American Realism and Naturalism

Catalog description

While the authors and texts studied in this course may vary, this course will focus on the American literature between 1865-1914, with the progression of literary culture from Romanticism to Realism and Naturalism and towards Modernism. Students will read literature by authors who were responding to radical shifts in America after the Civil War, including Reconstruction, the rise of industrialism, and the new theories of evolution. Authors may include Twain, James, Chesnutt, London Dreiser, Wharton, Cather, and Anderson, as well as poets of the early twentieth century.