English 376 - American Fiction

American fiction from the colonial period to the present. The course may focus on a small or large time period, and it will consider the language and form, method and content that mark a distinctly American tradition.

CW Gen Ed The American Worker. This class follows a representational trajectory of American workers in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels and short stories. Fanny Fern?s Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1854) embraces a lively style of transcendentalist discourse that challenges the rigid social customs that undermine women?s progress. Henry James?s The American (1877) offers a critique of industry conditions that launch a business magnate?s personal transformation. Such works portray the occupational conditions within which American women, men and child laborers participated. We will study literature with extensive depictions of the interior spaces and inner workings of a variety of occupational industries. We will pay keen attention to the interiorities of law offices, overcrowded tenement buildings, factories and street-based industries that employed child laborers. Many early American writers first achieved an authorial status by publishing fiction about workers in nineteenth-century magazines like Putnum?s Monthly, The Student and the Schoolmate and The Anglo-African Magazine. To enrich the learning experience, students will have opportunities to explore the pages of historical periodicals in which readings originally appeared. Course readings include works by the authors Fanny Fern, Henry James, Herman Melville, Martin Delaney and Upton Sinclair.