Please Note: The third session of this course has changed from April 10 to April 17. Also, all sessions of this course are held at the Ripley Center (1100 Jefferson Dr, SW, Washington, DC).
America’s Gilded Age was a heyday for the written word, and its literature reflects and comments on the immense social, cultural, and economic changes that were taking place during the time. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration were altering the national landscape and creating both immense wealth and poverty, and novelists found rich backdrops for their works in this rapidly shifting new world.
The fiction of Edith Wharton and Henry James probes the complexities of these transformations and offers an insider’s view of the upper class. Their works highlight the clash between the conventional and the free-spirited, as well as that between old money and new. Other writers were committed to portraying city life from working-class and immigrant perspectives. Realists like Theodore Dreiser convey what it felt like to move to the bustling metropolis: the excitement, the danger, the sense of possibility, and the reality of poverty. Anzia Yezierska considers life in New York’s Lower East Side and the forces of Americanization that impacted newly arrived immigrants like herself. Together, these authors created a distinctly American literature with topics and characters that reflected their unique historical moment.
Join Lisbeth Strimple Fuisz, a lecturer in the English department at Georgetown University, in spirited lectures and informal discussions about the books. Participants should read the first book prior to class. Sherry and cookies are available for refreshment.
Feb. 13 Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905)
A tragic novel about a woman born to wealth who sinks under the vanity and cupidity of upper-class life.
Mar. 13 Henry James’ Daisy Miller (1878) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899)
In the novella Daisy Miller, a naïve young girl pays a high price for her recklessness. In The Awakening, a married woman seeks greater personal freedom and a more fulfilling life.
UPDATED DATE (originally Apr. 10): Apr. 17 Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900)
A realistic and one-controversial novel of the intertwined stories of a young woman’s rise to fame as an actress and of a wealthy man’s fall from a life of comfort to living on the streets.
May 15 Anzia Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements (1923)
A highly dramatic fictionalization of immigrant and labor activist Rose Pastor’s marriage to an upper-class philanthropist.
4 sessions
