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Prerequisite: ENGL 203 and ENGL 234 The later part of the nineteenth century saw a nation shattered by civil war become one of the great powers in the world. American literature of this era is shaped by - and helped shape - this process. Short stories, novels, poetry and, eventually, film provided a crucial forum for Americans to forge a new national consensus after the Civil War, to negotiate the role race, class, ethnicity and gender would play in their culture, and to define their identity as an industrial power with a worldwide empire. Authors studied might include Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane and Henry James.