Courses

The class aims to provide a broad acquaintance with classic works of American literature from the period 1492-1852. The emphasis will be on literature produced before the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Most people grow up thinking of this date as the starting point of US history: “a new birth of freedom,” as Abraham Lincoln called it. And it was, in a way. But we will be trying to understand it differently: as an end-point of the chaotic, multinational, multicultural world that was North America before the USA existed.

Most of the texts composed during the first three centuries of American literature were written by authors who assumed that North America was destined forever to remain an outpost of the British, French, and Spanish empires. Before 1776, the Americans who most often dreamed of “declaring independence” were not white men in wigs, but rather enslaved people of African descent or members of Indigenous nations fighting to retain their sovereignty against the European empires. From these peoples’ perspective, the Revolutionary War did not bring an end to the “colonial period” of American history, as white Americans began telling themselves in the 1780s and 90s. According to early US nationalists like James Fenimore Cooper, America had already achieved freedom in a legal and political sense by the year 1800; now it just had to bring its culture up to speed. In reality, however, the ink on the Constitution had hardly dried before the USA became an empire in its own right. Freedom remained an unresolved problem that creators of American literature had to work through. That ongoing process, which began in the fifteenth century and continues today, is mainly what we will be studying.