Introduction to Classics of American literature ; Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, the first American story ; Washington Irving, the first American storyteller ; Ralph Waldo Emerson yesterday, America's coming of age ; Emerson today, architect of American values ; Emerson tomorrow, deconstructing culture and self ; Henry David Thoreau, counterculture hero ; Thoreau, stylist and humorist extraordinaire ; Walden, yesterday, today and tomorrow ; Edgar Allen Poe ; Poe, ghost writer ; Poe's legacy, the self as "haunted palace."

Nathaniel Hawthorne and the American past ; The scarlet letter, Puritan romance ; Hawthorne's "A", interpretation and semiosis ; The scarlet letter, political tract or psychological study? ; Hawthorne our contemporary -- Herman Melville and the making of Moby Dick ; The biggest fish story of them all ; Ahab and the white whale ; Moby Dick, tragedy of perspective ; Melville's "Benito Cereno", American (mis)adventure at sea ; Benito Cereno, theater of power, or power of theater? ; Walt Whitman, the American bard appears.

Whitman, poet of the body ; Whitman, poet of the city ; Whitman, poet of death ; The Whitman legacy ; Uncle Tom's cabin, the unread classic ; Stowe's representation of slavery ; Freedom and art in Uncle Tom's cabin ; Emily Dickinson, in and out of nature ; Dickinson's poetry, language and consciousness ; Dickinson, devotee of death ; Dickinson, "Amherst's Madame de Sade" ; Dickinson's legacy.

The adventures of Tom Sawyer, American paradise regained ; Huckleberry Finn, the banned classic ; Huckleberry Finn, a child's voice, a child's vision ; Huckleberry Finn, American orphan ; Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, black and white charade ; Henry James and the novel of perception.