New Worlds, New Subjects: American Fiction at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

In 1900, the historian Henry Adams declared, Americans lived in a world so radically transformed that “the new American ... must be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature.” This new world had many progenitors: Darwin’s theory of evolution; Nietzsche’s theory of the will; Freud’s theory of the unconscious; the rise of the mass media; the industrial production line; the triumph of consumerism; mass immigration; Jim Crow; the New Woman. This class reads works of fiction from the turn-of-the-century in the context of these transformations. Writers include Freud, Nietzsche, Stephen Crane, Henry James, and Edith Wharton.