Instructor: Craig White

Phone: 281 283 3380

This homepage features

 

• a preview of the course
  
• required texts
  
• a brief listing of likely assignments and
  
• course objectives

(For the reading schedule or other details, click on the appropriate tabs at the top or bottom of this page.)

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The "American Renaissance" describes literature and culture in the generation before the Civil War--perhaps the greatest concentration of literary genius in United States history.

In this definitive era of American literature,

authors as diverse and marvelous as . . .

. . . explore a variety of identities for Americans during the nation's early maturity,

when the identity of the nation was still being formed.

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Nina Baym, ed., The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. B, 7th ed.

James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

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(Details of assignments may be found at the Syllabus & Schedule tab. Percentages listed are only symbolic of approximate relative weight; grades are not computed mathematically but by letter grades, which may include pluses and minuses.)

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Objective 1

To use critical techniques of "close reading" and "new historicism"

as ways of studying

and cultural history of the "American Renaissance"

(the generation before the Civil War).

Objective 2

To study the contemporaneous movement of "Romanticism,"

the narrative genre of "romance,"

and the related styles of the "gothic" and "the sublime."

Objective 3

To use literature as a basis for discussing representative problems and subjects of American culture (new historicism), such as equality; race, gender, class; the family; modernization and tradition; the individual and the community; nature or land; the writer's conflicted presence in an anti-intellectual society.

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For further information, contact Craig White

at 281-283-3380 or