The crosscurrents of culture in the dialogic pairing of Henry James' 'What Maisie Knew' with Zitkala-Sa's 'American Indian Stories' and of Henry David Thoreau's 'Walden' with Susan Fenimore Cooper's 'Rural Hours'

Although courses in American literature are a staple of most high school and college English departments, in recent years the discipline of English has been the subject of increased interrogation by scholars and teachers. Histories of the discipline suggest that the body of texts which defined American literary study in the last century, in conjunction with the New Critical approach favored in American literature classrooms, have authorized a narrow classroom view of American literary history and culture. When designing courses in American literature, teachers face the dilemma of deciding how to represent various peoples and their voices, ideas and literary aesthetics in the limited span of a semester course.; This dissertation proposes that teachers consider organizing American literature courses around texts that engage each other by offering differing views of cultural controversies. This approach invites exploration of people and ideas vying for attention, and complicates students' understanding of literary and cultural history. As a means of exploring the benefits of this approach, the dissertation presents two oppositional pairings to the consideration of the American literature: First, the pairing of Henry James' What Maisie Knew with the little-known American Indian Stories by Native American writer Zitkala-Sa, and second, Henry David Thoreau's Walden with Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours. The first pairing explores the implications of concepts of periodicity and literary aesthetics in classroom practices, and it reveals the remarkably different ways in which texts represented nineteenth-century social concerns, while the second pairing highlights the authors' radically different environmental ethos to explore crucial questions about the representation of gender, writing, and nature in literary production and reception.