Inventing America

Overview

This module analyses the historical, literary and philosophical movements that generated the American literary tradition in the nineteenth century. It will introduce students to the key critical and cultural contexts, writers and movements of the American Renaissance as well as the counter narratives (cited in questions of gender, race, slavery as well as US religious and historical legacies) that produced enduring documents of the nineteenth century. In part, the module is a digest of canonical American writing of the period but one that allows students to read through and beyond the texts and into the major debates underpinning the writing from the new world between circa 1830 and 1900. Backgrounding the module’s discussions are key historical events and phenomena particular to the United States (e.g., the 1830s banking collapse; the American Civil War; demographic and population changes) and students will be encouraged to fuse their literary investigations with appropriate knowledge of historical and social contexts.

Learning Objectives

On completion of this module, students will have a sound knowledge of nineteenth-century American writing, in particular the rise and promise offered by Transcendentalism, the darker pessimism of the American realists, and the narratives and poetry of American discordance registered in slave narratives and texts dealing specifically with gender, race, and the power systems of American society. The developing influence of capitalism, the economic justifications for the horrors of slavery, and the self-conscious development of American individualism all feature as key questions that the module discusses. By moving between a range of genres – philosophical essays, econarratives, poetry, horror fiction, slave narratives, psychological tales, historical fiction – students will be equipped as multi-modal readers and critics of the developing forms of nineteenth-century American writing.

Skills

Students will, on completion of this module, be able to:
• analyse a range of nineteenth-century American writing from different perspectives in terms of genre, historical significance, literary techniques and variations of form;
• demonstrate a good understanding of the period known as the American Renaissance
• identify key aspects of American writing from the nineteenth century
• understand the cross-currents of American literary production set against contemporary debates concerning class, gender and race
• demonstrate a range of transferable skills in the forms of presentation skills, group discussion, individual research and written communication

Assessment

None