ENGL 348(S) Sentimentalism and Realism: The Nineteenth-Century American Novel

This course studies sentimentalism and realism, the two dominant modes of the nineteenth-century American novel. How does American literature get from the tear-stained deathbed of the angelic Little Eva to the brutally "real" depravities of the dentist McTeague who chews on his wife's fingers ("crunching and grinding them with his immense teeth, always ingenious enough to remember which were the sorest")? We will focus our inquiry on the highly contested nature of sentimentalism's "feminine" taste for the domestic and realism's "masculine" move toward the bestial. We will consider the material conditions and intellectual movements informing these literary practices: separate spheres ideology and the rise of feminism; industrialization, immigration, and urbanization; slavery and the Civil War; theories of evolution and economics; and modernism in the other arts. Authors may include Susanna Rowson, Susan Warner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Rebecca Harding Davis, Mark Twain, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Frank Norris. Requirements: active classroom participation, several short writing assignments, and a final paper of 12-15 pages. Note: Weekly reading assignments will often be quite heavy. Major Seminar. Open only to English majors and qualified non-majors. Permission of English Department chair required; see information above. Enrollment limited to 15. (1800-1900)

Hour: CLEGHORN