This online, asynchronous course will provide a survey of American literature between the colonial period and the Civil War. We will read in a wide variety of genres such as short fiction, historical nonfiction, slave narratives and other forms of autobiography, poetry, etc., paying close attention to how writers used the conventions of these genres to meet their particular personal, aesthetic, and political goals. Some of the writers we’ll discuss include Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Washington Irving, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, and we’ll focus on issues as colonization, slavery, women’s rights, nature, and individualism.