AML 5017 Kilgore Fall 2022

This course will explore developments in nineteenth-century U.S. literature, roughly from 1848 to 1861, in connection with the rise of labor and feminist movements, utopian socialism and communism, radical abolitionism and the resistance to U.S. Empire. "The American 1848" represents a historical flashpoint for these political configurations—the European revolutions of that year, the end of the Mexican-American War, the Seneca Falls Convention, the establishment of the Oneida Community, the California Gold Rush. What significance do these and other events hold for understanding U.S. literature before the Civil War—the so-called "American Renaissance"? In addition to political tracts, essays, speeches, and social theory, students can expect to read authors such as Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Julia Ward Howe, Henry David Thoreau, Hannah Crafts, George Lippard, John Rollin Ridge, Martin Delany, Rebecca Harding Davis.