US Literature from the Constitution to the Civil War

Catalog description

The first decades of the nineteenth century marked a period of innovation and abundance in the literary history of the United States. Students explore the landmark developments of the early national and antebellum periods within the broader contexts of American cultural history, paying particular attention to the influence of Romanticism and such North American variants as New England Transcendentalism and the American Gothic. They may also explore the intersections between literature and a variety of social reform movements, such as those involving abolitionism, women’s rights and Native American rights. Authors assigned may include a selection of the following: Apess (Pequot), Brockden Brown, Cooper, Irving, Poe, Sedgwick, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Wells Brown, Whitman and Stowe.