ENGH254

Explores the dynamic relations among author, reader, theme, form, culture, and text in America through an examination of representative texts from the founding of the US to the turn of the twentieth century. Emphasizes the transnational roots of American literature, exploring the multiplicity of contexts from which a national literature emerges. Topics may include literary nationalism, Native American protest literature, race, slavery and freedom, the Gothic, transcendentalism, gender and sexuality, the novel, realism, urbanization, and US imperialism. Authors may include Paine, Jefferson, Brown, Wheatley, Irving, Apess, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne, Stowe, Douglass, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, James, Chesnutt, Twain, Gilman, and Du Bois.