English 130B

Book List

Fern, Fanny: Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Levine, Robert S.: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. B: 1820-1865; Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick; Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass (1855 edition)

Other Readings and Media

Photocopied course reader

Description

We will take up the remarkable fiction, poetry, and essays of this period, including works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Fanny Fern, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. We will attend to literary form and technique, social and political context, and the ideological formations and transformations of these decades, especially the urgent debates about democracy, slavery, race, gender, sexuality, individuality, theology, economic system, social reform, the role of writers, and the power and limits of words. Two midterms and one final examination will be required.

This course satisfies L & S's Historical Studies breadth requirement.