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As currently organized, Early American Literature (EAL) at SIUC stretches from the pre-Columbian period to 1900. Confronted with this daunting assignment, faculty members tend to focus on the nineteenth-century, the sub-area most in demand, with excursions into earlier literatures when appropriate. US literature is taught both in respect to traditional formal literary concerns and with reference to contemporary critical issues now loosely gathered under the rubric of Cultural Studies. A major concern in many classes is the way in which the multi-cultural foundations and composite nature of US literatures has worked to mediate primary social issues of race, class, and gender.
Courses
EAL faculty cover both the standard survey courses (the Literary History of the United States) and a variety of upper-level courses in US literature before 1900. Because of the enormous chronological spread and the wide diversity of genres and authors that need to be covered, upper-level courses in EAL tend to vary considerably from year to year, even when the course titles remain nominally the same. Balancing between attention to major writers and newly recovered voices, sample courses at the 400 level (mixed graduate and undergraduate) have included Nineteenth-Century American Novelists from James Fennimore Cooper to Nella Larsen; "Interior Subjects: Work, Service, and Self-Possession in Antebellum America" (a course studying the crisis in interiority in antebellum fiction); American Women Poets from Bradstreet to Sarah Piatt, Poetry and Politics in the Nineteenth Century (abolition poetry, poetry of Western settlement, etc.); a course on poetic responses to the Civil War in Whitman, Melville, Dickinson and Piatt; and "Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Fiction" (a course studying how various literary genres, such as sentimentalism and sensationalism, managed concerns over gender and sexuality).
Seminars
Over recent years topics for 500 level graduate seminars have included individual courses devoted to Melville, Hawthorne, Twain and James, "Emily Dickinson and her Women Poet Peers," "The American Experience: Captivity Narratives and Slave Narratives," and "The Sentimental as Aesthetic and Social Vision." Projected seminars include "African-American Writers Before 1900: Texts and Critical Contexts" and "Sex and the Gothic Imaginary in 19th Century America."
Recent PhD Dissertations
Catherine Otto, "Ragged Men: Gender Ambiguity in Melville's Short Fiction"
Joseph Fulton, "Mark Twain's Moral Realism: Ethics and Dialogics"
Thorunn Ruga, "Angels in Architecture: The House of Representatives and the House Represented in American Women's Fiction, 1791-1812"
Pamela Kincheloe, "Through the Claude Glass: Nineteenth-Century American Writers and Monumental Discourse"
Lisa B. Day, "‘White Spirits and Black Spirits Engaged in Battle': Apocalyptic Images in Antebellum Literature"
Robert Alsop, "Stout-Hearted Men: Individualism and the Anxiety of American Manhood, 1784-1906"
Faculty
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