This course will survey American literary and cultural history from its beginnings through the nineteenth century. Although any such survey will unavoidably be incomplete, this course is designed to refresh and deepen your knowledge of the canonical texts that have marked American literature and culture. From the literature of Puritan New England to the American Renaissance and the beginnings of realist fiction, we will identify major literary movements, styles, and strategies of representation. As such texts reveal, the history of American literature and culture has often been understood as a project carried out by white men. To counterbalance this bias, this course will read such texts alongside a range of texts written by women, African Americans, and Native Americans. This course will enable you to contextualize significant American literary and cultural movements and engage with how these texts fought over, contested, constructed, and laid claim to what counts as American.
