ClassInfo

This course will survey American literature from the arrival of settlers to the Civil War. Course topics will include the Puritan theology that cast such a long shadow over the American cultural imagination; the literary construction in the Revolutionary era of a national identity under the influence of such Enlightenment ideals as reason, civility, cosmopolitanism, and sympathy; the rise in the mid-nineteenth century of a radical intellectual and social movement in Transcendentalism; the antebellum ideological struggles over slavery, industrialism, women's rights, and Native American rights; and the self-conscious cultivation of a national literary aesthetic in the Romantic prose and poetry of the period later critics would come (controversially) to call "the American Renaissance."

Likely authors: Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Hannah Webster Foster, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and more.

This course will survey American literature from the arrival of settlers to the Civil War. Course topics will include the Puritan theology that cast such a long shadow over the American cultural imagination; the literary construction in the Revolutionary era of a national identity under the influence of such Enlightenment ideals as reason, civility, cosmopolitanism, and sympathy; the rise in the mid-nineteenth century of a radical intellectual and social movement in Transcendentalism; the antebellum ideological struggles over slavery, industrialism, women's rights, and Native American rights; and the self-conscious cultivation of a national literary aesthetic in the Romantic prose and poetry of the period later critics would come (controversially) to call "the American Renaissance."

Likely authors: Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Hannah Webster Foster, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and more.

This course will survey American literature from the arrival of settlers to the Civil War. Course topics will include the Puritan theology that cast such a long shadow over the American cultural imagination; the literary construction in the Revolutionary era of a national identity under the influence of such Enlightenment ideals as reason, civility, cosmopolitanism, and sympathy; the rise in the mid-nineteenth century of a radical intellectual and social movement in Transcendentalism; the antebellum ideological struggles over slavery, industrialism, women's rights, and Native American rights; and the self-conscious cultivation of a national literary aesthetic in the Romantic prose and poetry of the period later critics would come (controversially) to call "the American Renaissance."

Likely authors: Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Hannah Webster Foster, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and more.