Stephen Matterson: Who Was An American Writer?

Stephen Matterson delivers a presentation at the Salzburg Global Seminar during the American Studies Alumni Association 2010 Symposium. This meeting was held in honor of Emory Elliott, and was entitled "American Literary History in a New Key".

Matterson focuses on the afterlife of F. O. Matthiessen's, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). Once a widely accepted scholarly text on American Literature, which gradually fell out of favor, perhaps due to the book's obvious exclusions, but also due to the modern trend of increasingly exploring diversity when studying American literature.

Histories can provide "A Meaning" and not "The Meaning".