ENGL2510: American Literature & Culture The Gilded Age

Abstract

In the years after the Civil War up to the turn of the twentieth century, huge changes in all areas of life – technological, economic, social, political, intellectual, and cultural – converged to forge the United States into a modern nation. America saw the rise of industrialization, urbanization and immigration, of mass consumer culture, and of social and economic inequality. The “Gilded Age,” as Mark Twain dubbed it, was a period marked both by great affluence and extreme poverty, by excessive displays of wealth and by urgent calls for social reform. In this course, we’ll read a wide range of literary works, from gritty urban novels to tales set in the close-knit communities of rural New England and the Deep South. In our reading, we’ll gain a focused understanding of the cultural changes occurring in these years and will study the literary movements (realism, naturalism, regionalism) adopted by American writers at the time. In A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) by William Dean Howells, we read about labor disputes and self-made millionaires, about the rise of the new magazine culture and the growth of urban America. Along with A Hazard of New Fortunes, our readings include Edith Wharton’s novel House of Mirth (1905) and shorter works by Abraham Cahan, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Hamlin Garland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, and Zitkala-Sa,. We end the course reading a more contemporary novel about the period, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975).