ELA 11: American Literature—Semester A

My country, 'tis of Shmoop.

  • Credit Recovery Enabled
  • Course Length: 18 weeks
  • Course Type: Basic
  • Category:
    • English
    • Literature
    • High School

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Shmoop's ELA 11 course has been granted a-g certification, which means it has met the rigorous iNACOL Standards for Quality Online Courses and will now be honored as part of the requirements for admission into the University of California system.

This course has also been certified by Quality Matters, a trusted quality assurance organization that provides course review services to certify the quality of online and blended courses.


Shmoop loves Moby-Dick. (Don't judge.) But we don't love torturing you with it. So in this course on American Literature, we're going to do things a little differently. After all, doing things differently is as American as you can get.

Don't worry: you're still going to get your Big Deal Authors. We wouldn't take that away from you. But it's not just about reading the words on the page. We're also going to show you why these Big Deal Authors matter.

In the first semester of our Common Core-aligned American Literature course, we'll walk you through readings, essays, and activities that

  • kick off with the Puritans.
  • transcend with the Transcendentalists.
  • nail down some of the biggest hitters in literature: Poe, Dickinson, and Louisa May Alcott. (Yep, Little Women's on board.)

We dare you to follow the U.S. for two-and-a-half centuries and not leave with a bounce in your step.

P.S. ELA 11: American Literature is a two-semester course. You're looking at Semester A, but you can find Semester B of the course here.


Unit Breakdown

1 ELA 11: American Literature—Semester A - Colonialism and Exploration 1400 – 1700

This unit will introduce students to American Literature, focusing on the central guiding question, "What makes me 'American'?" The central focus will be on the first Americans, including Native Americans, explorers during the age of colonization, and the Puritans; writing will focus on persuasive strategies and techniques, and will be assessed through persuasive paragraphs with textual support. Plus, we'll answer the most enduring question of all: when did language stop being so old-timey?

2 ELA 11: American Literature—Semester A - Rationalism and Independence: 1700 – 1800

Building upon the ideas introduced in Unit 1, this unit will focus on American seminal texts and rhetoric that involve the split from England and the formation of a new country. Primary documents and letters will support the writing of the time period as well as several significant biographies. Sounds fun? You haven't even met Poor Richard yet.

3 ELA 11: American Literature—Semester A - American Gothic 1800 – 1855

This unit will engage students in an in-depth analysis of American Gothic fiction through themes, plot, suspense, character, setting, and narrative devices. Writing will focus on narrative structure and strategy of the short story and narrative poem, as well as the creative aspect of how to create and organize a narrative in the gothic style. Melville and Hawthorne cameos will prove you don't have to be Poe to be spooky.

4 ELA 11: American Literature—Semester A - Transcendentalism 1830 – 1850

This unit will introduce students to the literary movement of American Transcendentalism, begun by authors such as Emerson and Thoreau and continued by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. The central focus will be on the tenets of transcendentalism, which include individualism, self-reliance, metacognition, and a focus on Nature. Yep, we capitalized Nature—it's that important to these innovative writers and thinkers.

5 ELA 11: American Literature—Semester A - Abolition and Women’s Rights 1820 – 1920

How can a hyphen or an ellipsis represent years of oppression? This unit will use short stories and literary nonfiction, including seminal texts to examine the historical significance of the abolitionist and women's rights movements. The central focus will be on how argument, rhetoric, and the power of art can advance a cause—from early organizing all the way through today. 

6 ELA 11: American Literature—Semester A - Realism 1855 – 1870

This unit focuses on American Realism as a movement in both urban and rural areas. A novel study on Little Women will a focus on social/historical context, as well as provide students with evidence to prove or disprove that they are so the Jo and you are so the Amy. Plus, we'll be analyzing Jacob Riis photos, Civil War-drenched short stories, and the grossest parts of The Jungle—what else could a Shmooper desire?


Recommended prerequisites:

  • ELA 10: World Literature—Semester A
  • ELA 10: World Literature—Semester B

  • Sample Lesson - Introduction

    Lesson 4.06: Transcending Transcendentalism

    Two men overlooking a woodsy scene.
    No, we're not going to cut it all down and put up condos! Don't be ridiculous.
    (Source)

    Let's get out of the books and into some images. We keep telling ourselves that Transcendentalism isn't just a literary movement—it's a philosophical, social, and artistic movement as well.

    There are several artistic movements that have their roots in Transcendentalism, and we're going to look at a few paintings from artists belonging to the Hudson River School in this lesson.

