Comprehensive Exam Booklist

Below is a list of books from my comprehensive exam for a doctorate, plus five questions about the list. I constructed the booklist and questions myself, with solid advice from the exam committee.  This list should be helpful for anybody interested in American literature of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  However, it is not to be construed as a canon, as much of it reflects my own personal interests.

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Historical Period Reading List (American Literature 1776-1893)

 Jupiter Hammon — Poems in Jupiter Hammon: American Negro Poet, 1915 (1760-1786)

Phyllis Wheatley — Collected Works (1773; 1988)

Philip Freneau — [various poems (1775-1832)]

Thomas Paine — Common Sense (1776)

Hector St. John de Crevecoeur — Letters from an American Farmer (1782)

Thomas Jefferson — Notes on the State of Virginia (1784)

John Filson — The Life and Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone [Appendix in his Kentucke] (1784)

Joel Barlow — The Vision of Columbus (1787)

William Hill Brown — The Power of Sympathy (1789)

Olaudah Equiano – The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789)

William Bartram — Travels (1791)

Hugh Henry Brackenridge — Modern Chivalry (1792-1805)

Benjamin Franklin — Autobiography (1793)

Hannah Foster — The Coquette (1797)

Charles Brockden Brown — Wieland (1798)

John Taylor — Arator (1813)

Washington Irving — The Sketch Book (1819)

Lydia Maria Child — Hobomok (1824)

James Fenimore Cooper —The Prairie (1827)

Catherine Maria Sedgwick — Hope Leslie (1827)

William Apess — Son of the Forest (1829)

John Tanner — The Falcon (1830)

Nat Turner — Confessions (1831)

William Cullen Bryant — Poems (1832)

John Pendleton Kennedy — Swallow Barn (1832)

Blackhawk — Life of Blackhawk (1834)

David Crockett — Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (1834)

Anonymous — The Davy Crockett Almanacs (1835-1841)

Ralph Waldo Emerson — Nature (1836); Essays – First Series (1841)

Nathaniel Hawthorne — Twice-Told Tales (1837), The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Edgar Allan Poe — Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Tales (1845), The Raven and Other Poems (1846), “The Philosophy of Composition” (1849)

William Gilmore Simms — The Yemassee (1844)

Frederick Douglass — Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

Margaret Fuller — Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Herman Melville — Typee (1846), Moby-Dick (1851), The Piazza Tales (1856), The Confidence Man (1857), Battle Pieces and Other Aspects of the War (1866)

John Greenleaf Whittier —Voices of Freedom, and Other Poems (1846)

Osborne Russell – Journal of a Trapper (1847[?], 1921)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — Evangeline (1847); The Song of Hiawatha (1855)

Francis Parkman — The Oregon Trail (1849)

Henry Bibb — Narrative of the Adventures and Life of Henry Bibb (1849)

Susan Warner — The Wide, Wide World (1850)

Harriet Beecher Stowe — Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

William Wells Brown – Clotel; Or the President’s Daughter (1853)

John Rollin Ridge — The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murietta (1853)

Henry David Thoreau — Walden (1854)

Alexander Beaufort Meek — The Red Eagle: A Poem of the South (1855)

Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass (1855; 1892)

Rebecca Harding Davis — Life in the Iron Mills (1861)

Louisa May Alcott — “Hospital Sketches” (1863), Little Women (1868)

Bret Harte — The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories (1871), East and West, Poems (1871)

Mark Twain — Roughing It (1872), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)

William Cody – The Life of the Honorable William Cody, also known as Buffalo Bill (1876)

Edward Wheeler – Deadwood Dick, Prince of the Road; or the Black Rider of the Black Hills (1877)

Henry James — The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1878)

George Washington Cable — The Grandissimes (1880)

Helen Hunt Jackson — A Century of Dishonor (1881)

Sidney Lanier – Poems (1884)

William Dean Howells — The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)

Edward Bellamy – Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1887)

Emma Lazarus – Poems of Emma Lazarus, Volume 1 (1888)

Helen Hunt Jackson – Verses (1890)

Jacob Riis — How the Other Half Lives (1890)

William Dean Howells — Criticism and Fiction (1891)

Frances Harper – Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892)

Frederick Jackson Turner — “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893)

Emily Dickinson – Complete Poems (Thomas H. Johnson edition, 1955)

Criticism

Jay Fliegelman — Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (1985)

Amy Kaplan — The Social Construction of American Realism (1988)

Richard White — ‘It’s Your Misfortune, But None of My Own’: A New History of the American West     (1991)

Mark Noll -- A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (1992)

Michael Warner – The Letters of the Republic (1992)

Richard Brodhead – Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America      (1993)

Charles Sellers – The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1994)

Richard Slotkin — The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (1994, revised ed.)

Jay Grossman – Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation (2003)

Meredith McGill — American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (2003)

Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (2004, revised ed.)

Henry Nash Smith — Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (2007, revised ed.)

Alan Trachtenberg – The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (2007, revised ed.)

 

Historical Period Questions

1. In Jay Grossman’s Reconstituting the American Renaissance, Grossman claims that “if the Constitution laid the groundwork for facing up to the virtuality—the built-in partiality—that is representation, then, looked at one way, the story of American literature in the United States is the story of gradually, over the course of the nineteenth century, making this virtuality into a ‘literary’ virtue.”  How, then, do United States texts from 1776 to 1893 appropriate the conceptions and discourses of American Federalism, including the inherent tension between representatives and their constituents (e.g., authors and readers)? 

2. Richard Slotkin in The Fatal Environment argues that evolving social and economic conditions that arose from Western expansion helped perpetuate the “Myth of the Frontier” in popular culture.  Specifically, the American West was “a space defined less by maps and surveys than by myths and illusions, projective fantasies, wild anticipations, extravagant expectations” (11).  In what ways has the West been imaginatively, and how did these constructions change during the nineteenth century?    

3. In arguing that much American literature is “preoccupied with God,” Mark Noll in A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada asserts that in significant ways the Bible has “played a part in American culture, often shaping that culture by the power of its own message, but also often being shaped by the social, economic, and artistic patterns of American life” (407).  How did nineteenth-century texts use or even counter the formal, thematic, or tropological elements of the Bible, in turn “reshaping” the Bible? 

4. While questioning the usefulness of origins or “firsts” in a constructed canon, Cathy N. Davidson argues that The Power of Sympathy is the “first American novel” since it simultaneously represents reinforcing and subversive sociopolitical discourses of a post-Constitutional era (9, 154).  Yet, as she also notes in Revolution and the Word, there are other contenders for the status of “first American novel.”  What exactly is at stake in the protracted critical debate over what this first American novel is?  What critical assumptions have been in play, and why is this seemingly trivial fact important to the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature?

5.  Writing of the Western territories in his history of the American West, Richard White argues that “it was impossible to find a social world in which Indians did not play intimate and essential roles.  Indians might often be abused and oppressed, but Indians mattered” (85).  Though critics such as Richard Slotkin and Henry Nash Smith ignore the genre of poetry, White’s statement could be applied just as easily to the poetic world as well as the social.  What ideological work did occasional, pastoral, lyric, and epic American poems do in their depiction of Native Americans?