English Department – The American Literary Emergence, 1620-1920
Reading List 2012-2013 – American Literary Emergence,
1620-1920
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Fiction
William Hill Brown
The Power of Sympathy (1789)
Herman Melville
Pierre (1852), “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850)
Kate Chopin
The Awakening (1899)
Gertrude Stein
Three Lives (1909)
Short Stories/Essays
Catharine Maria Sedgwick
“Cacoethes Scribendi” (1830)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The Poet” (1844)
Hawthorne
“The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844)
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844)
“Preface to The Marble Faun” (1860)
Charles Chesnutt
“‘Po Sandy” (1888)
Henry James
“The Figure in the Carpet” (1896)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The Yellow Wall-paper” (1899)
“Why I Wrote The Yellow Wall-paper?” (1913)
W. E. B. Du Bois
“The Sorrow Songs,” from The Souls of Blackfolk (1903)
Poetry
Anne Bradstreet
“The Prologue,” “The Author to Her Book”
Edward Taylor
“Huswifery”
“Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children”
“The Ebb and Flow”
Phillis Wheatley
“On Imagination”
“To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works”
Philip Freneau
“The Power of Fancy,”
“To an Author,”
“The Wild Honeysuckle”
William Cullen Bryant
“To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe”
Edgar Allan Poe
“Israfel,”
“The Bells”
“The Poetic Principle”
Walt Whitman
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
“Live Oak with Moss,” Democratic Vistas
Wallace Stevens
“Anecdote of the Jar”
“Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”
Marianne Moore
“Poetry”
“To a Steam Roller”
“Critics and Connoisseurs”
Secondary Works
Cathy Davidson. Revolution and the Word, Introduction, Ch. 5 & 6.
Cindy Weinstein. Marriage, Family, Kinship in the Nineteenth Century American Novel,
Introduction and Ch. 6.
Neil Harris. The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, Chapters 1, 7-9.