LARTS 345 Transcendence & Entrapment: 19th-Century American Literature
Nineteenth-century American writers repeatedly reflect on themes of transcendence‹of literary conventions, of cultural norms and codes, of geographical constraints, or of culture itself in a realm of nature or spirit‹even while they detail the entrapments of culture, nature, place, identity, and the human mind. This introduction to nineteenth-century American literature explores the tensions of transcendence and entrapment, among other themes, in Romanticist, Realist, and Naturalist writing.