This course will provide a survey of American literature from early contact and colonization to the end of 1865. While we will read and discuss many different texts ranging across different genres, one larger theme we will return to throughout the semester concerns the idea of “wilderness” and its counterpart, the “domestic.” The time period we will be studying witnessed enormous changes to the land of what is now called the United States of America and the people and animals who inhabited that land. European colonization efforts configured the land as a wilderness to be rendered tame to a white domestication project writ large; by the middle of the nineteenth century on the eve of the Civil War, the newly-formed United States, built through Indigenous dispossession and Black enslavement, was “a house divided” (as Lincoln famously put it). As we read throughout the semester, we will attend to the various valences of “wilderness” and the “domestic” as we consider different topics, especially settler colonialism; slavery and abolition; women’s rights; the emergence of a middle-class domestic sentimental space; and the natural environment.

Through class discussions and assignments, students will develop a thorough understanding of the works we will discuss, attending carefully to context, circulation, and historical memory, and students will analyze how different literary genres afforded authors different opportunities to comment on social issues. Questions we will consider include: How did authors construct, narrativize, resist, and critique “America” during this period? What is the relationship between word and world? What is the relationship between what we are reading in the class and our current historical moment?

Assignments will include three short response papers, contributing to a creative digital class mapping project over the course of the semester, a midterm exam, and a final exam. While this will be an asynchronous online course, students will have opportunities to engage in online class activities and discussions.