123030 VO Literature Survey 2 (2012W)

This lecture course will survey "American" literature(s) from contact and colonial times (1607-1783) via the Early Republic (1783-ca. 1820) to the post-Civil War era (ca. 1865-70). While emphasis is placed on historical background, cultural context, and literary analysis of selected novels, short stories, essays, poetry, drama, and political writing, the course will also address the dynamics of literary historiography and canon formation in the "American" literary tradition and "American" textual identity formations.

In this survey we will examine some of the most important literary trends and developments in English literary history between the 18th and the early 20th centuries and relate them to major events in British political and social history. In our analyses of seminal works of English literature we will focus on the historically typical and the aesthetically innovative, on significant writers but also on other art forms (such as painting or architecture) to illustrate the prevailing fashions and changing tastes of each era - from the Augustan age to Romantic literature and from the Victorian period to Modernism.