US Literature from the Civil War to the Early 20th Century

Catalog description

The period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century was one of profound social, technological and political changes in the United States. Students look at how writers reflected and responded to the world of the late nineteenth century (sometimes reaching into the early twentieth century) in literature written by American authors and, sometimes, by the European writers that influenced them during this period of intense transnational literary exchange. Course may address the waxing and waning popularity of sentimental literature, the elite enthusiasm for realist literature and the related growth of regional literature, the connection between fiction and the muckraking school of journalism, the expansion of publication in magazines and newspapers, the explosion of literatures by and about immigrants, and/or African American literary production in the eras of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Students may read works by Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, W. E. B. DuBois, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Sarah Orne Jewett, Sarah M. B. Piatt, Zitkala Sa, Charlotte Perkins GIlman, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and a multitude of others.