Mid-Century & Turn of the Century
This course will contrast American literature of the 1850s with American literature of the 1890s. This will allow us to dive deeply into two decades to get a feel for the way America and American literature changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first half of the course will be devoted to writers of the American Renaissance—a group that includes such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathanial Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson. The second half of the course will be devoted to major writers of the Gilded Age—a group that includes such figures as Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton. I can say with certainty that we will be reading Melville’s Moby-Dick and Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove—but the rest of the syllabus will be built in consultation with enrolled students. Before the end of this spring semester, I will conduct an anonymous survey of enrolled students to see what they have and haven’t read from these decades, and I will build a syllabus with those results in mind.
R, 2:00-5:00pm, face-to-face
Carl Eby