ENG 228-01 - American Literary Traditions II (Fall)

4 credits (Fall)

From the Mexican-American War to the Civil War, from the Indian Removal Act and the “Trail of Tears” to U.S. imperialism in the Pacific, the nineteenth-century American border was particularly contested and bloody. Merely trying to define the geographic borders of the United States proved difficult, even as many nineteenth-century American writers sought to create and re-formulate a truly national identity through literature. Starting with the American Renaissance, we will examine how these nineteenth-century American writers sought to create an American identity that would influence discourses as varied as the frontier, race, nature, domesticity, sexuality, and freedom. We will closely read canonical masterpieces like Melville’s Moby Dick and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, but we will also investigate the many different writers who challenged received definitions of American identity, such as David Walker, Catherine Sedgwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Dion Boucicault, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Chesnutt, Onoto Watanna, John Rollin Ridge, Mar¡a Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Henry James, Frederick Jackson Turner, Stephen Crane, and Zitkala-Sa.

Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 or any course in the study of literature in another language department.
Instructor: Khactu