WFQS 253 - Topics in American Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

The specific focus of the course varies each year, and may center on a literary movement (e.g., Transcendentalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain School), a single work and its milieu (e.g., Moby-Dick and the American novel, Call It Sleep and the rise of ethnic modernism); a historical period (e.g., the Great Awakening, the Civil War), a region (e.g., Southern literature, the literature of the West), or a genre (e.g., the sentimental-domestic novel, American satire, the literature of travel/migration, American autobiography, traditions of reportage, American environmentalist writing). Belvin Shelnutt.

Topic for 2026/27b: Popular Women Writers and the Work of Art. (Same as ENGL 253 and GNCS 253) Women wrote much of the bestselling literature of the nineteenth century, but popular works by American women of the period frequently get overlooked in the literature classroom. This course considers why that has been the case and what we gain by taking seriously nineteenth-century American women’s writing, in its myriad forms. Reading works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, we examine how authors such as Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, Frances Harper, Louisa May Alcott, and Sui Sin Far successfully navigated an expanding literary marketplace and drew power as well as artistic inspiration from the challenges they faced to publish their writing in print—and get paid for it. We attend especially to how authors formulate reflexive artfulness by drawing attention to the economic circumstances of their writing, whether cultivating authorial personas as marketable brands, channeling the renown of celebrity authors and bestselling texts, or embracing the periodical format’s intensifying association with mass production. Blevin Shelnutt.

This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS