This lecture course deals
with the interlocking of Romanticism, cultural nationalism, and practices of
political reform; it focuses on a broad archive of autobiographical writings,
political tracts, literary works, philosophical essays, and popular entertainment
from the period between the Jacksonian era and the Civil War. Topics include:
the evolution of democratic culture, “Indian Removal,” New England
transcendentalism, debates on slavery and national expansion, sentimentalism
and the abolitionist imagination, the emergence of popular entertainment forms
and genres, the slave narrative. Combining a focus on narrative forms and
cultural self-descriptions with inquiries into shifting configurations and
hierarchies of race, gender, and region, the lecture engages works by James
Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Alexis de Tocqueville, Margaret Fuller, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Lydia Maria Child, Maria Stewart, Frederick
Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Jacobs,
P.T. Barnum, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher-Stowe and others.
- Lehrende(r): Alexander Starre