English 130C

Description

A survey of major works of U.S. literature after the Civil War, with special attention to artistic experimentation in these years and to the rise of "realism" in literature.  These decades put unprecedented faith in ideals of progress and individualism, in economic expansion and big business.  They also were marked by all the problems of Reconstruction, by racial injustice and the rise of Jim Crow laws, by deep poverty, and by unresolved debates about the role of the federal government in social welfare.  Writers engaged with this moment in a variety of surprising ways that also reflected on literature’s uncertain status as a medium of social protest or as a separate realm outside of the new social realities that were made visible to readers like never before.  Our authors will include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, Jacob Riis, Henry James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Edith Wharton.