American Sensations
Graham Thompson - University of Nottingham
This module explores a number of literary works written during the thirty years prior to the American Civil War that engage with the nature of America at a crucial stage of its national and international formation. Students study a cluster of key themes: constructions of the American canon and the ‘American Renaissance’; religious and reform movements; ‘Nativism’ and immigration; racial confrontations; inter-American imperial encounters; urbanisation and industrialisation; gendered and sexed bodies. They are asked to consider how these themes are represented in different genres—the romantic; the sensational; the sentimental; the gothic; melodrama—and to think about the relationship between high and low culture.
| American Sensations Syllabus |
