Examines a selection of classic texts and major issues in the literature of the United States from the American Renaissance of the 1840s and 50s through to the Jazz Age of the 1920s and 30s. Texts and emphases may vary from year to year, but our primary concern is the relation between literature and some of the larger historical processes and problems of the period. A cross-cultural frontier becomes a settled landscape; a ‘new world’ becomes a new world order; a post-colonial literature engages the traditions of Europe; utopian hopes are contradicted by slavery and its legacies; emancipated women challenge the dominance of men; the big city offers new opportunities for self-fashioning and cultural invention. The theoretical orientation of the course is broadly new historicist and is responsive to recent developments in settler colonial studies, gender theory, environmental and spatial history. This course promotes advanced reading, critical, and writing skills through the study of a carefully chosen set of thematically interlocking texts. For 2025: Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance; Melville, Moby-Dick; Thoreau, Walden; Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems; Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Cather, The Professor’s House; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Faulkner, As I Lay Dying.