Survey of American Literature I

Catalog description

This course explores the development of American literature from its beginnings through the Civil War. Texts including letters, histories, autobiographies, political documents, poems, plays, and novels, illuminate the rich complexity of this period in American literary history and culture. These works reveal the often interconnected and overlapping stories of discovery and exploration; private piety and public life; the development of national identity; race; gender; slavery and the movementtowards its abolition.