American Renaissance (redirected from New England Renaissance)

American Renaissance

 or New England Renaissance

Period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the American Civil War in which U.S. literature came of age as an expression of a national spirit. The literary scene was dominated by New England Brahmin writers, notably Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. Also influential were the Transcendentalists (see Transcendentalism), including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as well as the great imaginative writers Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allan Poe.