Fall 2023 Detailed Description: American Literature 1815-1865

Antebellum writers tried to shape the nation through their texts, as they expressed the struggles over power and identity that led to the Civil War—and that continue to define U.S. discourses today. We encounter the genres—novels, oratory, poetry, appeals, slave narratives, essays, and nature writing—that authors used to grapple with slavery, social reform, environmental transformation, and aesthetics. Writers include William Apess (Pequot), Margaret Fuller, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Stoddard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. We’ll consider critical debates on antebellum literature by reading selected scholarly essays, and we’ll dip into antebellum visual culture, too. This course emphasizes research; students develop their interpretations of what we read by building on the criticism and cultural history about the period.