The Short Story American Romantics 1830-1865

Romanticism, which flowed in part through the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and David Palmer, and which found literary form in works from Goethe (i.e. his Sturm und Drang smash hit Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) and other authors such as Ludwig Tieck and Novalis to William Blake, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë and Lord Byron, to name a few, found its major beginning in American culture around the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidential election of 1828, 54 years after the first publication of Goethe’s jungen Werthers. Along with other contemporaneous cultural and intellectual currents such as American Transcendentalism and Victorianism during the antebellum period (1830-1865), American Romanticism helped to establish for the first time a distinctly American literature with great works from the likes of Whitman, Walden, Dickinson and Melville. One of the most distinctly American forms of literature to be popularized and become a canonized literary genre during Romanticism was the short story. In this course we will look at the arrival of the American short story within the framework of American Romanticism, at its progenitors and their stories, and also at their essays on literary criticism. Among those we will be reading are Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. We will discuss the function of literary devices such as character, plot, theme, point of view, setting, tone, and style, as well as the historical background and cultural mindset underlying each individual short story. Students will be required to print texts out from Moodle. Anglistik - Amerikanistik For 2 KP: Regular attendance and participation; short group presentation; in-class written assignments For 5 KP: Same as above except that one in-class assignment will be expanded into an essay For 7 KP: Same as above except that one in-class assignment well be expanded into a research paper Universität Siegen SoSe 2011 M.A. Hulse Seth Thomas M.A