LITR228

(Formerly LITR 242) Colonial American Literature focuses on major Puritan and Colonial writers including Bradford, Winthrop, Williams, Wigglesworth, Bradstreet, Rowlandson, Mather, Edwards, Crevecoeur, Paine, Franklin, Jefferson, Wheatley, Native American writers, and others. We may think of Colonial literature as uniform and staid; however, these writers work in a variety of genres, including poems, sermons, histories, and narrative accounts. Nor do these writers speak with one voice. Perspectives range from Puritan patriarchs to dissenters to entrepreneurs to revolutionaries. Our writers include slaves and kidnap victims as well as wealthy Virginia landowners. From this medley, we hope to understand the tensions and paradoxes that produce our contemporary understanding of who we are as Americans and where it is we came from. From discovery to conquest to Puritanism to Revolution, we will chart the early evolution of American literary expression.