Love and Death in 19th-Century American

How did individuals in the nineteenth century United States try to make sense of their lives? In many ways, this century was marked by change above all. The country endured the bloodiest war in its history (approximately 750,000 soldiers died in the Civil War), as well as violent conflicts with American Indians, Britain, Mexico, and Spain. The United States moved from a sparsely populated agrarian land of about 4 million to an urban industrial global power of 76 million, quadrupling its land mass. Waves of immigration made the country increasingly diverse in race, ethnicity, and religion. Abolitionism, suffragism, labor unions, and the temperance movement inspired change and provoked often violent opposition. Meanwhile, technological and commercial innovations in print production, alongside the rise of literacy, enabled a mass market for texts of all kinds.

This course examines the literary response to the social turbulence of the nineteenth century by focusing on representations of love and death. Do love and death—seen by some as universal aspects of the human condition—offer stability in a tumultuous society? After all, the most intimate and deeply felt moments of life seem to offer reprieve from the forces of history. Yet, as we’ll see, the very meanings of love and death change as society changes. The personal sentiments that make us feel human are in fact social. By studying literature, we can examine the extent to which notions of intimacy and mortality register cultural transformation. Meanwhile we’ll get to ask if it is indeed true, as Leslie Fiedler suggests in Love and Death in the American Novel, that American literature “is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death.”