ENGL405: Resources | Saylor Academy

Topic	Name	Description
	Course Syllabus

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COURSE INTRODUCTION

Course Syllabus

Unit 1: The American Renaissance in Context

1.1: The Influence of European Romanticism in America

1.2: Individuality, Conflict, and Context

1.3: President Jackson and Indian Removal

1.4: Jacksonian Democracy and the Self-Made Man

1.5: The Second Great Awakening and the Emergence of Transcendentalism

1.6: The "Transcendental Club" and "The Dial"

1.7: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Father of the Transcendental Movement

1.8: Competing Visions of Reform

Unit 1 Assessment

Unit 2: Continuity and Change in Poetic Form

2.1.1: Ralph Waldo Emerson

2.1.2: Edgar Allen Poe

2.2: The Question of Poetry's Social Role

2.3: Walt Whitman, Free Verse, and the Poetics of Democracy

2.4: Emily Dickinson and the Personal Lyric

Unit 2 Assessment

Unit 3: The Invention of the Short Story

3.1: "The Limit of One Sitting" and Concerns with Length

3.2: The Short Story's Artistry and Conventions

3.3: The Gothic, Suspense, and the Macabre

3.4: Building a New Genre with the Detective Story

Unit 3 Assessment

Unit 4: The Development of the Novel and its Various Forms

4.1: The Establishment of American Publishers and the Passage of Copyright Laws

4.2: The Rise of Literacy and Public Education in the Young Republic

4.3: The Popularity of the Novel

4.4: The Romance and Nathaniel Hawthorne

4.5: Sensationalism

4.6: Sentimentalism

Unit 4 Assessment

Unit 5: Nature and Technology: Creating and Challenging American Identity

5.1: Technology and Class Division

5.2: Economic Development

5.3: Urban Popular Culture, the Penny Press, and the New Social Order

5.4: Melville, Capitalism, and the Limits of Sympathy

5.5: The Move toward Realism in Davis' "Life in the Iron-Mills"

5.6: American Nature as Challenge to American Progress

Unit 5 Assessment

Unit 6: The Question of Women's Place in Society

6.1: Women's Rights in the Young Republic

6.2: Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, and the Transcendentalists

6.3: Law, Class, Race, and Marriage

6.4: Sentiment, Religion, and the Power of Womanhood

Unit 6 Assessment

Unit 7: The Slavery Controversy and Abolitionist Literature

7.1: Slavery and the Debate over Abolition

7.2: Manifest Destiny and the Expanding Western Frontier

7.3: Radical Abolition and The Liberator

7.4: The Slave Narrative

7.5: Uncle Tom's Cabin

Unit 7 Assessment

Study Guide

Course Feedback Survey

Certificate Final Exam

Archived Materials