Arnold Krupat

American Literature: 1830-1890

Fall 2010

Beginning roughly in the 1830s, a number of American authors set out to "invent" American literature as a distinctively national literature rather than merely an English literature written elsewhere. Thoreau began his experiment living at Walden Pond exactly on the 4th of July. Walt Whitman, in his "Song of Myself," refers to himself as "Walt Whitman, American." And Emerson wrote about the "American Scholar." It was also the case, however, that the country founded upon the proposition that "all men are created equal" had to deal with its Constitution's provision that some men-slaves-were to count as only 3/5ths of a man, while others-Indians-were not to be counted at all. The land of liberty was also a land of slavery and colonial conquest. This course examines the invention of American literature from roughly the 1830s to 1890, the year Sioux Indians were massacred at Wounded Knee and the year when the Bureau of the Census announced the "closing" of the American frontier. In addition to those named above, other of our authors include Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, William Apess, Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller, and Mark Twain.