350:556

Index # - 13311

Distribution Requirement:  A4, D

Monday – 9:50 a.m.

CCA - 8 Bishop Place

Meredith L. McGill

Antebellum American Literature

This course will introduce students to some of the major American texts of the pre-Civil War period and the critical debates that have shaped our understanding of them.  It is designed both for non-specialists who would benefit from intensive reading in the classic works of the “American Renaissance” (Romanticists, Victorianists, African-Americanists, and Modernists, among others), and for students who wish to build a foundation for more advanced work in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. 

The course aims at generic breadth as well as coverage.  We will read novels, poems, essays, a few plays, and many texts that defy easy generic classification.  While most seminar meetings will be devoted to literary texts by major figures such as Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Stowe, and Whitman, we will interrupt (and reframe) our discussion of classic works with meetings devoted to popular culture in the 1840s, African-American autobiography, fiction and periodicals, and “Literature in and around 1860.”

Among other topics, we will discuss the contrary pulls of cosmopolitanism and literary nationalism; the relation of Native Americans to national identity; the emergence of experimental forms of autobiography; individualism, mass-culture, and the mass subject; print culture and the development of short fiction; slavery, anti-slavery, and cultural authority; sentimentality, sensationalism and the novel; democracy and poetry.

Students will write two short papers along the way and a 10-12 page final paper.  They will also compile an annotated bibliography to circulate to the class as a whole.

Texts will include:  James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, William Apess, On Our Own Ground, William Cullen Bryant, selected poems, Ralph Waldo Emerson, selected essays and poetry, Edgar Allan Poe, selected poetry, tales, and essays, Robert Montgomery Bird, Sheppard Lee, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, selected tales, Jarena Lee, spiritual narrative, Frederick Douglass, Narrative, David Walker, Appeal, Nathaniel Hawthorne, selected tales and The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, “Benito Cereno,” and Pierre, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall, Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Harriet Brent Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon.

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