In the decades following independence, Americans faced a cultural question alongside the political challenges of the new republic: could the United States develop a literature distinctly its own? Edgar Allan Poe and the Emerging American Voice will explore how nineteenth-century writers moved beyond inherited British literary traditions and began creating forms, themes, and voices that reflected the experiences, ambitions, and contradictions of the young nation.
With Poe at its center, this week-long seminar will examine a remarkable generation of writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman, who helped define an emerging American literature. Participants will consider how these writers wrestled with individualism, democracy, morality, religion, national identity, and the meaning of America itself. From Emerson’s transcendentalism and Whitman’s democratic expansiveness to Hawthorne’s moral ambiguity and Poe’s psychological darkness, they developed different responses to the possibilities and tensions of American life.
Poe offers a particularly compelling lens into this transformation. As poet, critic, editor, and literary innovator, he participated in debates over what American literature should become while developing a voice with international influence. His work also raises larger questions about what, if anything, made literature distinctly American.
A field study in Baltimore will connect literature to place through the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, and potentially Poe-related archival collections at the Enoch Pratt Free Library or Johns Hopkins’ George Peabody Library. Together, readings, scholarly discussion, and historic sites will illuminate how a young nation gradually found a literary voice of its own.
Mark Dawidziak
Mark Dawidziak is an author, cultural critic, actor, and playwright whose work connects American literature with theater, film, and television. The author or editor of approximately twenty-five books, he brings expertise in Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and the enduring influence of imaginative storytelling on American popular culture.
His biography A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe explores Poe’s life through the circumstances surrounding his mysterious death, examining the myths that have obscured the writer’s achievements and personality. The book received nominations for the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and Ohioana awards. Dawidziak’s writing includes five books about Mark Twain, as well as The Columbo Phile: A Casebook, The Night Stalker Companion, Everything I Need to Know I Learned in The Twilight Zone, and The Shawshank Redemption Revealed. His publications also encompass fiction, horror studies, short stories, and comic book scripts.
A journalism graduate of George Washington University, Dawidziak spent forty-three years in journalism, including positions as television, film, and theater critic at the Akron Beacon Journal and Cleveland’s Plain Dealer. His cultural criticism earned five Cleveland Press Club awards for entertainment writing, and he was inducted into the Press Club of Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame in 2015. He also taught courses on reviewing film and television and on screen portrayals of vampires at Kent State University.
In 2002, Dawidziak and actress Sara Showman founded the Largely Literary Theater Company to promote literacy, literature, and live performance. As artistic director, he portrays Twain and Charles Dickens and performs with Showman in The Tell-Tale Play, featuring Poe’s stories and poems.
Typically scheduled from Sunday through Friday in the summer, Founding Forward’s week-long teacher seminars are hosted at Union League Liberty Hill, a 300+ acre private conference center and golf course in suburban Philadelphia. Each seminar has a single theme and consists of content-focused talks by highly regarded scholars (morning and afternoon) interspersed each day with activation sessions featuring either lesson demonstrations from master teachers and presentation from resource providers like Retro Report or Periodic Presidents. Finally, each seminar includes an out-of-classroom field study to historic sites, archives, and museums.
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