ENGL3006V

This course will survey some of the major literary figures, aesthetic movements, and thematic concerns of US literature from the Civil War to the present. Our investigation will identify common traits in the literature that causes it to fit within three very broad literary historical categories: realism, modernism, and postmodernism. We will explore what makes literature created by the people of the United States distinctly "American" during a period that extends from the Civil War and the outlawing of slavery to women's suffrage, workers' movements, the Great Depression, the First and Second World Wars, and the civil rights movement. In addition to reading and analyzing the literature itself in terms of style, form, genre, and language, we will study it in historical context: the complex interplay between the political, the social, the cultural, and the literary in the United States. This approach rests upon the notion that literature is not created in a vacuum; it is influenced by and influences the world in which it is created.

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02293