Course Description
This course will contrast how American writers imagined individual selfhood, autonomy, and agency before and after the Civil War. (It will, of course, be open to many themes, but this will be a central one.) The first half of the course will be devoted to writers of the American Renaissance (1830-1865)—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 (1870-1900)—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, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton. I can say with certainty that we will be reading Melville’s Moby-Dick and a major novel by Henry James—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 you have and haven’t read before from this time period, and I will build a syllabus with those results in mind.
Course Information
- Course- ENG 5780: Nineteenth-Century American Literature - Imagining Selfhood in America Before and After the Civil War
- Professor- Dr. Carl Eby
- Offered- W 6:00-9:00
- Semester- Fall 2024
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