Module Identifier | EN37520 | ||
Module Title | THE AMERICAN NOVEL IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY | ||
Academic Year | 2002/2003 | ||
Co-ordinator | Dr Martin Padget | ||
Semester | Available semesters 1 and 2 | ||
Assessment | Semester Assessment | 2 x 2,500 word essays | 100% |
Supplementary Assessment | Resubmit any failed elements and/or make good any missing elements |
- Demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the core literary texts and of appropriate critical approaches to the study of those texts;
- Demonstrate an understanding of the historical and cultural contexts in which the set material was produced;
- Write about the set material in a well-structured and well-argued way;
- Illustrate their knowledge and views by drawing upon appropriate literary, historical and critical sources beyond the core literary texts;
- Demonstrate developing skills in critical analysis;
- Demonstrate developing skills in oral presentation, both individually and in small group presentations.
1-2. Representing the Frontier and Mythologizing American History
Required reading: James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
3. "Somewhere between the real world and fairy-land": Dramatising the Past and the Present in the Romance
Required reading: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
4-6. "You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in": Moby-Dick and the Expansive Imagination
Required reading: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
7-8. Sentimental Fiction, Abolitionism, and the Politics of Emotion
Required reading: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
9. The Meanings of Freedom: The South Before and After the Civil War
Required reading: Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson
10. "The Courageous Soul that Dares and Defies": The Awakening and the Subversive Imaginations of Women
Required reading: Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Set texts
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1851)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)
Select Bibliography
Sacvan Bercovitch,ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature
Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition
Michael Colacurcio, ed., New Essays on the Scarlet Letter
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel
Michael Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace
Susan Harris, Nineteenth-Century Women's Novels
Harry Levin, Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville
Lucy Maddox, Removals
F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction