ENGL 201   American Texts and Contexts

An introduction to American literature exploring the relations among key texts and various contexts—critical, cultural and historical. The course engages a wide range of issues in American literary history, from Native American oral traditions and the European “discovery” of Indigenous lands through the colonial period and Revolution to the emergence of the women’s rights movement and debates over slavery and its legacy in the decades before and after the Civil War. A central focus is the impact of race and gender on the writings of all periods; the diverse authors studied include Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, William Apess, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Chesnutt.