120127 VO Survey of Literatures in English 2 (2008W)

The course will offer an introduction to literary and cultural documents produced in North America from the early European settlements in the 17th century until the closing of the frontier and the rise of the United States to the status of an imperial power. This year the focus will be on the process of nation building in the late 18th and in the 19th centuries with the crisis of the Civil War and on the consolidation of British North America through the Confederation of 1867. Some attention will be paid to the Puritan heritage in New England and to foundational texts from the 18th century (by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson), but the emergence of a national literature and the "American Renaissance" (R.W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, N. Hawthorne, H. Melville, etc.) seen against the background of popular forms of literature and entertainment will be in the foreground. Some attention will also be paid to early colonial prose produced in Canada (e.g. by the Strickland sisters) and to the efforts of the Confederation poets in the recently formed Dominion of Canada.