This course examines texts of "American literature" from 1850 to 1945. We will consider writerly questions about the writing process, revision, voice, publishing, and form, and, at the same time, social and intellectual contexts, including nationalism and imperialism, race and gender, sovereignty and democracy, the body and the self, capitalism and consumerism. Authors to be considered include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, William Wells Brown, Charles Chesnutt, Zitkala-Sa, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes.