The 1840s and 50s are known as "the American Renaissance," a watershed in American literary history which includes Thoreau's Walden and Melville's Moby-Dick, Emerson's essays and Hawthorne's fiction. It also includes major abolitionist writings by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Poe's grotesque tales, and the groundbreaking poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. We will explore this essential period by inquiring into the ways these authors figure emotion, experience, and, identity, both personal and national. We will also consider the belief in the transformational power of language shared by the majority of our authors, and the strategies they developed in their efforts to call themselves and the nation into new forms of being.