Department of English

Authors writing in the United States in the Nineteenth Century grappled in their work with a range of social and political conflicts that were occupying the country undergoing the process of "nation building." This course will examine some of these conflicts, which included the forced removal of American Indians from their lands, slavery, Reconstruction/post-Reconstruction, women's rights, the Mexican War, and processes of urbanization and industrialization, in selected prose works, both fiction and non-fiction, from a list that includes the following authors: James Fenimore Cooper, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, William Apess, George Lippard, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Delany, Rebecca Harding Davis, Mar�a Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Stephen Crane, Frances Harper, Sarah Winemucca, and Charles Chesnutt.