The term American Renaissance designates a period in our nation's history when the literary -classics- appeared--works -original- enough to mark a beginning for America's literary history. But the American Renaissance, Donald Pease argues in his introduction, does not belong to the nation's secular history so much as it denotes a rebirth from it: -Independent of the time kept by secular history, the American Renaissance keeps what we could call global Renaissance time--the sacred time a nation claims to renew, when it claims its cultural place as a great nation existing within a...