Students preparing to take the comprehensive examination in American Literature to 1865 should be familiar not only with the breadth of primary texts listed below but also with the major interpretive, critical, and historical issues concerning these texts. See the bibliography below for suggested readings and avenues for further research. Listings below that do not identify specific texts, consult with your advisor concerning the appropriate and relevant critical editions.
Christopher Columbus. Journal of the First Voyage to America (selections).
Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca.
John Winthrop. A Modell of Christian Charity, Journal (selections).
William Bradford. Of Plymouth Plantation (selections).
Roger Williams. A Key Into the Language of America (selections).
Anne Bradstreet.
Mary White Rowlandson. A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.
Edward Taylor.
Cotton Mather. Wonders of the Invisible World, selections from Magnalia Christi Americana; or, the Ecclesiastical History of New England.
The Bay Psalm Book (1640), and The New England Primer (1683?).
Sarah Kemble Knight. The Journal of Madam Knight.
Ebenezer Cook. The Sot-Weed Factor; or, A Voyage to Maryland.
William Byrd. The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina and The Secret History of the Line (selections).
Jonathan Edwards. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”; Images of Divine Things; “Personal Narrative”
Benjamin Franklin. Poor Richard's Almanac; "The Way to Wealth"; Autobiography.
J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. Letters from an American Farmer.
Thomas Paine. Common Sense; The Age of Reason.
Thomas Jefferson. Notes on the State of Virginia (selections), "Declaration of Independence" ("finished" version, and the annotated version presented in Jefferson's Autobiography).
Selections from The Federalist Papers.
Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa). The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.
Philip Freneau. Selected poems, including "On the Civilization of the Western Aboriginal Lands."
Timothy Dwight. Selections from Greenfield Hill: A Poem in Seven Parts.
Joel Barlow. Selections from The Vision of Columbus.
Phillis Wheatley.
Susanna Rowson. Charlotte Temple.
Charles Brockden Brown. Wieland.
Washington Irving. "Rip Van Winkle," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."
James Fenimore Cooper. The Last of the Mohicans.
Catherine Maria Sedgewick. Hope Leslie; Or, Early Times in Massachusetts.
William Cullen Bryant. "Thanatopsis," "The Prairie," "To a Waterfowl."
William Apess.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Essays: Nature, "Circles," "Self-Reliance," "The Poet," "Experience," "Fate," "Illusions." Poetry: "The Sphinx," "Uriel," "Give all to Love," "The Probelm," "Ode: Inscribed to William Ellery Channing," "Hamatreya," "Terminus." Read also: "Letter" to Walt Whitman on the occasion of the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855).
Nathaniel Hawthorne. Fiction: The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance, "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappacinni's Daughter," "The May-Pole of Merrymount," "Roger Malvin's Burial," "My Kinsman, Major Molineux." Read also his prefaces to each of his major works.
William Lloyd Garrison. Statement of purpose published in the first number of The Liberator.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Bhumor of the Old Southwest (George W. Harris, Thomas Bangs Thorpe).
Edgar Allan Poe. Poems: "The Raven," "Sonnet: To Science," "Israfel," "To Helen," "Ulalume -A Ballad." Tales: "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Ligiea," "The Purloined Letter," "Berenice," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Imp of the Perverse." Essays and reviews: "Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales," "The Poetic Principle," "The Philosophy of Composition."
John Greenleaf Whittier. Selected anti-slavery poems.
Harriet E. Wilson). Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black.
Abraham Lincoln. "Address at the Dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery," "Second Inaugural Address."
Sarah Margaret Fuller. "The Great Lawsuit."
Fanny Fern (Sara Willis Parton). Ruth Hall.
Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Harriet Ann Jacobs. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton. "Declaration of Sentiments" (from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention).
Henry David Thoreau. Walden; "Resistance to Civil Government"; "A Plea for Captain John Brown."
Frederick Douglass. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass or My Bondage and My Freedom. "What to the American Slave is the Fourth of July?" (available in Foner's Life and Writings). Note: Be aware that Douglass wrote his autobiography three times (1845; 1855; 1881 [expanded 1893]).
James Russell Lowell. The Bigelow Papers (first series; selections), "A Fable for Critics" (selections).
Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass (1855), including the preface. Also read these sections from the "death-bed" edition of Leaves of Grass: "Children of Adam," "Calamus," "Drum Taps," "Memories of President Lincoln."
Emily Dickinson. Selected poems and letters. (The candidate should also be familiar with textual and editorial problems surrounding Dickinson's poetry.)
Herman Melville. Fiction: Moby Dick, Typee, Billy Budd. "Bartleby the Scrivener," "Benito Cereno." Essays: "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (a review of the second edition of Hawthorne's Mosses From an Old Manse). Read also a brief selection of Melville's poetry.
Maria Susanna Cummins. The Lamplighter.
[see also Andrews, William L. Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.]
Helpful Anthologies, Reference Works, Literary Histories, and Literary Criticism
Reference Works:
Elliot, Emory, ed., et al. Columbia Literary History of the United States. 1988.
Hutner, Gordon, ed. American Literature, American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Contains a useful selection of the more significant critical statements on American literature from the past two centuries.
Miller, Perry, ed. The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry. A useful anthology, with historical, critical and biographical commentary.
Spiller, Robert, ed., et al. Literary History of the United States. 3rd ed. 1963.
Criticism:
(A)
Aldridge, A. Owen. Benjamin Franklin and Nature's God. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1967.
Breitwieser, Mitchell R. American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990.
Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1956.
Mulford, Carla, ed., Teaching the Literatures of Early America. New York: MLA, 1999.
Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.
Wells, Colin. The Devil and Dr. Dwight: Satire and Theology in the Early American Republic. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002).
(B)
Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.
Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977.
Epstein, Barbara Leslie. The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press; distributed by Columbia University Press, 1981.
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion, 1960.
Gilmore, Michael T. American Romanticism and the Marketplace. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1923.
Leverenz, David. Manhood and the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.
Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford UP, 1941.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961.
Reynolds, David. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf, 1988.
Rowe, John Carlos. At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
Smith, Stephanie. Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.
Tompkins, Jane P. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.