STATEMENT ON PhD ORAL EXAMINATIONS BY THE FACULTY IN
AMERICAN LITERATURE
Students who want to be tested in “American” as their period should choose a specific 100-110 year span (for example, 1820-1930, 1835-1940, 1865-1970, etc. -- exception: students who want to offer 'colonial American' should use the period 1600 to 1800 or beyond) and pick approximately 40 book-length texts (or the equivalent) to represent that span. Your list should reflect both your own particular interests and the period as a whole, with texts spread evenly across the span you've defined, and including both poetry and prose (and, for students whose lists include the 20th century, drama). All or nearly all of the authors on your list should be included in the most recent two-volume edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Once you've got a draft, you should show your list to faculty in the American Area committee and get their advice about your choices, then bring it to the head of the Area committee for final approval.
4/2004
The PhD Oral Examination
in the
American Period
The American Area has put together the following list of recommended secondary sources for you to use in deciding what critical works to add to your period lists. Choose six in addition to your forty primary texts.
Columbia Literary History of the U.S.
Cambridge History of American Litature
Perry Miller, The New England Mind (2 vols.)
Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad
Bercovitch, Puritan Origins of the American Self
William J. Scheick, The Will and the Word: The Poetry of Edward Taylor
Crain, The Story of A
William J. Scheick, Design in Puritan American Literature
David Hacketet Fischer, Albion 's Seed
Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative
Phillip Gura, A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Racicalism in New England 1620-1660
Jill Lepore: In The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed
Mason Lowance, The Language of Canaan : Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists
Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic
Daniel Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson
Laurel Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale
Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution
Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic
Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority
Fliegelman, Declaring Independence : Jefferson , Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance
Gillian Brown, The Consent of the Governed
Frank Shuffleton, A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America
William Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire
Alan Taylor, William Cooper's Town
Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word
Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel
Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel
Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion
Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America : Persons, Houses, Cities
Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in 19th-Century America
Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel
Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black
Edmund Morgan, American Freedom, American Slavery
Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture from the Revolution through the Renaissance
Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden
Alice Tyler, Freedom's Ferment
Karhryn Sklar, Catherine Beecher
Joseph Fichtelberg, Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860
Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imaging Self in Nineteenth-Century America
Paul Boller, American Transcendentalism
F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman
Donald Pease, ed., The American Renaissance Reconsidered
Stephen Railton, Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance
David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville
Eugene Genovese, Roll , Jordan , Roll
Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, Slavery and the Literary Imagination
Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class
Lawrence Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow
Susan Howe, The Birth Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness
Eric Lott, Love and Theft
Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America
Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty : Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body
Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States
Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture
Kevin Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance
Cheryl Walker, Indian Nation: Native American Literature
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
George Frederickson, The Inner Civil War
Elizabeth Young, Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War
Robin Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender
Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth Century America
Ron Takaki, Iron Cages
Frances Foster, Written By Herself
Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood
Cheryl Wall, Changing Our Own Words
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America
Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction
Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy and Realism in American Literature
Cynthia Russert, Darwin in America
John Higham, Strangers in the Land .
John Kasson, Amusing the Million
William Leach, Land of Desire
Miles Orvell, The Real Thing
Nell Painter, Standing at Armageddon
Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents
Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture
Sacvan Bercovitch, Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America
Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace
Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race
George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind
Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture
Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative
Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature
Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature
Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate
Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism
Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, Cultures of U.S. Imperialism
Alfred Kazin, An American Procession
Cecilia Tichi, Shifting Gears
David Nye, American Technological Sublime
Janet Davis, The Circus Age
Robert Clyde Allen, Horrible Prettiness
Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey
Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry
Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present Day
James Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary American Poetry, 1945-1965
Barry Chabot, Writers for the Nation: American Literary Modernism Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
George Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance in Black and White
Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture
Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era
Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
Marjorie Perloff, Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition
Stephen Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America
Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere
Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian-American Cultural Politics
Wai-Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time