32114

SoSe 21: Reform, Diversity, and Cultural Nationalism in the Age of Romanticism

Alexander Starre

Kommentar

This lecture course deals with the interlocking of Romanticism, cultural nationalism, and practices of political reform; it focuses on a broad archive of autobiographical writings, political tracts, literary works, philosophical essays, and popular entertainment from the period between the Jacksonian era and the Civil War. Topics include: the evolution of democratic culture, “Indian Removal,” New England transcendentalism, debates on slavery and national expansion, sentimentalism and the abolitionist imagination, the emergence of popular entertainment forms and genres, the slave narrative. Combining a focus on narrative forms and cultural self-descriptions with inquiries into shifting configurations and hierarchies of race, gender, and region, the lecture engages works by James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Alexis de Tocqueville, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Lydia Maria Child, Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Jacobs, P.T. Barnum, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher-Stowe and others. ----- This course functions as “Vorlesung” in the M.A. Module B (Kultur der Nationalität und Diversität). As such, it is closely associated with my accompanying seminar “(Counter-)Narratives of American Nationhood and Citizenship in the Antebellum Period.” ----- Due to the Coronavirus situation, lectures will be pre-recorded and made available on Blackboard in time for the weekly time slot of the class. Schließen