American Reckonings
This course will be a loose survey of United States literature from 1820 to 1900. Our focus will be social justice themes and literary movements. The course will begin with the major figures in early nineteenth-century U.S. literary nationalism, figures who celebrated and mythologized the founding of the United States, including Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman. After looking at these central champions of American nationalism, we will move on to study a skeptical tradition in U.S. literature. This skeptical literature takes into account the problematic political history of the United States, its reliance on an often-brutal capitalist economic order, its dependence on race-based enslavement, and its violent settler colonization of Indigenous territories. In this section we will first study romantic and poetic attacks on the mythology of the U.S. by such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Rebecca Harding Davis. We will then look at how a powerful gender ideology in the United States worked in tandem with its larger political and economic ideologies; in this section we will study Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Henry James. Finally, the course will look at Black and Indigenous accounts of life under U.S. slavery and colonization. In this section we will read William Apess, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs.