American Renaissance; Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman

F. O. Matthiessen has centered his evaluation of the great age of our literature around the chief works of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. Mr. Matthiessen has made the intensive critical synthesis that has long been needed, taking full advantage of the historical and biographical work that has been done during the past generation. He holds that an artist's use of language is the most sensitive index to cultural history, and consequently approaches our writers through close attention to their own theories of art. He has not only made a more thorough scrutiny of the form and content of "Moby-Dick", "Walden", and "Leaves of Grass" than any heretofore in print; he has also investigated the largely neglected subject of the interrelations between the various writers. His concluding chapter brings all his major writers together through their subject matter and through their varied responses to the myth of the common man. His book thus ends of a comparison between the function of myth in the age of Whitman and Melville and in that of Joyce and Mann. -- From publisher's description.