Literature of the American Renaissance

Catalog description

This course focuses on the literature of the American Renaissance (1830-1860). This study of works by writers like Cooper, Bryant, Irving, Poe, Emerson, Douglass, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Longfellow, Whitman, Stowe, Jacobs, and Dickinson will cover the three major characteristics of the period: the movement from classicism to romanticism in the early writers; the development of literary nationalism, and an increasing interest in exploring what it means to be an American; and, finally, the beginnings of literary realism with the approach of the Civil War. This course may not be offered annually.