Literature of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This new course highlights literary works written in the 40 years after the American Civil War, spanning the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age. The era's fiction was remarkably innovative, and writers from the U.S. took their place on a global stage in a way rarely seen before. We will explore the riches, reading major novels by Henry James (Portrait of a Lady), Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn), Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), Kate Chopin (The Awakening), Charles Chesnutt (The Marrow of Tradition), Simon Pokagon (Queen of the Woods), and Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth). Short stories by Sarah Orne Jewett ("A White Heron") and Charlotte Perkins Gilman ("The Yellow Wallpaper") will round things out. The end of the Civil War produced abiding conflicts over race and questions about the future of American democracy, which we will consider in works by Walt Whitman (Democratic Vistas and selected poetry), along with selections from the postbellum writings of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells-Barnett's anti-lynching journalism. This volatile period of territorial expansion, income inequality, domestic political and racial conflict, large-scale immigration, and rising international influence transformed the United States from a largely homogeneous and agrarian society to a version of what it is today. We are living in what is sometimes described as a "Second Gilded Age," while Reconstruction has become the subject of renewed attention in connection with the persistence of racial injustice. The historical context, and its parallels with the present, will provide an animating framework for our close readings of the literature. There will be around 25 pages of writing, with specific assignments at the beginning of the semester. Participation - possibly including an oral report - will also factor in the final grade.