Literature Pre-1850 Spring 2026
ENGL 309: The British Novel
Instructor: Hannah Scupham
55798 | TuTh 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4076
Adventure, passion, intrigue, humor, deception – just a few elements of the wonderful world of the British novel. Have you ever wondered how the novel became the dominant, beloved genre of literature? In this course, we will explore the development of the British novel from the late 18th century to the early 20th century. From early epistolary novels to lush Realism, from quiet domestic tales to dramatic sensation fiction, we will examine the social, cultural, and political backdrops to some of the best novels in the British tradition. Join us for a world filled with luscious prose, thrilling plots, complex characters, and vivid explorations of the mind and heart. Texts will include: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.
ENGL 320: American Literature I: Beginnings to 1865
Instructor: Laura Mielke
56491 | TuTh 9:30-10:45 AM | Wescoe 4076
This course surveys works of American literature from Indigenous oral and visual literatures through responses to the U.S. Civil War and asks students to reflect on how literature contributed to the formation of cultures in what Europeans called the New World. Over the course of the semester, we will consider the variety of ways in which residents of North America, and later the United States and various Tribal Nations, used texts: to create community, to promote settlement, to worship and proselytize, to control those in the minority (especially through the category of “race”), to establish or challenge political authority, to contemplate the beautiful, to pursue social reform, and to shape national identity. This semester, we will frame literature across these decades in the context of the US semiquincentennial (i.e. 250th birthday).
