This course was run on edX.org during the Winter of 2016.  All materials on this WordPress site are now available as a guide for individual study of the authors of the American Renaissance.  While we have no current plans offer the course again in the future, we encourage both the edX community and new learners to continue their engagement with the course and each other via this WordPress site, our social media outlets, and the comments on our YouTube channel.

What is the American Renaissance? How did Dartmouth help foster the formation of the American Renaissance and its reevaluation and reinvention in the twentieth? Why should we, as twenty-first century readers, concern ourselves with this literature?

Join a community of learners as we discover how to discern the historical turning points involved in the production and transmission of American Renaissance writings. We conceptualize the role historical and affective turning points continue to play in the selection, interpretation and valuation of these writings.

Together we propose continuities and discontinuities between these historical literary works and the present. Along the way we construct global and temporal mappings between a set of seemingly disparate locations, myths, and traditions.

Join us in a discussion of the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain as we explore literary, political and historical context, their desire to create a distinctively national literature, and the ongoing controversy over the local, national, and transnational significance of this literature.