ASH 3002y Reading Assignment
April 5, 1999

The Transparent Eyeball and the Bottom Line:
Boston and New York

As you read the texts listed below, consider the various approaches that these writers take to the project of producing an American literature.  How do they define authorship?  How do they approach poetry?  We'll try to treat these texts briefly on their own terms, but also use them to get some sense of the landscape of American literature and American publishing in the mid-nineteenth century.

Note that this assignment is quite substantial, as it serves as full week's worth of reading.  If you will be away for part of the week, I recommend that you look at the Coultrap-McQuin reading before you go.  The rest of the reading is found in the Norton Anthology, and is thus portable.

Reading:

• Susan Coultrap-McQuin, "Gentlemen and Ladies:  Ideals and Economics in the Literary Marketplace," in Doing Literary Business:  American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill and London:  U of North Carolina P, 1990) 27-48.  Barnard Course Reserves  PS147 .C68 1990
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and "The Poet," in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 5th ed., volume 1 (1073-1101, 1144-59).
• Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven" and "The Philosophy of Composition," in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 5th ed., volume 1 (1492-95, 1572-80).
• Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,"  in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 5th ed., volume 1 (2156-2161).
• Fanny Fern (Sara Willis Parton), "Male Criticism on Ladies' Books," "'Fresh Leaves, by Fanny Fern,'" in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 5th ed., volume 1  (1706-1710).

Further reading:

• Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture:  From Revolution through Renaissance (New York:  Cambridge UP, 1986).
• David S. Reynolds,  Beneath the American Renaissance:  The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, Massachusetts:   Harvard UP, 1988).  Barnard Course Reserves PS217.S6 R49 1988 and PS217.S6 R49 1989
• Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale:  The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York:  Harcourt Brace, 1956).