Literary Series with Mark Scarbrough: The American Literary Renaissance Reconsidered: Whitman and Hawthorne in Conversation with Douglass and Stoddard – Library

Tuesday mornings, September 29, 2026, through November 17, 2026, 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

In the 1940s, Harvard scholar F. O. Matthiessen reinvented U. S. literary history by resurrecting the almost forgotten writers from the years before the Civil War: Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman (along with the still-recognized Emerson). Since then, Matthiessen’s roll call of the greats has dominated much of what we see as the move from the early Republic to the Civil War crack-up in 1861. However, Matthiessen’s scholarship omitted vast swaths of writers who didn’t fit his notion of the Transcendentalist mindset. In this literary seminar, we’ll take our initial cue from Matthiessen but work