Course Resources Archive

This module will appeal to students with an interest in American literature.  Exploring classic authors and texts emerging from nineteenth-century America, the module offers a range of fiction, poetry, short stories, and essays, and an opportunity to engage with the cultural and literary issues related to ‘writing the new world’.

This module provides students with the opportunity to study a variety of nineteenth-century American texts, including fiction, the short story, poetry, and prose. Following a thematic model, the module introduces to students to transcendentalist thought through the essays of Emerson and the work of Whitman and Thoreau.  Having explored ‘canonical’ writers like Hawthorne and Melville, alongside the emergence of black American literary expression in Douglass, the module concludes with texts which look toward twentieth century notions of modernity, such as Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and Chopin's The Awakening.

A student passing this module should be able to

1. Demonstrate a well-founded understanding of literary and cultural production and developments in America during the nineteenth century.

2. Engage with competence and self-reflection in close reading and analysis of a variety of texts in relation to American specificity, race and gender, and evaluating these appropriately and critically but fairly.

3. Be able to communicate ideas with clarity and flair, making use of critical concepts and theories, and using appropriate critical vocabulary.

4. Plan and organise their own learning experience, and implement research, and use appropriate scholarly resources, including information technology.

The Library Catalogue contains full details of the current reading list for this module. Further details may also be found in the Module Guide.