19th Century American Literature to the Civil War
Class Information
Instructor: Badley, Chip
CRN: 44724
Time: MWF 2:10-3:00
Location: 1283 Grove
GE Areas: American Cultures, Governance, and History Domestic Diversity Writing Experience
Description
This course will introduce students to American literature published between 1800 and 1865, a period defined by the early national (1789-1831) and antebellum (1831-61) eras. We will study texts that engaged and influenced primary concerns of the early to mid-nineteenth century, including hemispheric revolutions and insurrections, Indian Removal and ?Manifest Destiny,? westward expansion, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, historical fiction, slavery and abolition, sex and democracy, the myth of the frontier, domestic sentimentalism, labor, industrialization, and the gothic. In addition to reading canonical writers?Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, Hawthorne, Irving, Jacobs, Melville, Stowe, Thoreau, Whitman?we will explore popular and bestselling works that remain relatively understudied today, including Uriah Derick D?Arcy?s ?The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo? and John Rollin Ridge?s Life and Adventures of Joaqu?n Murieta, The Celebrated California Bandit.
Grading
Two Essays
Midterm Exam
Participation Reflection
Final Exam
Texts
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, Frederick Douglass
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Leaves of Grass (1855 ed.), Walt Whitman
The Life and Adventures of Joaqu?n Murieta, John Rollin Ridge
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, Harriet Jacobs