Medieval America

Catalog description

Traces, fantasies, and nightmares of the Middle Ages filled 19th century American writings and persist today; this course moves between early American and actual medieval literature, seeking new perspectives on both. Southern chivalry? New England feudalism? Anglo-Saxons as models for racialized American identity-or identifications with anti-Norman Scottish warriors as models for abolition (as in the surname Douglass that Frederick Douglass chose from himself)? We'll linger over Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, Whitman, Douglass, and others while, in alternating stretches, we read some troubadours, Middle English romances, Chaucer, Malory, and actual medieval rebels. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PRE)