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Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

In this course, we will consider works of nineteenth-century American fiction in their cultural and historical contexts.  Our investigation will center on the ways in which complex and interrelated transformations during the nineteenth century (such as Westward expansion, Indian removal, and the Civil War) take root in both the subject matter and the aesthetics of American literature of the period, especially in the continual struggle to invent new literary forms.  This is a century rife with contradictions, and we shall have to grapple with what Amy Kaplan has called the “unstable paradox at the heart of US imperial culture”: domestic/foreign, self/other, subject/citizen, and savage/civilized are not fixed dichotomies, but fluid, uncertain categories residing at the heart of the nation’s attempt to fashion a discourse of liberty and a cultural-political-literary identity independent of Europe.  Therefore, we will pay special attention to how the complexities of race, gender, and class shape—and are shaped by—literary works.  The course will sample a wide range of genres from both the antebellum and postbellum periods: gothic tales, frontier romances, sentimental novels, local color sketches, realist and naturalist writing.  The reading list may include texts by Brockden Brown, Irving, Child, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Wells Brown, Cable, James, Twain, Jewett, Chopin, Harper, Howells, Crane, Chesnutt, Dreiser, Hopkins, and/or Wharton.

Requirements will include weekly response papers, two longer (5-7 page) essays, an in-class presentation, regular attendance and active participation in class discussions.