RATIONALE
This field aims to cover the major and canonical American
works between the years 1850-1950. First and foremost,
it is designed to provide me with a solid and broad understanding
of the field of American literature during this period.
The majority of the texts are the most commonly taught
and researched works of this era. Thus, I begin with Moby
Dick and Uncle Tom's Cabin, and conclude with
Invisible Man. Some themes, however, that I hope
to trace within this framework include emerging notions
of race and identity, urban modernity, and the increasing
presence of immigrants and "foreigners" in American
culture. To this end, I have clusters of texts that focus
on American realism (particularly in the city) and books
written by immigrants and minority authors. My goal is
to attain this general command of the canonical, "most
taught" works while developing a possible dissertation
thesis in the process.
|
|
TEXTS
Herman Melville
— Moby Dick (1851)
— "Benito Cereno" (1855)
Harriet Beecher Stowe
— Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851)
Walt Whitman
— Leaves of Grass (1860)
Mark Twain
— The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
William Dean Howells
— A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)
Emily Dickinson
— selected poems: 49, 214, 249, 258, 303, 328,
341, 435, 441, 465, 556, 585, 632, 657, 712, 986, 1129,
1670, 1732 (1890-1914)
Stephen Crane
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)
— "An Experiment In Misery (1893)
Sarah Orne Jewett
— The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)
Kate Chopin
— The Awakening (1899)
Frank Norris
— McTeague (1899)
Theodore Dreiser
— Sister Carrie (1900)
W.E.B. DuBois
— The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Henry James
— The Ambassadors (1903)
Jack London
— The Sea Wolf (1904)
Edith Wharton
— House of Mirth (1905)
Upton Sinclair
— The Jungle (1906)
Gertrude Stein
— Three Lives (1909)
James Wheldon Johnson
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
William Carlos Williams
— "Tract" (1917)
— "The Widow's Lament in Springtime"
(1921)
— "The Great Figure" (1921)
— "Spring and All" (1923)
— "The Red Wheelbarrow" (1923)
— "At the Ball Game" (1923)
— "Portrait of a Lady" (1934)
— "This is Just to Say" (1934)
— "The Young Housewife" (1938)
Edna St. Vincent Millay
— "Renascence" (1917)
— "Recuerdo" (1920)
— "Love Is Not All" (1931)
— "Hearing Your Words" (1931)
— "Oh Sleep Forever in the Latmian Cave"
(1931)
— "The Return" (1934)
Willa Cather
— My Antonia (1918)
Sherwood Anderson
— Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
Marianne Moore
— "The Fish" (1921)
— "Poetry" (1921)
— "Critics and Connoisseurs" (1924)
— "A Grave" (1924)
— "The Steeple Jack"(1935)
— "The Pangolin" (1936)
— "What are Years?" (1941)
— "Spenser's Ireland" (1941)
T.S. Eliot
— The Waste Land (1922)
Claude McKay
— "The Tropics in New York" (1922)
— "If We Must Die" (1922)
— "America" (1922)
— "The Harlem Dancer" (1922)
— "The White City" (1922)
Jean Toomer
— Cane (1923)
Wallace Stevens
— "Sunday Morning" (1923)
— "Peter Quince At the Clavier" (1923)
— "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" (1923)
— "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
(1923)
— "Anecdote of the Jar" (1923)
— "The Snow Man" (1923)
— "The Emperor of Ice Cream" (1923)
— "The Idea of Order at Key West" (1936)
— "Study of Two Pears" (1942)
— "The Old Lutheran Bells at Home" (1950)
— "The Plain Sense of Things" (1954)
John Dos Passos
— Manhattan Transfer (1925)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
— The Great Gatsby (1925)
Anzia Yezierska
— The Bread Givers (1925)
Ernest Hemingway
— The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Langston Hughes
— "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1926)
— "The Weary Blues" (1926)
— "A Dream Deferred" (1926)
— "Brass Spittoons," (1927)
— "Sylvester's Dying Bed" (1942)
— "Morning After" (1942)
— "50-50" (1942)
— "Madam's Past History" (1949)
— "Catch" (1959)
— " Theme for English B" (1959)
Ole F. Rolvaag
— Giants In the Earth (1927)
Nella Larsen
— Passing (1929)
Hart Crane
— The Bridge (1930)
William Faulkner
— Light In August (1932)
— Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
Henry Roth
— Call It Sleep (1934)
James Agee and Walker Evans
— Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1936)
Zora Neale Hurston
— Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
John Steinbeck
— The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Richard Wright
— Native Son (1940)
Eugene O'Neill
— Long Day's Journey Into Night (1940)
Tennessee Williams
— A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
Arthur Miller
— Death of a Salesman (1949)
Ralph Ellison
— Invisible Man (1952)
— "Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black
Mask of Humanity" (1946)
James Baldwin
— Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953)
— "Everyone's Protest Novel"
|
