The course Engl 5200, "Readings in American Literature", taught by Edward Griffin is being held Friday from 11:00am to 1:30 pm spring 2009.
Our Wilson Library owns about 85% of the roughly 100 novels written by Americans from the time of the first one (generally acknowledged as William Hill Brown's 1789 novel, The Power of Sympathy) through the time of Cooper's Leatherstocking series (1823-41). Until recently, because these novels were unavailable in affordable editions, literary history tacitly assumed that the American novel pretty much began with Cooper. With the thoroughgoing revision of the American canon that began in the 1970s, however, and with the rise of new methods of scholarship and computer-aided research, this chapter in American literary history was discovered. The discovery generated a new willingness to teach these books in the classroom, and such eagerness (and market) produced a greater interest among publishers to reprint many of the novels in paperback. When that happened, I started teaching a graduate course in the first American novels--one of the first such offerings in the United States, I have been told. Students found these works highly interesting, perhaps because of the novelty but also because they found among them both some hitherto undiscovered jewels on a list that had for a long time remained unexplored and a revised understanding of American literary history. The reading list for spring semester is currently under construction, but it will include about eight titles drawn from the novels of such writers as the following: Hugh Henry Brackenridge; Charles Brockden Brown; William Hill Brown; Lydia Maria Child; Julia Collins; Hannah Foster; Jesse Holman; Gilbert Imlay; Royall Tyler; Susanna Rowson; Rebecca Rush; Catherine Maria Sedgwick; Tabitha Tenney. These titles use such subjects as variations of the classic marriage plot, explorations of near-insanity, political and social satire, women‚Äôs education, slavery, the encounter between Islam and early American Christianity, and race relations. They also include the newly discovered first-novel-published-by-an-African-American woman (Julia Collins, The Curse of Caste). As a term project, each graduate student will choose one of these ‚Äúfirst American novels‚Ä? that is not currently in print and prepare an original introduction to it.
