This course will introduce students to historical and cultural concerns of nineteenth-century America through major subgenres of the novel, including the gothic, the sentimental, realism, and naturalism. Emphasis will be on shifts in the novel across the century as well as the relationship of the nineteenth-century novel to print culture, including serial publication in literary magazines and newspapers. We may also think about how non-fiction texts from this period draw on the conventions of fiction. Authors studied may include Charles Brockden Brown, Fanny Fern, George Lippard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Pauline Hopkins.