Massachusetts features prominently in nineteenth-century American literature. In this course, we will focus on four writers, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Henry James. What did they have to say not only about the Massachusetts landscape but about the Massachusetts character? Alcott’s girls and women alternately conform to and rebel against strictures of behavior about gender, social class, and race. Hawthorne and Dickinson struggle with the weight of their Puritan ancestors. In The Bostonians, James (with some distance and irony) depicts reform movements and “Boston marriages,” intimate partnerships between women. In this course, we’ll explore the ways four prominent nineteenth-century American writers engage with place, the way they depict the ways of thinking and living and the moral sensibility they saw as characteristic of Massachusetts.