ENGL 2030 - Introduction to American Literatures: Beginnings to the Civil War

(crosslisted) AMST 2030
(HB) (LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

May be used as one of the three pre-1800 courses required of English majors.

A. Galloway.

From a “brave new world” in European settlers’ eyes to a “house divided” by the mid- nineteenth century, “America” is seen in an assemblage of richly layered tales, poems, novels, essays, first-hand accounts, and other documents of astonishing power and strangeness, produced in or around what became the United States. In these works, trials of persecution vie with utopian schemes, prophetic fantasies run up against exploitative hoaxes, and haunted houses are as likely to be riven with family secrets as with national hatreds. Expect to encounter tough-minded thinkers, to read closely and with curiosity, to write skeptically and carefully, and to engage in informed conversation about figures such as Bradstreet, Taylor, Wheatley, Franklin, Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, Jacobs, Dickinson, Douglass, and Melville.