Romantic Realist: 19C US Lit

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course focuses upon a close reading of certain famous American texts written both in the Middle American Period (the years between the end of the Revolution and the beginning of the Civil War (1820-60), and the early modern period (1870 to about 1900). These periods differ in many ways, but it was in them that distinctively American values, attitudes and assumptions took root and developed and that the country began to abandon European models, all the while being influenced by them, German romanticism before the war, French Realism after, English throughout. We will be concerned with these developments, but our focus will be upon familiar authors -- Thoreau, Emerson Hawthorne, Crane,Chopin and Dreiser among others -- though we will give attention as well to some who gave energy as well to the changes that were everywhere apparent, and that informed the new republic, altering attitudes that, for better or for worse, are with us even now.