ENG 2051 American Realism
This course will focus on literature from the Civil War to the Great War, roughly the 1860s to the 1920s, a volatile time in American social and literary history. We will make broad reference to the influence of new technologies (factories, trains, the telegraph, electric lights), the growth of urbanization, changing gender roles and attitudes toward sexuality, the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, and representations of slavery, race, and ethnicity. Against the background of these shifts in political and cultural history, we?ll focus on stylistic innovations such as the invention of free verse and the deployment of vernacular modes of American speech, the use of impressionistic, unreliable, or repetitive narration, as well as the impact of literary movements like sentimentalism, realism, naturalism, and modernism. Reading list will likely include many of the following authors: Twain, Howells, London, Chesnutt, Crane, Wharton, Dreiser, Whitman, Dickinson, Chopin, Gilman, James, Stein, Frost, Anderson, Hemingway.