Literatures of the American Renaissance, 1820-1865

This course surveys literature from one of the most exhilarating and fraught periods in American history. Reading texts by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Fuller, Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Jacobs-and putting them in relation to political speeches, antislavery tracts, ecological materials, and indigenous texts-it explores the way in which these writers engage contemporary issues such as revolution, slavery, nationalism, agriculture, westward expansion, women's rights, democracy, and war, and in doing so, can become resources for doing political work in the present and, in particular, anti-racist work.