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Course Description

Summary

From the Puritans' first unpromising glimpse aboard the Mayflower of this "hideous & desolate wilderness, full of wild beats and wild men," America has inspired, even required, bold new feats of language and the imagination to capture it in literature. This course will survey the beginnings of the American literary tradition, from the poetry of Anne Bradstreet and the salacious genre of the captivity narrative to the sermons and tracts of America's first great religious thinker, Jonathan Edwards; we'll also delve into American fiction from Washington Irving to the Gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe.