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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.
COURSE FORMAT: Lecture/Discussion
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
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459