This course will explore how the United States became an “imagined community” through writing, printing, and other media from the period of English settlement to the Civil War, and study this media as part of an emergent consumer culture also containing commodities like beer and products of slave plantations like rum, sugar, tobacco, and cotton.  Put another way, this course will examine how a nation as large as the expanding United States of the period was held together through a common set of texts integral to understanding its heritage, as well as through its Atlantic-wide economy and marketplace.  It also will study how the problems of slavery, race, gender, and immigration present at its founding continue to challenge the historical narrative of American development and civic engagement.  We’ll read early texts documenting the encounter between European and Native Americans, religious accounts of this encounter and sermons, captivity narratives, Native American writings, drama, Revolutionary-era polemical texts, autobiographies, fiction, nature writing, slave narratives, and poetry.  We will also show how a literature that is truly “American” for the first time emerges from the work of Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and many other writers.  In doing so, we will encounter an astonishing range of discourses and voices. The course includes short critical readings that provide interpretive paradigms for discussing these texts. The goals of the course are to provide students with a broad knowledge of the formative period of American literature and to offer experience in textual analysis through reading and writing about multiple genres. 

In spring 2020 this course fulfills a Post-1800 Literature requirement for English majors.