American Literature I, 1500-1865

Catalog description

This course focuses on the origins of American Literature beginning with the indigenous peoples and explorers of the sixteenth century through the Colonial, Federalist, and Romantic periods to the end of the Civil War. It includes a broad range of texts: political essays, songs, captivity narratives, memoirs, myths, poetry, and the emerging American novel. Writers studied may include Bradford, Bradstreet, Mather, Franklin, Jefferson, Wheatley, Poe, Apess, Truth, Douglass, Melville, Jacobs, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Whitman.