An introduction to American literature and culture during the decades leading up to the Civil War. This is a period that struggled with numerous issues of race, slavery, gender, and class, strove to develop a national mythology and identity against the backdrop of shifting national boundaries, increasing immigration, worldwide travel, empire and trade, and a heterogeneous population, tried to salvage religious faith in the wake of modern science and the Enlightenment, and took democracy seriously enough to trace through its implications even to the point where, as in the case of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, such implications start to become startling and strange. The period is much too complex to be organized into a dominant, easily defined thesis or polemic, and in fact the aesthetic strategy of choice for many of the writers whom we’ll be exploring is the ambiguous interchange of perspectives and voices without closure or synthesis. The “question,” as Melville at one point writes of his own literary method, tends to remain “more final than any answer,” and nature itself, as Thoreau emphasizes, becomes a site where perspectives so alter and shift and we can never get any closer than “nearer and nearer to here.” The pre-Civil War American idiom, I should caution, is dense, complicated, and often difficult to read—although enormously rewarding and eloquent--and most of the issues broached during this period remain as current as cell phones and iPods.


List of Books in Order of Use:

Emerson, The Portable Emerson
Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau
Hawthorne, The Portable Hawthorne
Whitman, Leaves of Grass (selections available on e-reserve)
Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick