American Renaissance

American Renaissance

Introduction

American Renaissance is the term for a period of American literature that saw a remarkable outburst of creativity in American letters. The American critic F. O. Matthiessen first employed the term to describe the major works of Emerson (Essays, 1841, Poems, 1847); Thoreau (Walden, 1854); Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, 1850); Melville (Moby Dick, 1851), and Whitman (Leaves of Grass, 1855). Now the term is used to describe the entire American literary output in the 30 years preceding the Civil War. Critical to the development of literature and thought in the period was the movement known as transcendentalism, a rich mixture of Romantic ideas and American individualism (Ammons, & White-Parks, 1994).

Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe

Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Beecher Stowe also called, Lichfield, was born on 1811-Hartford, and died in 1896 as one of the greatest American Novelist. Among other novels, is the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), anti-slavery narrative of profound humanity and religious sense he met unprecedented success (Ammons, & White-Parks, 1994).

Harriet Beecher Stowe was part of the numerous children of the Rev. Lyman Beecher, evangelist activist and defender of Puritan orthodoxy in the tradition of Jonathan Edwards. Formed in an environment of severe Puritanism, the Old Testament and the texts of the Puritan divines were the readings of her childhood that she assimilated with the same joy passionate who admired the natural beauty of New England. Her exuberant temperament, who had tried other means let off steam on stage or among high society, was deployed instead on the dual form of expression spoiled by their social environment and her time. However, on one side, a rich inner life inclined to the analysis spiritual, intensely dramatic or even melodramatic, and very similar (except in its concrete forms) to the contemporary of the poet Emily Dickinson, on the other hand, a diligent interest to the building and the betterment of humanity (Pease, 1987).

In 1832 the Rev. Beecher moved to Cincinnati, along the border of Ohio, to found a theological seminary, her children accompanied. Harriet, saddened by nostalgia for her native land, found between household chores and teaching work, the time to write the sketches pietisms of scenes and types of the descendants of the pilgrims, ??later published as The Mayflower (1843).

In time, the sympathies of the writer were leaning toward the antislavery movement, when in 1850 she returned to New England. However, her reflections on slavery reached an intense fervor, the immediate result of which was Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851). Beecher Stowe believed that the true author of the book was God, from whom she would have been just faithful amanuensis, in any case, the work showed his talent for writing melodramatic, and achieved an international reputation so great that very few are paragons possible in this respect in the field of literary history. At first, however, was not well received; even the author is blamed for the deaths of many Confederate soldiers (Pease, 1987).

The play stars the slave Tom, and tells its vicissitudes from the time he ...