19th-Century American Literature

A survey of authors of the American Renaissance, such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and Whitman, and/or the Gilded Age, such as Twain, Howells, James, and Dickinson. The instructor may choose to include some Puritan or early national writers or to read the canonical writers mentioned above in light of some of the more popular genres of the nineteenth century, such as women's fiction, protest novels, and slave narratives.