SEMINARS
NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
READING LIST
WEEK 1: Introduction
WEEK 2: Benjamin Franklin, “Autobiography” (Early American Reader, pp. 107-116)
WEEK 3: Washington Irving “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (text and film)
WEEK 4: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”; Emily Dickinson, a selection of poems;
R. W. Emerson “The Poet”
WEEK 5: Edgar A. Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Philosophy of Composition”
WEEK 6 & 7: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Scarlet Letter” (text and film)
WEEK 8: Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno” (text and the film “Amistad”)
WEEK 9: Harriet B. Stowe, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
WEEK 10 & 11: Mark Twain, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
WEEK 12: Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet” (photocopied), “The Art of Fiction”
WEEK 13: Charlotte P. Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Kate Chopin, “The Awakening”
WEEK 14: Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”
Note: All required texts for reading can be found in the anthologies of American literature in the
library, unless it has been indicated otherwise.
REQUIREMENTS: CLASS PARTICIPATION; ORAL PRESENTATION; MID-TERM QUIZ;
FINAL WRITTEN EXAM.
Mid-term quiz: Definition of important concepts (literary and cultural); multiple-choice questions.
Final exam: Identify a passage from the texts included in the reading list; write an essay (a choice
from two given topics)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I.GENERAL
Elliot, Emory (gen.ed.) Columbia Literary History of the US.
Elliot, Emory (ed.) Columbia History of the American Novel.
Bercovitch, Sacvan (gen.ed.) The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol.I, II, VIII
Bercovitch, Sacvan (ed.) Reconstructing American Literary History
Brooks, Cleanth & Robert Penn Warren, American Literature: The Makers and the Making, 1973
Spiller, Robert. A Literary History of the US
Hutner, Gordon (ed.) The American Literary History
The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Inge, Thomas (ed.) A Nineteenth Century American Reader
Hubbell, J.B. (ed. et. al.) – Eight American Authors
Parrington, V. L., Main Currents in American Thought, Vol. III: The Beginnings of Critical Realism in
America ( New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930), 323-34;
II. WRITERS, TRENDS
Mathiessen, F.O. American Renaissance
Reynolds, D. S. Beneath the American Renaissance
Pease. D., Visionary Compacts. American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context
Bell, M. D., The Development of the American Romance
Kazin, A., American Procession
Lewis R.W.B., Trials of the Word
Lewis R.W.B., The American Adam. Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the 19th century
Chase, R., The American Novel and its Tradition
Sundquist, E., American Realism: New Essays
Bell, M. D., The Problem of American Realism, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1993);
Walcutt, Cl., American Literary Naturalism: A Stream Divided (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1956);
Ahnebrink, L. The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction 1891-1903 ( New York: Russell &&
Russell, 1961);
Pizer, D. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1966)
Conder, J.J. Naturalism in American Fiction: The Classic Phase (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1984)
Howard, J. Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1985);
Seltzer, M. "The Naturalist Machine”{, in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 116-47;
Michaels, W.B. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the
Century (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1987);
Mitchell, L.C. Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1989);