Stephen Crane: Three Novellas
$175
Stephen Crane lived a short and intense life, and wrote short and intense fiction. Regardless of the genre—he was a muckraking journalist, an author, and a poet—Crane never shied from an ugly truth, never spared his readers’ feelings. Whether depicting the sordid streets of lower Manhattan or fictionalizing his own experience of shipwreck, Crane’s remarkable prose registers human courage and cowardice in equal measure. Little surprise, then, that he wrote what is still the definitive novel about the Civil War. The Red Badge of Courage captured something that the period’s countless memoirs and histories could not—a seemingly authentic account of what it was to be engulfed by war.
The irony that a man, not yet born when the cruel war was over, could accomplish such a feat is one of the many aspects of Crane’s brilliant career that we will explore in this Delve seminar. Together we’ll read his three most important novellas—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), The Red Badge of Courage (1895), and The Monster (1898)—plus a smattering of his poems and short stories. Crane is known for his surprising prose, which both perfects the late nineteenth century’s obsession with the real and anticipates the experimentation of genre and style that would characterize the early twentieth century. To read Crane is also to confront, often uncomfortably, the ethical problems of complicity, hypocrisy, and self-delusion. It will be a wild ride.
Recommended text:
The Portable Stephen Crane
Access Program
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Liaison position
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Elizabeth Duquette
Elizabeth Duquette has been teaching nineteenth-century literature for more than twenty years, formerly at Gettysburg College and now sometimes at Portland State University. She is the co-editor of the American Literary History Review, an editor for American Art, and the author of American Tyrannies in the Long Age of Napoleon (2023) and Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America.
