"We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837, as part of a call for US letters to develop distinctively to further the distinctiveness of the United States project itself: how can the nation reach its potential if it is not prepared to think of itself as new, independent, and important? As well as materially, America needs to think itself into fruition.
This module will study some major writers, as well as some less well-known authors and examples from folk traditions, from the nineteenth century onwards, with reference to (i) the development of US nationalism and the idea of a national tradition of literature; (ii) the development of regionalism and the construction of ideas of the local, with particular reference to the South; (iii) how such processes relate to wider transnational considerations, to ask how national and regional identities relate to others beyond the borders of the United States.