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American Cultural Voices, 1620-1865 ENG 75100; ASCP 81500

This course covers a representative range of American writings of the 1620-1865 period, from seventeenth-century Puritan prose and poetry to the eighteenth-century literature of enlightenment, revolution, and national founding, and on to that unique moment of political tension and cultural flowering, the Civil War era. We explore Puritan works by William Bradford and Jonathan Edwards; texts of the American Enlightenment by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson; the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson; nonfiction by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Abraham Lincoln; fiction by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville; the writings of African Americans, including David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs; and Native American works such as the Winnebago trickster cycle and Iroquois creation story. In addition to reading landmark works of America’s formative period, we discuss current approaches to cultural history, American Studies, and such critical approaches as historicist, queer, circumatlantic, ecocritical, and aesthetic/formalist. Class meetings are on Zoom. Assignments include a book review and a term paper.