American Literature and the Long 19th Century

Beginning with the decades around the formation of the United States of America in 1776 and concluding with early twentieth-century modernist literature of the 1920s this course will consider literary fiction, poetry, and essays that helped to shape ideas and beliefs about what “America” means. That is, we will be examining recurring themes, literary innovations, and aesthetic desires that have affected the self-conscious conception of the United States. We will simultaneously investigate recurring dreams of a “new world”—with fantasies of limitless geographical and psychological “frontiers”—alongside glaring contradictions in racial and gender inequalities. Throughout, we will pay particular attention to articulations of individualism, selfhood, justice, and freedom in the roughly 150 years of material covered by this course.

Authors and poets studied will include Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Phillis Wheatley, Black Hawk, Petalesharo, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others.