123250 AR Literature Course - Literature 1/2 (MA) American/North American (2014W)

This course will provide an interactive overview of dominant themes in nineteenth-century American literature, with particular attention to representations and constructions of landscape. With political independence, and after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, space became a central category of defining the new nation, both as political territory and as an arena of cultural identity. By looking at the development of literary approaches to the American landscape throughout the nineteenth century, we will explore all kinds of spaces (urban, rural, gendered, western, mythical, and utopian) and see them in relation to their literary-historical periods (of Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism). Writers to be addressed include Emerson, Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Bryant, Jewett, Bierce, London, and Crane, among others.