American Literature to the Civil War

Catalog description

This course explores American literature from first encounters and early colonies to the Civil War. Readings may include sermons, poems, diaries, travel writing, captivity narratives, and literature of the European/Indigenous encounter; slave narratives; political tracts and documents of the revolutionary and Federalist periods; novels of seduction, Gothicism, domesticity and frontier adventure; and the various writings of transcendentalists, romancers, woman-rights and anti-slavery activists.