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English and Comparative Literary Studies

Term 2

Primary Texts

Week 1: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale

Preparation/Book of Commonplace

This is a wonderful resource on 19th Century US literature run by Dr Mark Storey, from our Department, and his colleagues: BrANCA

Susan-Mary Grant: A Concise History of the United States of America. Chapters 5-8 - to be read as the term progresses.

Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville - read: John Bryant, 'Moby-Dick as Revolution.'

Free Audiobook of Moby Dick

Rebecca Stott on Moby Dick - Moby-Dick: Into the Wonder-World, Audaciously

Great online Version of Moby-Dick- full of extra information

Week 2: Moby-Dick

From our own China Mieville, Railsea- partly a 21st Century homage to Moby Dick.

Ian Maguire, '"Who Aint a Slave": Moby-Dick and the Ideology of Free Labor.'(PDF Document)

Transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Transcendentalist

Week 3: Henry James, The Bostonians

 Cambridge Companion to Henry James - read: Sara Blair, 'Realism, Culture, and the Place of the Literary: Henry James and The Bostonians.'

Week 4: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth  Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton - read: Maureen Howard: 'The Bachelor and the Baby: The House of Mirth.'
Week 5: W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

This is a site from PBS in the US that provides an excellent overview of Jim Crow.

Booker T. Washington Delivers the 1895 Atlanta Compromise Speech. At first supported by DuBois, but later rejected. Please read this and these more detailed sections from (Word Document)Washington's Up From Slavery: An Autobiography.

Week 7: Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones

Paul Robeson in The Emperor Jones from 1933.

First night criticism. Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill. Read: Daniel. J. Watermeier: O'Neill and the Theatre of His Time.
Week 8: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound & others, Selected Poetry (PDF Document) Pound: Kulchur, Mauberley, Metro. (PDF Document) Stein: The Making of Americans. (PDF Document) Rowe: Afterlives of Modernism.
Week 9: Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

80 years on from Death Comes for the Archbishop The New York Times revisits the scene.

'The Enchanted Bluff' - Willa Cather's first published writing about the southwest.

Read: (PDF Document)Luther Standing Bear, (PDF Document)Rebecca Tillett: 'The Emergence and Development of Native American Literature'

Week 10, Tba