Writers of the American Renaissance: An A-to-Z Guide

Front Cover
Denise Knight
Bloomsbury Academic, 2003 M12 30 - 458 pages

The American literary canon has undergone revision and expansion in recent years, and our notions of the 19th-century renaissance have been reevaluated. Mainstream anthologies have been revised to reflect the expanding literary canon, yet resources for readers have remained widely scattered. This book expands earlier definitions of the 19th-century American Renaissance as represented by canonical writers such as Emerson and Poe, covering writers who published popular fiction and dominated the literary marketplace of the day. Included is generous coverage of women writers and writers of color.

The volume provides alphabetically arranged entries for more than 70 writers of the period, including Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and many more.

Each entry was written by an expert contributor and includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes, a survey of the writer's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies.

About the author (2003)

DENISE D. KNIGHT is Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in English at the State University of New York, Cortland. She is the author of several books, including Writers of the American Renaissance: An A-to-Z Guide (Greenwood, 2003), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Study of the Short Fiction (1997), and Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Greenwood, 1997), and coauthor of Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Greenwood, 1993).

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