The subject matter of this intensive-writing course is the American antecedents of modern literary short fiction: nineteenth-century tales by authors such as Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Sarah Perkins Gilman and Sarah Orne Jewett.

• Introduction
  • Chopin, Kate (1850-1904)
    • “The Story of an Hour” (1894)
  • Frye, Northrup
    • from Anatomy of Criticism (1957) pages 302-307

• Irving, Washington (1783-1859)
  • “Rip Van Winkle” (1819)
  • “The Legend of Sleepy-Hollow“

• Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)
  • “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1832)
  • “Young Goodman Brown” (1835)
  • “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1843)
  • “The Birth-mark” (1843)

• Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849)
  • “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)
  • William Wilson (1839)
  • “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1842)
  • “The Black Cat” (1843)
  • “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846)

• Melville, Herman (1819-1891)
  • “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853)

• Twain, Mark
  • “Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog” (1865)

• Joel Chandler Harris
  • From Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings (1881)
  • “Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy”
  • “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story”

• Charles Chessnut (1858-1932)
  • ‘Po Sandy (1888)
  • Dave’s Neckliss (1889)

• Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)
  • “A White Heron” (1886)

• Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1860-1835)
  • “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)

• James, Henry (1843-1916)
  • “The Turn of the Screw” (1898)