The Humanities Today: Five Best Years of American Literature

Please join us for this online presentation by Maurice Lee, Chair of BU's English Department. Just before the United States entered World War II, F.O. Matthiessen published American Renaissance, an immensely influential scholarly book that set a single five-year period at the center of American literary history. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and some remarkable writings by Emerson were all published between 1850 and 1855, a time of startling intellectual and social upheaval. The canon of American literature has changed since American Renaissance, but even relative newcomers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and Harriet Jacobs flourished in the decade before the Civil War. Maurice Lee’s talk will reflect on a number of questions. How do we explain concentrated periods of artist achievement? In what ways has our sense of American literature changed—and not changed—since the “culture wars” of the 1980s and beyond? What happens to the teaching of American literature under accountability measures such as the Common Core standards? And what can American literature on the brink of the Civil War teach us about the past and present? Learn more from Dr. Lee about why we should all study literature, and about why he believes humanities studies are so critical.