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Description: |
We will investigate the peculiar quality of romanticism and the particular achievements of romantic writers in the United States during the period before the Civil War. Three capacious topics will organize discussions: nature and art, society and history, and individuals and communities. As part of each of these topics, we will also consider the pressures and controversies around slavery, race, and gender that were dividing the States in the decades before the Civil War. We will read works by Cooper, Childs, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Melville, Poe, Douglass, Jacobs, Hawthorne, Stowe, Whitman, Lincoln, Dickinson, and others. Of particular interest throughout the term will be the hopes and anxieties, allegiances and resistances, aesthetic triumphs and political frustrations that characters American romantic artists and have made the imagination a crucial part of the nation's life and an indispensable resource for its people even at moments when fundamental conflicts threatened to end the nation altogether. |