L351 9959 AMERICAN LITERATURE 1800-1865
Christoph Irmscher

11:15a-12:30p TR (30 students) 3 cr., A&H.

This course is designed to give students an overview of the formative period in American literary history. Focusing on short passages, we will try to assess how writers have tried to make their texts “work” and the ways in which these texts, after all these years, still speak to us. We will pay attention to some themes that resonate through these texts, the emergence of an American national consciousness, for example, the function of sentimentality, the shifting conceptions of American nature, and the specter of race and violence, and we will ask ourselves how changes in the literary marketplace affected conceptions of authorship. A particular focus of the course will be the emergence of female authors.

Texts: Part B of The Norton Anthology, vol. 1, to be supplemented by the Dover edition of Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century and the Penguin editions of Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons. In addition to the readings, requirements will include brief informal writing assignments/quizzes, two formal papers of 8 pp. each, and two exams.