national recognition as authors. Afew others , such as the Jewish American poet Mary E. Aiken Brooks, drew a strong following from a smaller segment of U.S. society , while others, such as Sarah Louisa Hickman Smith, who published a volume of poems in 1829, remained obscure. Poetry and nonfiction dominated women's publications of the 1820s, and those genres remained strongholds forwomen writ60 WOMEN WRITERS IN THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE ers in the Renaissance. Yet the record of women's book publication from 1830 to 1855 reveals significant developments in other areas:1 an increased interest in history writing; the emergence of substantial attention to children's literature and to African American and Jewish American women's writings; a new interest in philosophical and scientific writings; and an extraordinary production of novels, dramas, and autobiographies . Some important scholarly work has begun to appear on...

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