Penn Arts & Sciences Logo
 

American Fiction

ENGL 089.001
instructor(s):
MWF 11:00

This course will introduce you to the prose fiction of the 19th-century United States, as well as to its cultural and social contexts. We'll read diversely styled works on a wide range of themes by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, and Charles Chesnutt. We'll also study how and why American fiction blossomed alongside new institutions and technologies, entertaining huge numbers of readers, provoking critical appreciation and debate, making publishers rich and authors famous, breaking down boundaries between elite, popular, and mass culture, and fueling controversy over literary nationalism during the period.

fulfills requirements