Which American literary movement is Moby-Dick described as contributing to?

Moby-Dick is described as contributing to the American Renaissance.

The American Renaissance was a major period in United States literature, generally dated from about 1830 to the Civil War. It is associated with writers who helped establish a distinctive American literary tradition, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville.

Melville’s novel fits the movement through its ambition, symbolism, philosophical questioning, and engagement with American identity. Its whaling narrative expands into meditations on democracy, religion, knowledge, race, class, fate, and humanity’s relationship with nature. Moby-Dick combines adventure fiction with sermons, Shakespearean drama, encyclopedic passages, poetry, and extended reflections on whales and whaling.

The label is retrospective rather than a term Melville used to classify the novel. Critic F. O. Matthiessen popularized “American Renaissance” as the title of his 1941 study American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. The movement should not be confused with the Harlem Renaissance, a later African American cultural flowering, or with the Beat Generation of the twentieth century.