In this course we will explore how colonial subjects understood "selves": how they described their spiritual experiences and how they expressed their interior lives. We will also track changing descriptions and explanations of the “supernatural” from the colonial period to the end of the 19th century. Religious ecstasy, trance, witchcraft, and ghosting are some of the practices we will consider in our archival explorations. Our readings will include texts by John Cotton, Increase Mather, Mary Rowlandson, Sarah and Jonathan Edwards, Emerson, Hawthorne, and William James, as well as recent critical work on melancholy, trauma, subject formation, popular religion and the passions.