Manifest Destinies: Liberalism and Expansion in American Literature, 1820-1920

An investigation of the relations between American literature and the territorial expansion of the United States from the early 19th century through World War I. Topics include the role of liberalism in the rise and operation of American expansion, the relationship between colonialist and imperialist visions of America's manifest destiny, the ideological implications of literary genres of open space (the western, the sea narrative), race and the patterns of internal migration in the United States, and the connection between the Turner thesis and literary form (Howellsian realism, Whitman's poetics and Dickinson's anti-poetics, Jewett's regionalism). Authors include Cooper, Poe, Melville, Douglass, Craft, Whitman, Dickinson, James, Jewett, and Twain. Enrollment limited to 15 graduate students.