American Literature – I (Prose and Poetry)

Paper Code: 
25ENG323(A)
Credits: 
04
Periods/week: 
04
Max. Marks: 
100
Objective: 

The Course will enable the students to identify significant and culturally diverse examples of American literature between the 17th and mid-19th centuries, recognise different literary concepts, gain an insight into American Culture, Theory and Renaissance and appreciate the major genres and modes employed by the writers of the period.

 

Course Outcomes: 

The students will:

CO85. Critically analyse key American prose and poetic texts in relation to specific historical and cultural movements such as Puritanism, Transcendentalism, and early Democracy

CO86. Validate the issues, conflicts, themes and preoccupations of American writers in their works

CO87. Examine the role of gender, race, class, and region, through close reading and critical debate.

CO88. Evaluate the literary trends in the literature of the age

CO89. Develop an understanding of the development of American poetry from transcendentalism to the Modern period, focusing on transition in forms and styles of expression during each era
 

CO90.  Contribute effectively to course-specific interaction.

12.00
Unit I: 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Self-Reliance

Each and All 

12.00
Unit II: 

Walt Whitman

Preface to the First Edition of Leaves of Grass

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

12.00
Unit III: 

Emily Dickinson

I Felt a Funeral

A Bird Came Down the Walk

I Heard a Fly Buzz

 

Langston Hughes

Mother to Son

I, Too Democracy

12.00

Robert Frost

Mending Wall

Birches

The Road Not Taken

 

Wallace Stevens

Of Modern Poetry

Sunday Morning

Anecdote of the Jar

12.00

Amy Lowell

The Captured Goddess

September, 1918

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

 

Sylvia Plath

Ariel

Lady Lazarus

The Colossus

Source Books: 

Source Book:

Egbert, Oliver. ed. Anthology of American Literature1890-1965. S. Chand, 2012.

 

SUGGESTED READINGS: 

Suggested Readings

Dauben, Miriam. Emily Dickinson: The Death Motif in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson. GRIN Verlag, 2013.

Ford, Boris.Ed.The New Pelican Guide to English Literature: American Literature (Vol.9) Penguin Books, 1991.

John Jacob :History of America Literature . Sublime Publication, 2005.

Martin,Linda Wagner.Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath. G.K. Hall, 1984.

Matthiessen, Francis Otto. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman . OUP, 1943.

e-resources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOkdFMw0pmk (Emerson)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qwCEnkb2_E (Frost)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCWl8ZIgCHk (Plath)

 

Journals:

Literary Journals ASLE

English and American Literature

Academic Year: 
2025-2026