American Renaissance

미국문예부흥 (美國文藝復興)

American Renaissance, also called NEW ENGLAND RENAISSANCE, period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the American Civil War in which American literature, in the wake of the Romantic movement, came of age as an expression of a national spirit.

미국문예부흥 (美國文藝復興), American Renaissance. 뉴잉글랜드 문예부흥이라고도 함. 대략 1830년대부터 남북전쟁 말기까지의 기간에 이루어진 문예부흥. 이 시기의 미국문학은 낭만주의의 태동 속에서 성숙하여 국민정신을 표현했다.

The literary scene of the period was dominated by a group of New England writers, the "Brahmins," notably Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. They were aristocrats, steeped in foreign culture, active as professors at Harvard College, and interested in creating a genteel American literature based on foreign models. Longfellow adapted European methods of storytelling and versifying to narrative poems dealing with American history. Holmes, in his occasional poems and his "Breakfast-Table" series (1858-91), brought touches of urbanity and jocosity to polite literature. Lowell put much of his homeland's outlook and values into verse, especially in his satirical Biglow Papers (1848-67).

 이 기간에 문학계는 브라민이라 불린 일군의 뉴잉글랜드 작가들에 의해 주도되었다. 그 가운데 주요인물로는 헨리 워즈워스 롱펠로, 올리버 웬들 홈스, 제임스 러셀 로웰을 들 수 있다. 이들은 외국문화에 젖은 귀족적인 사람들이었으며 하버드대학교에서 교수로 활동했고, 외국의 예를 토대로 품위있는 미국문학을 창조하는 데 관심을 가졌다. 롱펠로는 미국 역사를 다룬 서술체 시에 유럽적인 이야기 기법과 작시법들을 원용했다. 홈스는 행사용 시들과 〈아침 식탁 Breakfast Table〉(1858~91) 시리즈를 통해 점잖은 당시 문학에 도회풍과 익살스러운 분위기를 도입했다. 로웰은 조국의 풍경과 가치관을 시로 표현했는데, 특히 풍자적인 〈비글로 폐이퍼스 Biglow Papers〉(1848~67)가 대표적이다.

One of the most important influences in the period was that of the Transcendentalists, centred in the village of Concord, Mass., and including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, and Margaret Fuller. The Transcendentalists contributed to the founding of a new national culture based on native elements. They advocated reforms in church, state, and society, contributing to the rise of Free Religion and the Abolition movement and to the formation of various utopian communities, such as Brook Farm. The Abolition movement was also bolstered by other New England writers, including the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier and the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) dramatized the plight of the black slave.