BA English Literature and American Studies

This course unit surveys American literature from its earliest periods to the end of the nineteenth century. It will introduce you to the major genres and movements of early American literature, including narratives of captivity, seduction, and escape, fiery sermons and revolutionary oratory, gothic tales, sentimental fiction, and transcendental essays, as well as poetry in a variety of forms. In particular, we’ll explore the rise of feelings—in the form of ecstatic religious experience, sentimental reform, the culture of sensation, and national sentiment—as a vital literary and cultural force in America; we’ll also track the relationship between form and reform (most especially between social movements and antebellum literary genres) and closely attend to texts and counter-texts—the ways that American writers speak back to and rewrite one another, drawing on older forms to issue new calls for change, but also recasting familiar genres and styles for their own literary purposes. We’ll read a mix of canonical and popular authors alongside and against the shifting geographical borders and cultural controversies of their time, tracking our key threads across texts that chart (and lay claim to) the development and formation of “American” literary traditions. And we’ll conclude our study by turning to the way U.S. writers sought to reunite and reinvent “America” in the aftermath of the Civil War, Reconstruction and its failure, a rapidly changing urban scene and a closing (but paradoxically expanding) frontier.

• To introduce students to some major themes in American Studies through readings of a number of the most significant literary works written in the 'New World,' primarily North America, between 1492 and 1900;


• To develop students' critical awareness by encouraging them to attend to variations and similarities in language, theme, tone and genre amongst the texts we will study;


• To introduce students to the specifically American historical and social influences which find expression in the literary works of this period;


• To encourage and develop students' writing skills (including skills of scholarly presentation) and their capacity to construct a sustained and coherent argument.

By the end of this course, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a knowledge and understanding of some of the major themes in American Studies as manifested in a selection of the literature written in the 'New World,' particularly North America, between 1492 and 1900;


• Demonstrate a basic awareness of and critical sensitivity towards the varieties of literary theme and expression most characteristic of this period in America, and particularly the part of North America that we now call the 'United States';


• Demonstrate some ability to understand and theorize the ideological constructs of, and intersections between, race, class, caste, gender, and sexual identity, as well as religion and politics, within the space we now think of as the United States;


• Demonstrate some ability (in the assessed essay and examination) to construct a sustained and cohesive written argument and to deploy appropriate scholarly methods of presentation;


• Demonstate analyzing of texts; speaking in front of groups; making connections to present-day concerns; improved writing; self confidence in abilities.

Preparatory reading list (2014-2015)

The bulk of our readings are from The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. A & B. Students are welcome to obtain these readings from other sources (or photocopy the selections from one of the copies on short-term loan in the library) but should make sure the excerpts they read are the same as the excerpts contained in the Norton. Course readings not included in The Norton Anthology will be provided to students via Blackboard or as in-class handouts.

Indicative primary reading for this course:

To prepare for this course, students will find the following secondary resources especially useful:

Barney, William L., ed. A Companion to 19th-Century America. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006.

Bauer, Dale M. and Philip Gould, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Burgett, Bruce, and Glenn Hendler, eds. Keywords for American Cultural Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2007.

Castillo, Susan and Ivy Schweitzer, eds. A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

Elliott, Emory. The Cambridge Introduction to Early American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge

         University Press, 2002.

         Marcus, Greil, and Werner Sollors. A New Literary History of America. Cambridge, Mass.:

                    Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

Samuels, Shirley. A Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.