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Aspects of American Romanticism (23/24)

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Course title: Aspects of American Romanticism (A, 19th c.)
Instructor:Dr Jelena Šesnić
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Duration: Semester 3 or 5
Status: elective
Enrolment requirements: enrolment in 3rd or 5th semester

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, 12:00-13:00; Thur 10-11

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; mid-term + final test (continuous assessment)

Selected works:
R.W. Emerson: selection of essays
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (selection of poetry)
Henry David Thoreau: Walden (selection); selected essays
Herman Melville: short stories (selection) (“The Piazza”; “Bartleby, the Scrivener”; from The Encantadas: Sketches One and Two)
Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Hope Leslie (novel)
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (slave narrative)            

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)