10:10A-11:00A MWF (30) 3 cr.
OPEN TO MAJORS ONLY. DECLARED MINORS OBTAIN AUTHORIZATION FROM BH442.
TOPIC: LITERATURE AND LIBERTY, 1776-1918
The nineteenth century is “framed” by cataclysmic events: the French and American revolutions at one end, the First World War at the other–and the American Civil War in the middle. This course will look at English and American literature during this “long” 19th century, with special attention to texts that reflect or participate in the wars and revolutions of the period. What is at stake in almost all of them is human liberty: claims for it and against it (or against “too much” of it, for certain people or classes of people). We will look at texts from the American Revolution, the English Romantic period, the Civil War, and Victorian England, when issues of social justice begin to arise, moving beyond questions of political (voting) rights. Authors will include Jefferson, Paine, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Emerson, Whitman, Douglass, Melville, Dickens, Yeats and Eliot, among others. There will be a mid-term and a final, and three or four short papers.