ENGL 250: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

Course Description

Nineteenth-century fiction gave us some of the most iconic images in American culture--the scarlet letter, the white whale--and some of the most captivating works about American life and society. This course will explore how fictional texts articulated the problems of nineteenth-century democracy, including the crises over slavery leading to the Civil War, and the rise of large-scale capitalism and urban modernity later in the century. We will look at such literary movements as sentimentalism, sensationalism, realism, and naturalism, among others. Writers studied might include Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and many others. Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement.