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EN 2046: Nineteenth-Century American Literature

EN 2046.1: Dr. Alan Gibbs

Course Aims

The objective of this module is to introduce students to a range of nineteenth-centuryAmerican literary texts in various genres. The module is an introduction to the

literature of the United States from the American Renaissance of the 1850s to the end

of the century. Reading a range of texts from the relevant period, students will trace

developments in American literary aesthetics and explore themes such as nation

building, race and gender, slavery and the South, with a strong focus on the role of

literature in the in the formation of American national identity.

Teaching MethodsThe course will be taught in twice-weekly 1-hour lectures:

Mon 12pm, Kane G1 and Tue 10am, Food Sciences Building A1.

I am also available for individual consultation: Tue 11am-1pm.

Tutor Contact DetailsOffice: ORahilly Building, 1.62

Telephone: 021 490 2508 / 2241

Email:a.gibbs@ucc.ie

(If you need to contact me outside my consultation hours, email is probably the best

way.)

Required TextsYou will need to purchase and read the following texts for the appropriate lectures,

and bring copies along to the relevant lecture. All books are available from John

Smiths Bookshop on campus, and substantial discounts apply when you buy them as

a package.

Herman Melville, The Confidence Man(1857). Penguin Classics. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper(1892). Dover Editions.

Other textsessays by Ralph Waldo Emersonwill be made available as a

photocopy.

Lecture/Reading Schedule

Date Subject/Text(s)

6.1.14 Course Introduction I: Early American Literary Contexts7.1.14 Course Introduction II: Nineteenth-Century American Literary

Contexts

13.1.14 Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalism

14.1.14 Emerson:Natureand The American Scholar

20.1.14 Herman Melville, The Confidence ManI

21.1.14 Herman Melville,The Confidence Man II

27.1.14 Herman Melville, The Confidence ManIII

28.1.14 Herman Melville, The Confidence ManIV

3.2.14 Herman Melville, The Confidence ManV

4.2.14 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-paperI

10.2.14 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-paperII

mailto:a.gibbs@ucc.iemailto:a.gibbs@ucc.iemailto:a.gibbs@ucc.iemailto:a.gibbs@ucc.ie

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11.2.14 ExamRevision

AssessmentThis course is assessed by a 90 minute examination (date/time TBA).

Suggested Secondary ReadingThe Oxford Companion to American Literature and The Cambridge History of

American Literatureprovide useful brief introductions to key authors and debates

covered in the course. You will also need to read some secondary criticism in

preparation for the class test and take-home essay, so there follows a short selection of

relevant general texts, and suggestions for specific authors. NB: numerous invaluable

scholar ly arti cles can also be found onl ine at JStor and at Project M use (both

accessible through the Boole L ibrary website).

The following are useful resources which can be found in the university library:

General Accounts and SurveysSacvan Bercovitch (ed.),Reconstructing American Literary History

Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (eds.),Ideology and Classic American Literature

Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic

Construction of America

Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), Cambridge History of American Literature Vols.1 and 2

Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature

Annette Kolodny,The Land Before Her: Fantasy and the Experience of theAmerican

Frontiers

D.H Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in

America

Walter Benn Michaels, The American Renaissance Reconsidered

Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman, The Futures of American Studies

Donald Pease (ed.),Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon

Richard Poirier,A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature

Richard Slotkin,Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American

Frontier, 1600- 1860

Larzer Ziff,Literary Democracy(chapters on Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville)

Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self

Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in AmericaTony Tanner, The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo

Tony Tanner, Scenes of Nature, Signs of Man: Essays on 19th and 20th Century

American Literature

Race and GenderHenry Louis Gates,Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self

Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature

Toni Morrison,Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Elaine Showalter, The New Feminist Criticism(chapter, Melodramas of Beset

Manhood)

Sandra Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic(chapter on Dickinson).

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Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to AmericanFiction

Leland S. Person,Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetic in Poe,

Melville and Hawthorne

The American RenaissanceRichard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition

F. O. Matthiessen,American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson

and Whitman

Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease, The American Renaissance Reconsidered

David S. Reynolds,Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination

in the age of Emerson and Melville

EmersonJoel Porte and Saundra Morris (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo

Emerson

Robert D. Richardson,Emerson: The Mind on FireStanley Cavell,In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism

David Jacobson,Emersons Pragmatic Vision: The Dance of the Eye

MelvilleC. L. R. James,Mariners, Renegades and Castaways

David K. Kirby,Herman Melville

Carolyn Karcher, Shadow Over the Promised Land

Richard Chase (ed.),Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays

Faith Pullin (ed.),New Perspectives on Melville

Robert S. Levine (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville

Geoffrey Sanborn, The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a

Postcolonial Reader

Robert S. Levine (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville

Geoffrey Sanborn, The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a

Postcolonial Reader

Perkins GilmanAvailable thought Project Muse/JStor:

Jonathan Crewe. Queering The Yellow Wallpaper? Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the

Politics of Form,Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Autumn,

1995), pp. 273-293.Conrad Shumaker. Too Terribly Good to Be Printed: Charlotte Gilmans The

Yellow WallpaperAmerican Literature, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Dec., 1985), pp. 588-599.

Shawn St. Jean. Hanging The Yellow Wall-Paper: Feminism and Textual Studies,

Feminist Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2, Second Wave Feminism in the United States

(Summer, 2002), pp. 397-415.