Once upon a time, this course would simply have been called a survey and we – you and I both – would assume that we were “covering” all the important literary landmarks produced in “America” during a 250-year period. Our increasing awareness of the vast scale and richness of this period’s literary productivity, however, makes me (and should make you) skeptical about such implicit claims. So, while we will indeed read some of the important texts produced in North America between the establishment of permanent settlements by English-speaking colonists and the end of the United States Civil War, we won’t pretend that we’re even mentioning all of them. Instead, we will trace a set of intertwined themes or problems through a series of texts produced at key moments during this period. These topoi will organize our discussions: the idea of a legible landscape in which careful readers can find specific meanings; the imagination of community, especially through the identification of “Others;” and the practices and problems of captivity and enslavement. Writers will include: William Bradford, Cotton Mather, Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, Olaudah Equiano, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Likely texts will be the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, and Melville’s Moby Dick. Course requirements include two papers and an exam, along with substantial weekly reading assignments.