SOURCE: Buell, Lawrence. “A Narrative Overview of New England's Literary Development.” In New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance, pp. 23-55. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Buell provides an overview of developments in New England literature between 1815 and 1865.

Let us start by thinking of New England's literary climate at midcentury as affected most powerfully by a Unitarian-Whig orthodoxy, emanating chiefly from Boston, that was, however, enriched and complicated by a strong dissenting force that had arisen from within it and by considerable literary activity that was on the upswing in other quarters beyond its periphery. The literary aspect of this orthodoxy was a conservative sort of Romanticism first espoused by the Boston literary establishment during the 1820s and 1830s, which commended literature as a vehicle of moral advancement, approved the hopeful Romantic vision of human nature's capacity for improvement, prizing reason rather than...