Imagining America. Introduction to American Literature. Autumn 2013

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2 Imagining America Introduction to American Literature Autumn 2013 Module Convenor: Dr Thomas Ruys Smith Room: A1.40 Aims and Objectives This module will provide you with a thorough introduction to American Literature from the Colonial period, through the Revolution, up to the end of the nineteenth century. Over the course of Imagining America you will encounter a rich and vibrant variety of American writers and texts travellers, novelists, poets, biographers, philosophers and witness the development of a national literary culture. From Puritans to politicians, from Romantics to Realists, you will explore the work of the men and women who shaped our ideas of what American Literature was, is, and might be. Each week, you will also consider the other forces that shaped these texts. As America was colonised, sought independence, fought a Civil War over slavery, and stepped onto the world stage, how did American writers respond to the extraordinary tensions running through a newly born nation?

3 Learning Outcomes By the end of this module students will have: Become familiar with a wide range of early American texts and writers Gained an understanding of the major movements in American literature from the Colonial era through to the end of the nineteenth century Considered the issues surrounding the development of a national literary culture Improved their ability to read and analyse literary texts Improved their written skills Improved their oral presentation skills Course Texts All students are required to buy The Norton Anthology of American Literature, eighth edition. This semester, you will need volumes A, B, and C for all your required readings. Make sure to bring the appropriate volume to each of your seminars. Lectures and Seminars Each week, you will attend a one-hour lecture and a follow-up two-hour seminar. Lectures take place Mondays, Seminar times will vary according to group please make sure to check your timetable. You must attend all lectures and seminars. Listed below you will find the reading that you will need to do in preparation for your lectures and seminars. Some weeks you will read a single, longer text; some weeks you will read shorter extracts from a variety of works. Either way, you must ensure that you carry out all the required reading. And you should also feel encouraged and empowered to read beyond and around the required readings. The more you read, the more you will get out of this module. Please note: First year teaching begins in Week Two, so you will have no lecture or seminar during your induction week.

4 Assessment This module will be assessed through coursework, broken up into: First essay: 1500 words, due in Thursday, Week 6, before 3pm. This is a formative piece of written work: it will not contribute to your final grade for this module. A list of essay questions can be found at the end of the document. Second essay: 1500 words, due in Monday, Week 13, before 3pm, worth 90% of the final grade. A list of essay questions can be found at the end of this document. Presentation: delivery of a ten minute presentation on one of the authors covered in this module: 10% of the final grade. Presentations will be allocated in your first seminar. When writing your essays, make sure to employ the good practice learned in your Reading Cultures module and your Study Skills sessions.

5 Module Outline Week One: No lecture or seminar. Week Two: Introduction: The Colonists and their Legacy Dr Rebecca Tillett This lecture will look at the different ways in which America was seen by some of the early settlers: as a Promised Land, with the possibility of a New Jerusalem being founded there, as a commercial enterprise or as a new empire ripe for colonisation. For some it represented the possibility of leaving behind the corruption and constraints of Europe, while for others it was a means of spreading civilisation and establishing business enterprise. Required Readings (Vol. A): John Smith, excerpts from The General History of Virginia William Bradford, excerpts from Of Plymouth Plantation: Chapters 4,7,9,10,11 Anne Bradstreet, A Dialogue between Old England and New (not in Norton; click to read); To My Dear Children Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson Week Three: Inventing America Dr Hilary Emmett This lecture will examine various attempts to define a new national identity, addressing especially questions of capitalism, revolutionary ideals, and revolutionary violence. Required Readings (Vol. A): Thomas Paine, excerpts from Common Sense Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence and excerpts from Notes on the State of Virginia: Queries XVII, XIX J. Hector St John de Crevecoeur, excerpts from Letters from an American Farmer: What is an American?, Description of Charles-Town, and Distresses of a Frontiersman

6 Week Four: Who Reads an American Book? : James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Catherine Maria Sedgwick Dr Thomas Ruys Smith This lecture will explore the emergence of a national literary culture in the early nineteenth century, the Transatlantic tensions surrounding that process, and the work of three pioneering American authors who achieved international popularity writing stories and novels about America. Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow James Fenimore Cooper, excerpts from The Pioneers Catherine Maria Sedgwick, excerpts from Hope Leslie Week Five: Transcendentalism and Its Critics Professor Nick Selby This lecture discusses and examines what is often thought of as America s declaration of cultural and literary independence: Transcendentalism. The lecture will seek to place Transcendentalism within the wider movement of literary Romanticism in the first half of the nineteenth century, and will consider the importance of New England thinking to the development of an especially American literary sensibility. Focusing on Emerson s seminal essay Nature and Thoreau s Walden the lecture will consider how ideas of the land, landscape and nature lie at the heart of transcendentalist thought and are thus central in America s attempt to invent a literary culture for itself in the cultural and political upheavals of the early nineteenth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature; The American Scholar Henry David Thoreau, excerpts from Walden: Chapters 2 ( Where I lived, and what I lived for ), 3 ( Reading ), 17 ( Spring )

7 Week Six: Reading, Research and Writing Week no lecture or seminar Week Seven: American Gothic Edward Clough This lecture will explore the literary tradition of the Gothic in American writing in the years , reading it in the context of post-enlightenment discussions of science and reason, the rise of nationalism and national literature, and the US politics of expansion and slavery. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown (1835) Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher (1839); The Man of the Crowd (1840). Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855) Week Eight: Whitman and Dickinson: Multitudinous America, Microscopic America Professor Nick Selby This lecture will examine the different poetic responses of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to the various crises of personal and national identity that characterise America in the second half of the nineteenth century. What common ground is there, the lecture asks, between Whitman who declares, I am large, I contain multitudes and Dickinson, who states that microscopes are prudent in an emergency? Walt Whitman, Song of Myself Emily Dickinson, all Norton selections, including prose pieces

8 Week Nine: Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction and Damned Scribbling Women Professor Sarah Churchwell This lecture examines the origins and consequences of the association of popular fiction with women, in light of the cult of true womanhood, the suspicion of the novel, and the interrelated cultural hierarchies of gender, value, and the marketplace. Lydia Maria Child, excerpts from Letters from New-York Harriet Beecher Stowe, excerpts from Uncle Tom s Cabin Fanny Fern, all excerpts. Week Ten: Slavery and Abolition Dr Ross Hair This lecture considers the American slave narratives of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs (1861), examining issues of gender, audience, race, politics and aesthetics. The lecture will also address how the prefaces and introductions preceding these narratives demonstrate the extent to which authorship itself is put into question and has to be authenticated and legitimised. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself Harriet Jacobs, excerpts from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

9 Week Eleven: Civil War, Aftermath, and American Literary Realism Dr Thomas Ruys Smith The Civil War was a traumatic turning point in American life. This lecture will consider its equally significant effects on American culture, especially its relationship to the emergence of American literary realism in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In particular, it will focus on Mark Twain s seminal Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a text that is closely connected not only to the issues surrounding the development of American realism, but also the unfinished business of the Civil War in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Required Readings (Vol. C): Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Week Twelve: Towards the Twentieth Century Dr Rachael Mclennan This lecture will argue that the figure of the young woman is particularly visible in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature and culture, and functions as a symbol of modernity. By focusing on the development of an individual on the threshold between childhood and adulthood, fictions about young women enable fantasies of nostalgia, critiques of American culture in the Gilded Age, and speculation about American life in the twentieth century. Required Readings (Vol. C): Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets Sarah Orne Jewett, A White Heron

10 Essay Questions TBC