ENGL3005W: Survey of American Literatures and Cultures I

This writing-intensive course will survey the Anglophone literature of what would become the United States from the arrival of English settlers to the Civil War. We will define "literature" broadly to not only include fiction and poetry but also the sermon, the letter, the essay, the autobiography, and other non-fictional forms. Course topics will include the Puritan theology that cast such a long shadow over the American cultural imagination; the fraught literary construction in the Revolutionary era of a national identity under the influence of such Enlightenment ideals as reason, civility, cosmopolitanism, and sympathy; the Gothic doubts about democracy that attended the literature of the early republic; the rise in the mid-nineteenth century of a radical intellectual and social movement in Transcendentalism; the antebellum ideological struggles over such political issues as slavery, industrialism, women's rights, and Native American rights; and the self-conscious cultivation of a national literary aesthetic in the Romantic prose and poetry of the period later critics would come (controversially) to call "the American Renaissance."

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