Instructor: Dr Jelena Šesnić
Course title: Literary Seminar (2nd/3rd year): Aspects of American Romanticism (A, 19th c.)
Winter 2021/2022

Mon, 8:45-9:30 (A-105)
Wed, 10:15-11:45 (A-105)
Office: B-018
Phone: 01-4092060
E-mail: jsesnic@ffzg.hr
Office hours: Mon, 12:30-13:30; Thur 14:30-15:30

Course description: The period spans the decades from the 1820s to approximately the 1860s marked by the flowering of national literature in post-revolutionary times; the adoption and americanization of European ideas in so-called New England Transcendentalism, and the emergence of alternative (women, African Americans, commoners) voices. Alternatively called the American Renaissance, the period testifies to the coming-of-age of American literature. The texts are a representative selection of the unprecedented surge of creative energy that left no aspect of social and personal life untouched (from religion, education, women’s rights to politics and abolition), and will thus guide is in our examination of the past to which the American present owes so much.

Requirements: regular attendance; participation in class discussions; in-class and home assignments; seminar paper 6-7 pp. (ca 2000 words); mid-term + final test (continuous assessment, mandatory)

Selected works:

R.W. Emerson: selection of essays

Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (selection)

Henry David Thoreau: Walden (selection); selected essays

Herman Melville: short stories (selection) (“The Piazza”; “Bartleby, the Scrivener”; from The Encantadas: Sketches One and Two)

Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century; “American Literature; Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future”

Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Hope Leslie (novel)

Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Secondary readings: reading material will be provided in digital form on Omega.

Additional reading:

Buell, Lawrence, ed. The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings. Modern Library Classics, 2006. (selection)

Phillips, Christopher, ed. Literature of the American Renaissance. Cambridge UP, 2018. (selection)

Reynolds, Larry J. The Routledge Introduction to American Renaissance Literature. Routledge, 2021.

Rowe, John Carlos. At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature.

Columbia UP, 1997. (selection)

Warren, Joyce, ed. The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Rutgers UP, 1993. (selection)