American Prose from Reconstruction to World War ICourse Description
This course is a chronological survey of American literature from the Civil War to 1914. Writing of this period focuses on human nature and destiny, on dislocations associated with the close of the Western frontier, on enormous disparities of power and prosperity, and the transformation of the American landscape through immigration and urbanization. Characters rarely represented in fiction move to the center stage: industrial workers and the poor, ambitious business leaders, prostitutes, unheroic soldiers, and vagrants. African and Native Americans, other ethnic minorities, women from diverse social groups, and immigrants write for publication, addressing the long history of white injustice to black and native Americans, rethinking race, racism, and the ordering of family and civic life. These we will explore as we seek to answer a few broadly-related questions: How does literature of this period imagine a common (sometimes utopian) destiny for a diverse and divided people emerging from war? In a time when there is little sense of culture as a shared way of life and religion has lost the power to bind people together, (how) does this literature teach solidarity and fellow-feeling, the art of sympathetic identification with others? As romantic and transcendentalist visions give way to naturalism and realism, can it be said that the age of sympathy gives way to an age of empathy? Representative authors include Whitman and Melville, Bret Harte, Henry James, Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Theodore Dreisser, Stephen Crane, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Zitkala-Ša, Edward Bellamy, and L. Frank Baum.
Required Texts
- L. Frank Baum, The Annotated Wizard of Oz (Centennial Edition) 978-0393049923
- Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward Dover Thrift Editions 978-0486290386
- Stephen Crane, A Girl of the Streets and Other Short Fiction Bantam Classic Edition 978-0553213553
- Bret Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings Penguin Classics Edition 978-0140439175
- Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie Oxford World’s Classics Edition 978-0199539086
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland Dover Thrift Edition. 978-0486404295
- Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle Dover Thrift Edition 978-0486275529
- Herman Melville, Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales Barnes and Noble Classics Series 978-1593082536
- Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings Penguin Classics Edition 978-0142437094
