This course examines the literature of the new republic (after 1789) through the Civil War, as American literature developed a home-grown Romanticism influenced by European intellectual and aesthetic movements, as well as a new humanitarian sensibility of its own. Readings include the first generation of American Romantics: Irving, Cooper and Bryant; authors from the "New England Renaissance: such as Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau and Longfellow; social and feminist reformers such as Fuller, Stowe, Whittier, Davis and Fern; the slave narratives of Jacobs and Douglass; and the latter- day transcendentalism of Walt Whitman. Offered every fall semester.