LITR230

(Formerly LITR 227) This course offers a reading of fiction (the novel and short story), poetry, and drama as it was practiced in the United States in the 19th century. This century saw not only the birth of an American literary identity with Romantic fiction by James Fennimore Cooper and Washington Irving, but a later explosion of literary talent with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. This is also the century when civil war threatened the new nation's identity and survival. Slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobson, fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and non-fiction by Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau challenged Americans' fundamental notions of freedom and identity. Later, responding to a rapidly changing world, writers like Mark Twain, Paul Dunbar, Stephen Crane, and Kate Chopin turned to Realism and Naturalism. While the reading list will frequently change, students will encounter a wide variety of literary voices of the era.