American Literary History I From Puritanism to the Civil War

This is the first part of a two-semester lecture that provides a survey of the key texts, epochs, and developments in North American literature and culture. The survey offered in this first part moves from the Age of Discovery, Exploration, and Settlement (15th-17th centuries) to the Revolutionary Era and the literature and culture of the Early Republic (18th and 19th centuries), concluding with a close look at the American Renaissance and the literature of reform in the middle of the nineteenth century. The course covers all major genres and seeks to understand North America as a multiethnic, multi-religious, and multiregional nation. The authors we will study include Christopher Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh, Captain John Smith, William Bradford, John Winthrop, John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards, Sarah Kemble Knight, William Apess, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Royall Tyler, Phillis Wheatley, Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, Hannah Webster Foster, Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, John Pendleton Kennedy, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Please note that this will be a reading-intensive course. Most texts listed in the syllabus are included in the Norton Anthology of American Literature (7th or 8th Edition, Volumes A and B). Texts marked with an asterisk (*) are not included and will be provided on the course moodle. You must read the assigned weekly texts before attending the lecture. It makes little sense to attend the lecture course without reading the assigned texts. Seminar für Anglistik Universität Siegen WiSe 2015/16 Univ.-Prof. Dr. Stein Daniel