THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN WORKING CLASS: AMERICAN LITERATURE BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

Credit Hours: 3 · Undergraduate Upper-Level

This course will survey American literatures spanning from the Age of Discovery to the Atlantic Revolutions and up through the Civil War (or, the Second American Revolution). Through readings of explorer testimonials, trial transcripts, journal entries, narratives of enslavement, utopian political treatises, dime novels, and major works of American fiction and poetry alongside field defining pieces of political economy and history from below, we will focus upon the coming-into-being of the American working class as a distinct cultural formation resistant to multiple forms of exploitation.