L653 16025 IRMSCHER (#4)
American Literature 1800-1900

2:30p – 3:45p TR

While Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter sold well below 10,000 copies
during its author’s lifetime, George Lippard’s Gothic novel The
Quaker City sold 60,000 copies during its first year on the market
and continued to sell 10,000 per year for the next decade, making it
the longest-selling bestseller in nineteenth-century America before
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Actresses in “native” costume toured the country
reciting sections from Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), to
sold-out theatres, and steamships were named after protagonists of
the poem.  Carpenters, upholsterers, farmers, and schoolteachers
sent samples of their work to Lydia Sigourney or Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, asking if they, too, had the “gift of poetry.” But when
one of the hopeful applicants for a nursing position with the
invalid Alice James felt the need for some literary talk and
observed that, as far as she was concerned, “Longfellow was such a
deep poet,” James asked her to leave:  “to continue on so high a key
was too great a strain,” James wrote ironically.

In this survey-style course of American literature between 1800 and
the end of the Civil War, we will question, for the sake of
argument, the notion that one finds, in the words of Nina Baym, “the
best literature of an era among its relatively eccentric and unread
works.”  Drawing on recent as well as more established scholarship,
we will also discuss the continuing centrality of Transcendentalism
to accounts of nineteenth-century American literary history.  Thus,
the course is also intended to give those of you who are thinking to
continue their studies in nineteenth-century American literature the
opportunity to think critically and creatively about the field.
Several sessions of the course will likely be held in the Lilly
library, so that participants can get some first-hand experience in
the handling of primary material, including manuscripts.

We will move fast and cover a great deal of material.  Readings will
probably include Louisa May Alcott’s Moods, Frederick Douglass’s
Narrative, Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the
Nineteenth Century, Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, George
Lippard’s Quaker City, Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons, Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Susan Warner’s The Wide
World, as well as poetry by Lydia Sigourney, Emma Embury, Sarah
Helen Whitman, Frances Harper, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Julia Howe,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman.  Participants will
also be asked to purchase Lawrence Buell’s new anthology The
American Transcendentalists.

Requirements:   two in-depth class preparations, a series of weekly
reading responses, a 10-page critical paper, due around the middle
of the term, and a final collaborative project, based on archival
research.