The course is an overview of representative texts by and about women in nineteenth-century America. In order better to contextualize the texts, we shall be looking at two earlier traditions informing writing by women that are mutually compatible rather than exclusionary. The one is represented by Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and situates a woman at the centre of the project of nation-building, while the other is exemplified by Rowson’s hugely popular sentimental/ seduction novel, from which the novel writing in the States takes off. Thus the feminine tradition appears to be crucial from the very beginning for the way the American nation describes and represents itself. This argument, however, becomes possible only in the wake of the strong intervention into the field of literary history and literary canon formation enacted by feminist, poststructuralist, new historicist and cultural critics from the 1970s onwards.

1. General introduction. Introduction to Rowlandson.Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative as a formative national text; Richard Slotkin’s notion of „regeneration through violence“
2. Analysis of cultural, political, ethical, and gendered implications of Rowlandson’s captivity
3. Susanna Rowson’s novel as a representative and generative instance of the sentimental/ seduction novel
4. Rowson’s novel in the context of transatlantic cultural exchange and sentimentalism
5. L.M. Child’s Hobomok and the idea of cultural nationalism
6. Hobomok as a revisionst text; politics of race and gender in the novel (Indian and female characters)
7. Mid-term. Introduction to Jacobs’s slave narrative depicting her life in slavery
8. Jacobs’s text in between the domestic, sentimental and seduction novels and representative masculine slave narratives
9. Analysis of narrative and cultural strategies in conjunction with race and gender in Jacobs’s text.
10. Alcott’s Work as a story of women’s emergence in the public sphere in a transforming society.
11. Analysis of the novel’s accommodation of realism with the conventions of sentimentalism and women’s fiction.
12. Harper’s Iola Leroy and the post-slavery, post-Reconstruction America. On-going influence of the domestic and sentimental fiction.
13. Status and color distinction within the black community; Iola Leroy as a „tragic mulatta“ and the problem of passing.
14. Final test. Course evaluation.

1. Studenti će biti upoznati sa segmentom američke književne kulture 19. stoljeća.
2. Studenti će moći samostalno analizirati kompleksne književne tekstove.
3. Studenti će moći književne tekstove smjestiti u širi američki kulturni kontekst.
4. Studenti će razvijati generičke vještine (istraživanje, pisanje, izlaganje).

Analiza i čitanje književnih tekstova metodologijom književne teorije, kulturalnih studija i američkih studija. Stjecanje i uvježbavanje generičkih vještina (istraživanje i rad sa znanstvenom literaturom, pisanje seminarskih radova, vještine usmenoga izlaganja i prezentacije).

Kontinuirana evaluacija (1. i 2. kolokvij; seminarski rad; usmeno izlaganje; pismene zadaće).

1. Castiglia, Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago, London: The U of Chicago P, 1996. (selection)
2. Foster, Frances S. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993. (selection)
3. Goddu, Teresa. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. (selection)
4. Grasso, Linda. The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature in America, 1820-1860. Chapel Hill, London: The U of North Carolina P, 2002. (selection)
5. Howard, June. «What Is Sentimentality?» American Literary History 11.1 (Spring 1990): 63-81.
6. Nelson, Dana. The Word in Black and White: Reading ‘Race’ in American Literature, 1638-1867. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. (selection)
7. Schloss, Dietmar. “Republicanism and Politeness in the Early American Novel”. Early America Re-Explored: Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture. Eds. Fritz Fleischmann and Klaus H. Schmidt. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 269-90.
8. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1800, Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1973. (selection)

1. Anglistika, sveučilišni preddiplomski dvopredmetni studij, 3., 5. semestar