ENG 338, 339 - City, Frontier, & Empire in American Literature

Course unit(s): 1
Meets requirement: W when offered as 339
The course will focus on U.S. literature produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the post-civil war era to the years shortly after World War I and the enactment of the eighteenth and nineteenth amendments to the Constitution. Texts studied will include work by such writers as William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Rebecca Harding Davis, Abraham Cahan, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and others. Contexts considered will include changes in American identity, and U.S. literary practices in response to immigration, urbanization, the “closing of the frontier,” the triumph of Jim Crow, and U.S. imperial expansion. Satisfies departmental Prose requirement.