The Realist Imagination

A study of American literary realism. We will situate realism in the context of the realist turn in American artistic, political, legal, and economic enterprise from the Civil War to World War II, and measure the realist novel's relations to alternative aesthetic ideologies such as transcendentalism, regionalism, naturalism, and modernism. Authors to be considered include Emerson, DeForest, Grant, Twain, Cable, Chesnutt, Dreiser, Wharton, Cather, Anderson, Dos Passos, Faulkner, and Hurston. Enrollment limited to 15.