ENGL 375 Literature of the American Civil War

3 Credit(s)

Despite Whitman’s declaration that “the real war will never get in the books,” American literature has produced a diverse and contested archive of depictions of the Civil War. Rather than evaluating whether “the real war” has ever been captured, the course will ask instead how Americans have imagined the war and why. It will focus on the gender and racial politics of depictions of the home front versus the battlefield, the cultural work of the intersectional “romance of reunion” and “plantation school” dialect writing, and the romanticized “Old South” in fiction from the 1860s through the twenty-first century.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Enrollment Requirements:
Prerequisite: ENGL 200 or 201 or 202