ENG 339 - City, Frontier, & Empire in American Literature

1 course unit

The course will focus on US literature produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the post-civil war era to the years shortly after World War I. The most influential literature of this period stages the questions at issue for American national culture and identity with the rapid urbanization of the population, the closing of the frontier, and the expansion of an already existing ideology of empire. The generic strategies of Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism overlap and contest each other in the works we will read to push back against the massive, anxiety producing influences of pre-Civil War Romanticism. Readings will include Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Charles Alexander Eastman’s From the Deep Woods to Civilization, short stories by Stephen Crane, the last (“Deathbed”) edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and other works.
Meets departmental Texts/Contexts approach.
Meets general academic requirement W when offered as 339.