ENG 2050 Early American Literature
The course examines American writers from the colonial period to the Civil War, including Bradstreet, Taylor, Edwards, Franklin, Irving, Emerson, Poe, Douglass, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman. These writers helped to define the American identity by exploring conflicts and contradictions that still shape our American experience: the conflicts between spirituality and materialism, individualism and community, idealism and pragmatism, economic opportunity and economic exploitation, romanticism and realism.