This course provides an introduction to American literature and culture beginning with texts from the Post-Reconstruction era to more contemporary 20th century writings. The aim of this course is to understand the ways in which American literary genres, such as realism, modernism, and postmodernism have posited, and negotiated, particular notions of the U.S. national subject. We will track the notion of U.S. citizenship, and belonging, through a focus on various literary and historical representations of race, gender, and labor. Such a focus will allow us to engage with the following questions: How does representation work in each text? How are those figures gendered and racialized in American literature? What might these different narratives tell us about the construction of dominant U.S. narratives and the different identities that are created through them? We will explore how literature might serve as a particularly rich site for understanding the socio-cultural impact of literary representations of race, gender, labor, and nation, as well as the effects that popular notions of these categories have had on U.S. literature itself.