ENGL 225 - Early American Literature: Authoring Self, Nation, Worlds

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

(Same as ANAS 225 and GNCS 225) This course introduces students to American literatures from before European colonial settlement to the period preceding the Civil War, exploring the significance of literary authorship during an era of authoring a new nation. Through a range of genres including Native American creation stories, colonial histories of exploration, Puritan trial transcripts, personal narratives, poetry, Romantic tales, and sentimental fiction, we trace the literary strategies that writers (and other creative agents) use to claim legitimacy as authors alongside changing ideas about who counts as an author and what it means to “author” something. We also consider how authors respond and contribute to historical circumstances such as settler colonialism, Native resistance, slavery, abolitionism, the nation’s founding, and the literary market. Material texts are a key method of inquiry for this class; we focus on early physical forms in which our readings circulated. To that end, we make two visits to Special Collections, and you are asked to explore digital archives relating to several readings. Using archival artifacts, we consider the shifting forms and reception of literature, especially by authors traditionally regarded at the margins of the literary, and we’ll consider “history” as another kind of textual production that circulates about the past. Blevin Shelnutt.

This course satisfies the pre-1800 or a pre-1900 requirement for the English major.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS