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American Literature Colonial Period to 1860

In this course, we will survey a range of materials, from the suspenseful journeys of a number of explorers to the gothic novels of mystery and intrigue that riveted readers in the early republic.   We will seek answers to why stories of lost orphans, “fallen” women, surreptitious monks, revolutionaries, blood-thirsty Indians, and frontiersmen fleeing society appealed to colonial readers and citizens of the young nation.  We will consider the claims of critics that the gothic and a “paranoid style” (from hell-fire sermons, to fugitive nun stories, to the short stories of Poe) define and distinguish American literature before the Civil War.  But we will also consider how literature helped transmit and redact regional and cultural values about democracy, freedom, race, and class.  In what ways did readers identify with their new environment—political and geographical—through stories, through narratives that they both produced and consumed?  We will, for instance, examine colonial autobiographies and consider how Native Americans, African Americans, and women in the evangelical “harvest fields” viewed, shaped, even contested prescribed social roles through the stories they told about themselves and their history.   Finally, we will read both “high-brow” and “low-brow” fiction: not only the likes of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville, but also the “God’s-Revenge” fiction of Mason Locke Weems, saloon stories, children’s fiction, and historical romances of interracial love that created an enduring myth of national origins.