This course traces the rise of American literature from 16th-century narratives of exploration and conquest to the mid-19th century. We will situate texts within the context of major social and cultural transformations. We will read such writers as Christopher Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, John Winthrop, Capt. John Underhill, Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. |