ENGL 3650 - [Envisioning America: Nineteenth-Century US Poetry and Prose]

(crosslisted) AMST 3650
(HB) (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Fall. Not offered: 2021-2022. Next offered: 2023-2024. 4 credits. Student option grading.

R. Gilbert.

Powerful voices emerged in the United States’ first hundred years that continue to reverberate and to shape the ways in which we understand ourselves as Americans. We will give special attention in this course to the groundbreaking poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and to the visionary prose of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. We’ll consider the central place of slavery, abolitionism and the Civil War in the development of American ideals of freedom, selfhood, and political resistance, as reflected in writings by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Margaret Fuller among others. And we will explore the wide variety of verse produced by popular poets like William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

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