    The Hudson River School is an artistic movement during the 1830s and 1840s. The paintings are meant to visually embody the values of Transcendentalism: the centrality of the individual, the divine communion with nature, and the geography of America. These paintings intend to reveal the spirituality of nature to their viewers and communicate the Transcendental belief that nature and man are inherently good.

    In Shmoop-speak, Hudson River pics are as socially revealing as the Andy Warhols of the 1960s. (You know, the guy who did the portrait of Marilyn Monroe and the Campbell soup can?) One scenic portrait of nature reveals a thousand words about American values and thoughts.

    That's why we want you to pick up your museum tickets and step into the gallery.


    Sample Lesson - Reading

    Reading 4.4.06: The Hudson River School

    There are lots of short readings, so make sure you get to them all. Let's get started.

    First, a little background on Transcendental art. Transcendental thought influenced artists at the time, who largely specialized in natural landscapes. Landscape paintings, sneakily enough, are really all about man—and his relationship to the land, the earth, and the heavens. Even "pure" landscapes, in which not a single human figure can be found, were about Emerson-style personal angst: a picture of a tree represented an artist's relationship to what they're portraying, and a message that conveys how they feel about what they see. Yeah: a sublime lake signifies so much more than "just" a lake.

    Transcendental painters, also influenced by Romanticism, were called the Hudson River School—since most of them lived in the Hudson River Valley and specialized in depictions of its glory. Eventually, the term "Hudson River School" described artists who didn't just live in the upstate New York area; it was used widely to discuss the oh-so-majestic and oh-so-emotional natural paintings of the mid-1800s.

    Look at these well-known important works of the HRS:

    By Thomas Cole

    A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains, 1839

    A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains, 1839
    (Source)

    The Oxbow, 1836

    The Oxbow, 1836
    (Source)

    Home in the Woods, 1847

    Home in the Woods
    (Source)

    Asher Brown Durand

    Kindred Spirits, 1848

    Kindred Spirits
    (Source)

    As you "read" the paintings, think about these ideas. You'll want to jot down these answers somewhere, because you're going to be writing about all four paintings in the activity.

    • Where is your eye drawn? What lines take it there? Are they vertical, horizontal, diagonal?
    • How is space used in the painting? How are positive and negative space used?
    • How is color used in the painting? Where is light coming from, and what sort of intensity is used?
    • What textures exist in the painting?
    • What is emphasized in the text? Deemphasized? How do objects relate to one another? Is there balance or an imbalance in the painting?
    • What might the image be "claiming"—that is, what narrative is the image trying to tell?
    • What Transcendental values are present or absent in the painting?

    Sample Lesson - Activity

    Activity 4.06: Nature Is Divine

    Now that you've analyzed the paintings, you're going to take your jumble of notes and pile them together in some sort of synthesis.

    The first thing you need to do is summarize each painting—describe what's happening, including the most important details. In other words, if you have to explain the painting to someone who's never seen it before, what would you say? Include what claim you think the painter is making (what he wants to communicate to his audience) and what Transcendental values he might be depicting visually.

    Each summary should be 100–150 words long—enough to get some details, but not enough to go overboard.

    Let's do "The Notch" together. Here's what we might write for a summary.


    In "The Notch," our eye is drawn to the light—there's a house in the lower left and blue sky in the middle right. The lines are mostly horizontal and diagonal, which means there's an expanse of space (pretty indicative of the expanse of America). There's also a lot of positive space: the painting is busy and full of vibrant forests, powerful mountains, and the impending storm. The trees are intensely colored while the humans are muted, which might imply that the painting is really all about the power of nature. In fact, humans are small and insignificant compared to the mountain, the forest, and the approaching storm. The painter is most likely trying to convince his audience that humans are insignificant in the face of nature. He also is idealizing nature in depicting its true form and purity (hey, it's not all Bambi all the time).

    What we've got here is:

    • the summary (what's going on in the painting)
    • the claim (what the painter wants his audience to believe)
    • the Transcendental value (idealizing nature)

    And you can do it, too. Go to, aspiring art critics!

    1. The Ox-Bow

    2. In the Woods

    3. Kindred Spirits

    4. Now that you have the summaries done, you're going to synthesize all these paintings to make some sort of judgment about the Hudson River School as a whole. Think about the following questions as you write your synthesis.

      • What physical elements do all these paintings have in common? What are their differences, and why might these differences exist?
      • What is each painter communicating about the relationship between man and nature in his painting? Are these ideas similar or different?
      • What Transcendental values do these paintings share? Which ones aren't present? Why?