Mar 29, 2024  
2016-2017 Catalogue 
    
2016-2017 Catalogue [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENGL 23026 - The Early American Novel

Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
This is a survey of the novel in the United States from the American Revolution to the Civil War. The course will focus equally on text and context, attending to matters of aesthetics and literary form, as well as the ways in which these novels affirm or resist the prevailing ideas and political conditions of their time. Reading in this way, we will consider the relation of literature to history, the ways literary texts are shaped by their historical circumstances, and how they shape our understanding of the world in which they were produced. The course thus examines literary history as both an effect and an agent in the period’s social and political histories, which include national expansion, the rise and consolidation of U.S. capitalism, and increasing tensions between North and South over the critical issue of slavery, which culminated in the Civil War. Readings may include: Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple; Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive; James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers; Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie; Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter; Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall; and Martin Delany’s Blake, or, the Huts of America. [Before 1900] [AH]