ENGL 503 and ENGL 503 H American Literature I

“William Bartram’s botanical conquest of Florida is as notable an event of the American Revolutionary era as Patriot resistance to Britain.”-Lawrence Buell The Environmental Imagination

The course is motivated by Lawrence Buell’s contention that the New World is both a natural and political event and that much of American literature expresses an “environmental imagination.”.. We begin with the first best seller in America, a novel of seduction and travel published in 1794 by Susanna Rowson. We will analyze the humorous and controversial narrative of Caroline Kirkland's domestic life on the Michigan frontier in the 1830s and Margaret Fuller's seemingly more Romantic 1843 narrative of her tour of the Great Lakes. These popular women writers frame our reading of Henry David Thoreau's famous travel deep into the heart of Walden Pond, Herman Melville's South Pacific adventures, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. We will consider how these writers, among other early American authors, describe and define a new world—a new nature and a new community.