In the first half of the nineteenth century, literary sketches were immensely popular in the United States. Emphasizing place rather than time and experience rather than story, the genre was used in travel writing and regional literature as well as in literary fictions. Scholars of the genre have argued that it was so popular with antebellum U.S. writers because its emphasis on fragmentariness and discontinuity allowed writers to capture life in times of modernization and change. At the same time, however, it often crossed over into the genre of the tale and the romance. In this seminar we want to study the beginnings of the literary sketch in the United States by looking at the work of prominent authors as well as their transatlantic fellow writers. Texts will include works by Washington Irving, Lydia Maria Child, Fanny Fern, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. We will discuss scholarship on the literary sketch, the usefulness of the category genre, and finally, we will take a brief look at the development of the short story and its relationship to the literary sketch.
If you want to join this seminar, please note that you will be required to read a lot of literature and to participate actively in group discussions.
A reader with texts (including for our first session!) will be available at Frank’s Copyshop in late March.
- Lehrende/r: Stefanie Müller