Inventing America

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• the distinctions between a range of literary, visual and historical sources
• the role of gender in the construction of early American identities
• the creation and development of the United States, from British colony to independent republic
• the role of literature and the arts in this process
• the construction and experience of landscape
• the relation between race, nation, slavery and liberty in this early period of US history
• the key critical approaches, both historically-specific and trans-historical, that have been applied to the study of early US literature

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• draw upon the different kinds of understanding generated by a range of literary and non-literary texts
• analyse the pressures and influences which shaped the construction of the American republic
• make use of contemporary critical writing to inform your thinking about the issues raised in the module.
• contrast different historical, political and theoretical models employed by eighteenth-century and modern writers when engaging with the American Revolution and the new nation

Subject Specific Practical Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• read a variety of texts in an historically relevant way
• use electronic sources and a variety of library holdings effectively
• develop analysis and discussion based on a range of sources, both published and electronic
• employ research skills and initiative in identifying additional relevant source material.

Focusing on the period from shortly before the American Revolution to the early years of the nineteenth century, this module will introduce students to debates about, and the experience of, the United States of America. It aims to combine conventional ‘literary’ texts, including poetry and fiction, with the wide range of American writing in the early Republic, from letters and diaries, to travel writing, scientific and philosophical treatises, and political rhetoric, but also with visual images including portraiture, landscape and historical painting, cartoons and political satire.

Teaching and learning methods

• Lectures
• Tutor-led seminars
• Small group work within seminars
• Individual research opportunities
• One to one tuition around assessment and feedback

This module includes a Learning Support Hour. This is a flexible weekly contact hour, designed to support and respond to the particular cohort taking the module from year to year. This hour will include (but not be limited to) activities such as language, theory and research skills classes; group work supervisions; assignment preparation and essay writing guidance; assignment consultations; feedback and feed-forward sessions.

Resources & Reading list

Textbooks

Eberwein, Jane Donahue (ed.) (1986). Early American Poetry: Selections from Bradstreet, Taylor, Dwight, Frenea & Bryant. Univ. of Wisconsin Press.

Shields, David S. (1990). Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690-1750. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schweitzer, Ivy (2006). Perfecting friendship : politics and affiliation in early American literature. University of North Carolina Press.

Warner, Michael (1992). The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP.

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, William (2013). Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lawson-Peebles, Robert (1988). Landscape and written expression in revolutionary America : the world turned upside down. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Paul Giles (2001). Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1760-1860. Philadelphia: Universiry of Pennsylvania Press.

Dorothy Z. Baker (2007). America's Gothic Fiction : The Legacy of Magnalia Christi Americana. Ohio State University Press.

Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse (1992). he imaginary puritan : literature, intellectual labor, and the origins of personal life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hewitt ,Elizabeth (2004). Correspondence and American literature, 1770-1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carla Mulford, ed. Early American Writings. Oxford.

Tennenhouse, Leonard (2007). The importance of feeling English: American literature and the British diaspora, 1750-1850. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wood , Gordon S. (2009). Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. Oxford: OUP.

Andrews, William L. et al (ed.). Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women's Narratives. Univ. of Wisconsin Press.

Assessment strategy

The assessed essay requires independent use of online and other archives to explore life in the early United States. You will choose your own selection of documents and images to provide a case study and analysis of American life, drawn from themes including cities (Boston, Philadelphia, New York), rural life and the frontier, the rhetoric of freedom, the experience of slavery, Revolution and Loyalism, scientific and geographical exploration, women’s lives, views from abroad.

Written feedback on assignments will be accompanied by individual consultation.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal & External