This class covers American fiction written during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century, roughly the period spanning from after the Civil War up through World War I. Scholars of this period have long noted a rapidly expanding yet increasingly diverse nation that arose from advances in industrialization, urbanization and immigration. This course examines the artistic strategies (realism, naturalism, the stirrings of modernism) by which writers of fiction represented a growing multiplicity of points of view among different communities as well as the tensions that arose from competing needs and desires. Writers studied include Edith Wharton, Henry James, Mark Twain, W.E.B. Du Bois, Kate Chopin, Zitkala-Sa, and Theodore Dreiser. MW 11:20-12:50