While the authors and texts studied in this course may vary, this course examines literature from the early 1800s to 1965, the conclusion of the Civil War. During this period, American literature developed a home-grown Romanticism influenced by European intellectual and aesthetic movements, as well as a new cultural sensibility of its own. Authors may include Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Douglass, Dickinson, and the latter-day transcendentalism of Whitman.