2020-21 Academic Catalog

A survey of the major forms and voices of nineteenth-century American literature during the Romantic and Realist periods, with attention to historical and intellectual contexts including ideas about race, class, gender, and the nature of democracy. Topics covered will include the literary writings of Transcendentalism, abolition, and the rise of literary "realism" after the Civil War as an artistic response to urbanization and industrialism. Writers to be read include Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Fuller, Jacobs, Douglass, Dickinson, Whitman, Twain, James, and Chopin.