The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
American Renaissance

The Gnosis of Toni Morrison: Morrison’s Conversation with Herman Melville, with a Nod to Umberto Eco

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-376
Author(s):  
Justine Tally
Keyword(s):  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Nag Hammadi ◽  
The Us ◽  
The University ◽  
The Rose

Abstract Long before Toni Morrison was extensively recognized as a serious contender in the “Global Market of Intellectuals,” she was obviously reading and absorbing challenging critical work that was considered “provocative and controversial” by the keepers of the US academic community at the time. While no one disputes the influence of Elaine Pagels’ work on Gnosticism at the University of Princeton, particularly its importance for Jazz and Paradise, the second and third novels of the Morrison trilogy, Gnosticism in Beloved has not been so carefully considered. Yet this keen interest in Gnosticism coupled with the author’s systematic study of authors from the mid-19th-century American Renaissance inevitably led her to deal with the fascination of Renaissance authors with Egypt (where the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were rediscovered), its ancient civilization, and its mythology. The extensive analysis of a leading French literary critic of Herman Melville, Prof. Viola Sachs, becomes the inspiration for a startlingly different reading of Morrison’s seminal novel, one that positions this author in a direct dialogue with the premises of Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick, also drawing on the importance of Gnosticism for Umberto Eco’s 1980 international best-seller, The Name of the Rose.

Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance.

1992 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 816
Author(s):  
Sheila Post-Lauria ◽  
Stephen Railton
Keyword(s):  
American Renaissance ◽  
Literary Performance

The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982-83.

1985 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 663
Author(s):  
Joel Myerson ◽  
Walter Benn Michaels ◽  
Donald E. Pease
Keyword(s):  
American Renaissance

The American Art of Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-98
Author(s):  
John Michael Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Interior Space

Abstract This article provides a genealogy of the architectural figuration of human cognition from the ancient world to Renaissance Europe and, finally, to the American Renaissance where it came to possess a striking cultural and literary potency. The first section pursues the two-fold task of elucidating this archetypal trope for consciousness, both its ancient moorings and its eventual transmission into Europe. The second section shows that three of the most prominent writers of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—engaged this mystically inspired architectonic symbolism, employing far older techno-cultural suppositions about interior space. I thereby offer an account of the intellectual and spiritual heritage upon which Romantic writers in the United States drew to articulate cognitive interiority. These Romantics did more than value creativity in contradistinction to Enlightenment rationalism; they were acknowledging themselves as recipients of the ancient belief in cosmogenesis as self-transformation.

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