Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What is the “American Renaissance”? Aside from Herman Melville, what writers represent this literary period? What subjects, themes, and motifs are associated with this literary period?

Teaching Suggestion: Herman Melville is one of the foremost authors of the American Renaissance, a period of literary flourishing in the US during the mid-19th century. The class might discuss and name works by notable authors of the American Renaissance, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Encourage students to think about topics associated with these authors and to identify some common themes in their work (e.g., the relationship between human beings and nature; democracy and American nationalism).  

• This 35-minute presentation from Learning Language Arts provides a comprehensive short introduction to the literature of the American Renaissance. For a shorter selection, the excerpt 2:12-7:40 provides key characteristics and a brief discussion of the ways in which American Renaissance works fit into the history of American literature.
• This famous essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson (“The Poet”) embodies many of the preoccupations of the American Renaissance.