American Novel to 1900

AMER 383 traces how the novel took shape as an American form in the long nineteenth century, treating fiction less as a list of canonical works and more as a record of how the country argued with itself about labor, race, gender, and selfhood between Melville and Chopin. You read four or five full novels (Billy Budd, Alcott's Work, Howells's Silas Lapham, Harper's Iola Leroy, The Awakening) closely and steadily, and you're graded almost entirely on writing: two midterm essay exams, a final, two papers, plus quizzes that keep you honest on the reading. It pairs naturally with the survey courses in American literary history and prepares you for the 20th-century novel and theory-driven electives, where being able to sit with a long text and build an argument from it is the basic skill everything else assumes.