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From the early days of colonisation and captivity narratives to the extraordinary literary renaissance of the nineteenth century, American literature grappled with issues of race, gender, democracy, consciousness, vision, urban life, national identity, power and trauma which remain deeply relevant to American culture and society today. This course begins with the Jamestown colonists and the Puritans, who envisaged their new world as a ‘city upon a hill’. It gives you the chance to uncover the origins of the American autobiographical tradition and the gothic novel before focusing on the great American literature of the nineteenth century. In 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed to Harvard’s Divinity School that: ‘always the seer is a sayer’. This was a period in which the role of the writer took on new significance in contexts of Transcendentalism, social utopianism, feminism and restless spiritual quest. Abolitionism gained new energy and purpose as writers like Frederick Douglass revealed the unmitigated horrors that continued to dominate in the South. In its middle decades, the country exploded in civil war and the world watched, entranced, to see if the fragile experiment of American democracy would survive and whether it would be slaveholding or free. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson produced strikingly original poetry profoundly engaged with their own historical moment, Moby-Dick laid an early claim to the status of the Great American Novel and unprecedented levels of immigration swelled the cities and gave rise to a particularly urban fiction in which, by the end of the nineteenth century, everyday life on the streets became, for the first time, something which might be seen to matter.

Each term consists of lectures on six set texts and related topics and authors plus seminars on four of the six set texts. The course engages with a range of writing, including political writing, indigenous American writing, oratory, poetry, prose, the short story and the novel. Authors include, but are not limited to, John Smith, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sojourner Truth, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Kate Chopin and Henry James.

Examination is by means of a three-hour written exam paper or by Course Essay, if preferred, and no other Course Essay is being submitted by the candidate in that year.