ENG 337
Major American Novels

Course Description

In this class, we will be reading and considering a number of the most important or most critically lauded moments in the development of the American novel.

Books to Purchase

All books can be purchased at the ASU Polytechnic Bookstore. Additionally, I have provided links to Amazon.com if you prefer to purchase there.

A Note on Electronic Texts

All of the texts for this class are available in standard, class-approved editions at the ASU bookstore (except text 2, which is a short story and available online). However, the first six texts are also available in the public domain. If you prefer to save money or to use an eBook reader, you can download books 1-6 for free at Project Gutenberg. Additionally, any used or new edition of these texts will be acceptable for class.

At the same time, texts 7 and 8 are not available in the public domain. As such, you are required to purchase the specific editions linked below for these texts. Having coherent page numbers and editions allows us to have class discussions in an organized fashion in the absence of freely available texts.

Required Textbooks

  1. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
  2. “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville (1853)
  3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1885)
  4. Daisy Miller by Henry James (1878)
  5. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)
  6. My Ántonia by Willa Cather (1918)
  7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
  8. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)

Your Browser Does Not Meet Class Requirements

For this class, you are required to have a more modern web browser than Internet Explorer 8, the browser you are using. IE8 is 5 years out of date with regards to web standards, riddled with security errors, and no longer supported or maintained by Microsoft.

To view course content, you are required to install a more modern browser. I recommend downloading and installing the newest version of Mozilla Firefox. It is easy to install, compatible with a broad range of websites, and runs on many old computers.

When you have installed the required browser for this course, please return here to read the syllabus.

Help

Here are instructions for installing Firefox on Windows.

Basic information literacy as a prerequisite for this course. If you are having trouble installing a working browser, contact ASU support or consider dropping this course.