In this course we will read some of the classic American women writers (along with some unexpected ones) – whose work is as important to our national lineage as classic American male writers such as Melville, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Course writers include novelists, poets, and essayists. As we read, we will examine how each writer addresses, in her own way, themes of bondage (various kinds of enslavement, literal and figurative), as well as possible pathways to escape or liberation. Course texts will include work by writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zora Neal Hurston, Nella Larsen, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carmen Maria Machado, Margo Jefferson, with some possible excursions into the work of women auteurs of modern dance and urban blues.