ENGL 4540 - American Literature: Modern

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This historical survey focuses on the first half of the 20th century, when the United States went through a series of profound political and social changes, such as its entry into World War I and II, Prohibition, The Red Scare, Suffrage, the advent of the mass media, and Progressivism. Drawing on a variety of genres and media (including painting and film), the course will study developments in the New Negro Renaissance, Greenwich Village bohemianism, the Provincetown Players, “high” modernism, and the Lost Generation. Representative writers of the period include: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mina Loy, Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and e.e. cummings. Prerequisite: ENGL 3080.