This course examines a broad range of literary texts (poetry, short story, the essay form and the novel) covering the three main periods of American Literature: the Romantic, the Modern and the Contemporary. We will start with the literature of American Romanticism, also known as the American Renaissance which set the patterns, artistic and philosophical, for much of the American literature to follow as well as much of what we now consider distinctively American mentalities and ideals. We will focus on key aspects of the American Romantic mindset, which will be considered against the historical and cultural backdrop of the Ante-bellum era. The second part of the course will examine the multiform nature of American modernism in the first part of the twentieth century. This period developed in dialogue with several phenomena of modernity: newly national forms of social and economic integration; new models of perspective and experience emerging from psychology, philosophy and science; changes in urban cultural institutions; a fruitful ambivalence towards a technologically and economically innovative mass culture; and new sexual and political discourses that were rapidly altering the social understanding of sex and gender. We will pursue an interdisciplinary study of this moment of cultural ferment by looking at two classic novels by ‘The Lost Generation’ authors John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. The final part of the course addresses the cultural, philosophical, social, economic and aesthetic concerns that arose in the aftermath of World War II, the return of American prosperity, and the expansion of the middle class. We will explore the contemporary American novel that draws upon a particular formal stylistic repertoire such as self-reflexivity, new-ness, and being consciously experimental; social and cultural trends like identity politics; the rise of multiculturalism and the full range of postmodern experimentation that characterize the period.