BLS 320: American Romanticism
The Romantic era in the United States was rife with ironic contrasts: a self-culture movement that advised its collective followers how to become individuals, manifested most famously by Henry David Thoreau, who urged his followers to follow the beat of their own drummers; a literary culture that mourned the death of the Indian and used this grief to fuel some of its most enduring literary tropes—even as Native Americans struggled to become citizens, rather than icons; and a political culture that prized individual freedom, even as it enslaved millions of African Americans and treated women as children, unable to vote, own property, or enter into contracts.
This course explores these contradictions in the history of romanticism in the United States. We'll explore romanticism as an aesthetic and ideological category that will enable us to examine literary responses to such fraught issues as individualism, slavery, westward expansion, Indian removal, and women's rights.
