America achieved literary nationhood belatedly in the nineteenth century, after a long prehistory of religious and political rebellion that began with Puritanism and culminated in revolution. The nation’s writers, as they struggled towards cultural independence from the old world, drew upon these elements of the American experience, as well as diverse aspects of the effort to build a society in an untamed (but not uninhabited) continent. In these respects, America in the nineteenth century was pursuing both post-colonial liberation and, under its own flag, colonial expansion – by conquest, appropriation and purchase. In the work of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, American literature found its own subjects before it found its own forms; but the European legacy of Romanticism was given a pronounced American slant by the Transcendentalists, notably in Emerson’s freethinking essays and Thoreau’s experimental autobiography.
Walt Whitman’s radical free-verse Leaves of Grass built upon this foundation, while writers with other preoccupations found equally distinctive new voices and new forms (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson). At mid-century, American visitors to Britain were appalled by the inequalities of class they encountered; British visitors to America were equally appalled by the persistence of slavery in the South. The issue of slavery and the Abolitionist cause engaged many American writers, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and authors of slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. The Civil War was the culmination both of these arguments and broader political tensions within America’s national society. The era of increasing commercialisation and materialism that followed is examined in the novels of eminent realists William Dean Howells, Henry James and Edith Wharton. Notably, the reformist energies of ex-Abolitionists lent new momentum to arguments about the status of women in America (though such arguments run throughout the period, from Margaret Fuller to Kate Chopin). Some writers responded to the ‘Gilded Age’ by looking back to the Old South (Mark Twain) or, later, to the pioneer farmers of the mid-west (Willa Cather). Others confronted contemporary social realities more directly: the often-oppressive conditions of life in the newly great cities of New York and Chicago provided material for writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, whose perspectives converge with the deterministic and Social Darwinist ideas associated with European Naturalism.
Aims and Objectives
The aim of this module is to explore the rich and diverse literature of the American nineteenth century in relation to its changing historical, political and cultural contexts.
By the end of this module you will be expected to demonstrate
Knowledge and understanding of a range of texts in different genres from nineteenth-century American literature
Knowledge and understanding of the relations between literary texts and the contemporary politics and culture of nineteenth-century America
Knowledge and understanding of significant debates in recent American literary scholarship
America achieved literary nationhood belatedly in the nineteenth century, after a long prehistory of religious and political rebellion that began with Puritanism and culminated in revolution. The nation’s writers, as they struggled towards cultural independence from the old world, drew upon these elements of the American experience, as well as diverse aspects of the effort to build a society in an untamed (but not uninhabited) continent. In these respects, America in the nineteenth century was pursuing both post-colonial liberation and, under its own flag, colonial expansion – by conquest, appropriation and purchase. In the work of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, American literature found its own subjects before it found its own forms; but the European legacy of Romanticism was given a pronounced American slant by the Transcendentalists, notably in Emerson’s freethinking essays and Thoreau’s experimental autobiography.Walt Whitman’s radical free-verse Leaves of Grass built upon this foundation, while writers with other preoccupations found equally distinctive new voices and new forms (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson). At mid-century, American visitors to Britain were appalled by the inequalities of class they encountered; British visitors to America were equally appalled by the persistence of slavery in the South. The issue of slavery and the Abolitionist cause engaged many American writers, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and authors of slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. The Civil War was the culmination both of these arguments and broader political tensions within America’s national society. The era of increasing commercialisation and materialism that followed is examined in the novels of eminent realists William Dean Howells, Henry James and Edith Wharton. Notably, the reformist energies of ex-Abolitionists lent new momentum to arguments about the status of women in America (though such arguments run throughout the period, from Margaret Fuller to Kate Chopin). Some writers responded to the ‘Gilded Age’ by looking back to the Old South (Mark Twain) or, later, to the pioneer farmers of the mid-west (Willa Cather). Others confronted contemporary social realities more directly: the often-oppressive conditions of life in the newly great cities of New York and Chicago provided material for writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, whose perspectives converge with the deterministic and Social Darwinist ideas associated with European Naturalism.Aims and Objectives The aim of this module is to explore the rich and diverse literature of the American nineteenth century in relation to its changing historical, political and cultural contexts.By the end of this module you will be expected to demonstrateKnowledge and understanding of a range of texts in different genres from nineteenth-century American literatureKnowledge and understanding of the relations between literary texts and the contemporary politics and culture of nineteenth-century AmericaKnowledge and understanding of significant debates in recent American literary scholarship
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