Module overview
Aims and Objectives
Learning Outcomes
Knowledge and Understanding
Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:
- the creation and development of the United States, from British colony to independent republic
- the role of gender in the construction of early American identities
- the key critical approaches, both historically-specific and trans-historical, that have been applied to the study of early US literature
- the distinctions between a range of literary, visual and historical sources
- the role of literature and the arts in this process
- the relation between race, nation, slavery and liberty in this early period of US history
- the construction and experience of landscape
Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills
Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:
- make use of contemporary critical writing to inform your thinking about the issues raised in the module.
- draw upon the different kinds of understanding generated by a range of literary and non-literary texts
- read a variety of texts in an historically relevant way
- use electronic sources and a variety of library holdings effectively
- contrast different historical, political and theoretical models employed by eighteenth-century and modern writers when engaging with the American Revolution and the new nation
- analyse the pressures and influences which shaped the construction of the American republic
Transferable and Generic Skills
Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:
- employ research skills and initiative in identifying additional relevant source material.
- develop analysis and discussion based on a range of sources, both published and electronic
Syllabus
Learning and Teaching
Teaching and learning methods
Type | Hours |
---|---|
Wider reading or practice | 24 |
Preparation for scheduled sessions | 120 |
Seminar | 22 |
Completion of assessment task | 88 |
Follow-up work | 24 |
Lecture | 22 |
Total study time | 300 |
Resources & Reading list
Textbooks
Wood , Gordon S. (2009). Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. Oxford: OUP.
Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse (1992). The Imaginary Puritan : Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schweitzer, Ivy (2006). Perfecting friendship : politics and affiliation in early American literature. University of North Carolina Press.
Lawson-Peebles, Robert (1988). Landscape and written expression in revolutionary America : the world turned upside down. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Samuels, Shirley (1996). Romances of the Republic : Women, the Family, and Violence in the literature of the early American nation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Warner, Michael (1992). The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP.
Andrews, William L. et al (ed.) (1991). Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women's Narratives. Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
Hewitt ,Elizabeth (2004). Correspondence and American literature, 1770-1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Paul Giles (2001). Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1760-1860. Philadelphia: Universiry of Pennsylvania Press.
Carla Mulford, ed (2001). Early American Writings. Oxford.
Tennenhouse, Leonard (2007). The importance of feeling English: American literature and the British diaspora, 1750-1850. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Warner, William (2013). Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shields, David S. (1990). Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690-1750. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Eberwein, Jane Donahue (ed.) (1986). Early American Poetry: Selections from Bradstreet, Taylor, Dwight, Frenea & Bryant. Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
Dorothy Z. Baker (2007). America's Gothic Fiction : The Legacy of Magnalia Christi Americana. Ohio State University Press.
Assessment
Summative
This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.
Method | Percentage contribution |
---|---|
Critical Analysis | 30% |
Essay | 70% |
Referral
This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.
Method | Percentage contribution |
---|---|
Resubmit assessments | 100% |
Repeat
An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.
Method | Percentage contribution |
---|---|
Assessment tasks | 100% |
Repeat Information
Repeat type: Internal & External