This course examines the American novel in terms of the relationship between liberalism and imperialism in the United States history. Taking our bearings from the ways in which the representation of seemingly ungoverned territory--virgin land--shaped the development of American liberal ideals, we will chart the complicated and unpredictable relations between liberal political theory and American imperial foreign policy from the Louisiana Purchase through the Cold War. At the same time, we will measure the notorious formal irregularity of the American novel against the shifting terms in which the national integrity of the United States received its elaboration and definition. Our discussions will hinge on two broad clusters of questions. 1) In what ways did American liberalism encourage American imperial ambitions? In what ways did American liberalism limit and restrain those ambitions? What justifications are available to imperial state projects other than liberal ones? Should we understand manifest destiny as an imperial enterprise? How should we understand the relationship between manifest destiny and United States’ avowedly imperial projects at the turn of the twentieth century or its proxy-based expansion of its sphere of influence during the Cold War? 2) In what ways is the United States novel a specifically nationalist literary form? What forms of nationalism does it sanction? On what forms of nationalism does it depend? Does it make sense to peg developments in the American novel’s formal history--from realism to naturalism and modernism, from modernism to postmodernism, etc.--to contemporaneous shifts in way the United States was conceptualized as a national entity? If all goes well, our discussions will enable us to develop strategies for exhuming a submerged interplay between American literary and political history. We should emerge from the semester with a firmer command of the multivalent permutations of American liberalism, with an enriched understanding of the intellectual interest of American diplomatic history, and with a broader conception of the cultural environment from which American literature has sprung.