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American Literature After 1900

Penn State is the historic home of American literature in higher education; in the early twentieth century, Fred Lewis Pattee became the first English professor in the country to teach classes exclusively devoted to US literary works. The Americanist faculty at Penn State aim to be similarly ground-breaking.

Recent Grad Courses

  • Expatriate Modernisms
  • American Modernism and the “New Woman”
  • American Modernism, American Primitivism
  • The Texts of Modernist American Poetry
  • Modernist Little Magazines
  • Kay Boyle and Ernest Hemingway, Modernist Duet
  • The American Literary Memoir
  • Satire and the New Black Aesthetic in Contemporary African American Literature
  • Black Cosmopolitanism: Ellison and Johnson
  • Contemporary Fiction

Center for American Literary Studies

The Penn State Center for American Literary Studies, dedicated to supporting the study, teaching, and reading of American literatures, is quickly becoming a leading national center; it offers exceptional research and fellowship opportunities for faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students. CALS sponsored and hosted the inaugural conference of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, for example. Visit the CALS website at www.cals.psu.edu.

People specializing in this area

Emeritus Faculty

Kit Hume

Kit Hume
My interest lies in writers since 1960. My most recent book was on Aggressive American Fiction, and the one I'm currently working on concerns contemporary uses of mythology.
Linda Furgerson Selzer, Ph.D.

Linda Furgerson Selzer, Ph.D.
19th century literature, contemporary literature
James L. W. West III

James L. W. West III