Lectures on and discussion of the major texts of the American Renaissance.

We will take up the remarkable fiction, poetry, and essays of this period, including works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Fanny Fern, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. We will attend to literary form and technique, social and political context, and the ideological formations and transformations of these decades, especially the urgent debates about democracy, slavery, race, gender, sexuality, individuality, theology, economic system, social reform, the role of writers, and the power and limits of words. Two midterms and one final examination will be required. This course satisfies L & S's Historical Studies breadth requirement. See also https://english.berkeley.edu/courses/7242

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills