This course explores American literature from first encounters and early colonies to the Civil War. Readings may include sermons, poems, diaries, travel writing, captivity narratives, and literature of the European/Indigenous encounter; slave narratives; political tracts and documents of the revolutionary and Federalist periods; novels of seduction, Gothicism, domesticity and frontier adventure; and the various writings of transcendentalists, romancers, woman-rights and anti-slavery activists.