American Literature: Beginnings to Civil War

Undergraduate Prerequisites: one previous literature course, or junior or senior standing. - An introduction to the multiple literary traditions of North America (especially that area that would come to be the United States) from the close of the fifteenth century through 1855. Authors include John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, William Apess, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.