This course considers the way a large range of American writers responded to the industrial transformation of the United States. We will look at the way writers conceived and understood the rise of the corporation, the growth of the metropolis, the surge of migration, and the expansion of American power through war and settlement, and we will consider the way such visions related to the writers' understanding of the nature of American culture and the significance of literary expression. Among the authors discussed will be William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, T. S. Eliot, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Toomer, and Richard Wright. |