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Academic Year 2005/2006


The Novel and the New World
ENGL 361 SP

Crosslistings:
AMST 363

This course explores American fiction from its beginnings, focusing on its obsession with death, its troubled sexuality, and its ambivalent relationship with both the frontier and Europe. Rather than studying the American novel in isolation, we will examine how American novelists write in self-conscious dialogue with their British (and French) counterparts. Beginning with British writers such as Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, we'll ask how their novels absorb and transform kinds of writing that flourish in the context of the exploration and settlement of the New World: the captivity narrative, the travel account, and ethnography. Then, pairing novels from each side of the Atlantic, we will compare how British and American writers make different use of the same materials and forms. How does the sentimental novel fare in the context of the social volatility of the early American republic? How does Charles Brockden Brown transfer the cathedral typical of the gothic novel to the American woods? We will wind up the course by considering the turn of Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe to shorter fictional forms.

MAJOR READINGS

In addition to Behn, Defoe, Brockden Brown, Irving, and Poe, we'll read the American sentimental novelists Hannah Foster and William Hill Brown, Horace Walpole, and the French Romantic Chateaubriand.

EXAMINATIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS

Short, informal papers and persentations leading up to a final paper. Midterm exam.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS and/or COMMENTS

This course meets the English Departments pre-1800 requirement.

COURSE FORMAT: Lecture/Discussion

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Level: UGRD    Credit: 1    Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL    Grading Mode: Graded   

Prerequisites: NONE Links to Web Resources For This Course.

Last Updated on MAR-30-2006


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