Topic: "Slavery and the American Renaissance"
Committee: James Wallace (chair), Paul Lewis, Christopher Wilson
Exam Date: September 17, 2001
Primary Readings
Walker, David (1785-1839)
David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World
Washington Irving (1783-1859)
"Rip Van Winkle," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"
Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851)
Last of the Mohicans
Child, Lydia Maria (1802-1880)
Hobomok, "Slavery's Pleasant Homes--A Faithful Sketch," "The Quadroons"
Turner, Nat (1800-1831)
The Confessions of Nat Turner
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
Nature, "The American Scholar," "The Divinity School Address," "Self-Reliance," "The Poet," "Experience," "An Address on the Emancipation of the Negros in the British West Indies," "The Man of Reform," "Last of the Anti-Slavery Lectures"
Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)"Ethan Brand," "The Minister's Black Veil,""The Artist of the Beautiful," "Rappaccini's Daughter," "The Birthmark," "Young Goodman Brown," "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux," "The Maypole of Merry Mount," "Roger Malvin's Burial," "The Celestial Railroad," "The Earth's Holocaust"
Our Nig (1859)
Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849)
Poetry: "Sonnet to Science," "To Helen," "Israfel," "Dream-land," "The Raven"
Prose: "Philosophy of Composition," "Tale Writing."
Fiction: "Ligeia," "Fall of the House of Usher," "The Purloined Letter," "Ligeia," "William Wilson," "The Man of the Crowd," "The Tell-Tale Heart" "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Black Cat," "Hop-Frog: or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs,"
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Fuller, Margaret (1810-1850)
"The Great Lawsuit"
Stowe, Harriet Beacher (1811-1896)
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Fern, Fanny (1811-1872)
Ruth Hall
Jacobs, Harriet (1813-1897)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Brown, William Wells (1813-1884)
Clotel, or The Presidents Daughter
Thoreau, Henry David (1817-1862)
Walden, "Civil Disobedience" "Slavery in Massachusetts," "A Plea for Captain John Brown"
Whitman, Walt (1818-1892)
1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, "Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson"
"Song Of Myself," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"
Douglas, Frederick (1818-1895)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave, Written by Himself
Melville, Herman (1819-1891)
Prose: "Hawthorne and His Mosses"
Fiction: Typee Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, "Benito Cereno," "Bartelby, the Scrivener," "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids"
Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)
Selections from the Norton Anthology
Davis, Rebecca Harding (1831-1910)
Life in the Iron-Mills
Secondary Readings
Bell, Michael. The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
Brodhead, Richard. "Sparing the Rod" in Cultures of Letters. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1993
Bercovitch, Sacvan. "Hawthorne's A-Morality of Compromise." The New American Studies: Essays from Representations
Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance.
Carby, Hazel. ">Here My Voice, Ye Careless Daughters': Narratives of Slaves and Free Women before Emancipation." Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist.
Dayan, Joan. "Romance and Race." The Columbia History of the American Novel. Emory Elliott, general editor. New York : Columbia UP, 1991.
Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Anchor Books, 1992.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "From Wheatley to Douglass: The Politics of Displacement. Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Eric Sundquist. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "From Wheatley to Douglas: The Politics of Displacement.")
Gougeon, Len. "Thoreau and Reform." The Cambridge Companion to Thoreau. Ed. Joel Myerson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Kaplan, Amy. "Manifest Domesticity." American Literature 1998 Sept. 70:50 581
Karcher, Carolyn."Margaret Fuller and Lydia Maria Child: Intersecting Careers, Reciprocal Influences." Margaret Fuller's Cultural Critique: Her Age and Legacy. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
C. Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery Race and Violence in Melville's America. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State UP, 1980.
Klammer, Martin. Whitman Slavery and the Emergence of Leaves of Grass. University Park, PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995.
Levine, Robert. "Fiction and Reform I." The Columbia History of the American Novel. Emory Elliott, general editor. New York : Columbia UP, 1991.
Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York- Oxford U Press, 1941.
Michaels, Walter Benn and Donald E. Pease. The American Renaissance Reconsidered. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U Press, 1985.
Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive
Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf, 1988. (Part One, "God's Bow, Man's Arrows: Religion, Reform, and American Literature)
Romero, Lora. Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.
Russell Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature. New York: Methuen, 1986.
Samuels, Shirley, ed. Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America.. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1993. (Sections on Douglas and Melville)
Tompkins, Jane P. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford U Press, 1986.
Yellin, Jean Fagan. "Hawthorne and the American National Sin." The Green American Tradition: Essays and Poems for Sherman Pau
