Course Description
Summary
From the Puritans’ first unpromising glimpse aboard the Mayflower of this “hideous desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men,” America has inspired, even required, bold new feats of language and the imagination to capture it in literature. This course will explore the beginnings of the American literary tradition and its roots in Puritan 'confession,' 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 Melville and Hawthorne to the Gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
