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Historicizing the American Renaissance

Both of the books under consideration in this review are concerned with literary figures, themes, and events associated with the American literary Renaissance. And while they vary in their understanding of the practice it enables and in their orientation to its presuppositions, each of these books is answerable to the description "new historicist." Reynolds and Leverenz agree about the importance of historical context, but they disagree about the relationship between historical events and American Renaissance texts. Because their readings entail the restoration of historical contexts to otherwise formalist understandings of literary works, these new historicists call attention to the unusual historical status of American Renaissance texts-that is, their power to remain immune to such contextualization. As applied to literary works written in the decade and a half preceding the Civil War, the evaluative description "American Renaissance" referred to their collective conversion of the American Revolution into a mythos of American exceptionalism. When supplemented by interpretations of the myth-symbol school, the American literary Renaissance described a meta-narrative of American history and authorized the symbolic events constructed out of that narrative's assumptions and the national self who enacted them. As the foundational topos for the field of American literature, the American Renaissance denoted a work's participation in converting a sociopolitical opposition motivating war with Britain into a formal difference between the work's enduring aesthetic qualities and transitory historical facts. Thus when a work was included within the field of the American literary Renaissance, its newly acquired cultural status entailed the