ENGL 331 - U.S. Literature in the 19th Century I

(3 credits)
Prerequisite: ENGL 203 and ENGL 234
The era from 1800-1865 was filled with calls for distinctly American literature, and the responses were as varied and ambitious as the new nation itself. Writers celebrated the frontier and developed transcendentalism; wrote sentimental best sellers, twisted gothic tales and fiery abolitionist tracts; brought the novel to unparalleled philosophical depth and invented modern poetry. Authors studied might include James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Alan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson.