PERIODS OF AMERICAN

LITERATURE
1650 present day

Pre-Colonial/ Native American

[ 1600]
CHARACTERISTICS
1ST Americans
Creation & Origin Myths
Legends
Storytelling
Oral Tradition

Pre-Colonial/ Native American

Writers & Works
Earth on a Turtles Back

Colonial
(Puritans & Age of Reason)
[1600-1800]
CHARACTERISTICS
PURITANS
[1600-1700]
Sermons
Personal Narratives
Plain Style
Authority of Bible & church

Colonial
(Puritans & Age of Reason)
[1600-1800]
CHARACTERISTICS
AGE OF REASON
[1700-1800]
Political pamphlets
Ornate Style
Persuasive Writing
Patriotism

COLONIAL
HISTORY
PURITAN
Persons fate determined by God
All are corrupt & must be saved by Christ
Settlement of British Colonies in America
AGE OF REASON
Revolutionary War
Instructive in values

COLONIAL
PURITAN
William Bradford
Mary Rowlandson
Jonathan Edwards
Anne Bradstreet
The Crucible (Arthur Miller-1950)
AGE OF REASON
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Franklin
Thomas Paine
Patrick Henry

ROMANTICISM
[1800-1860]
CHARACTERISTICS
VALUE FEELING & INTUITION OVER
REASON
IMAGINATION
MYSTERY
SLAVE NARRATIVES
POETRY
SHORT STORIES

ROMANTICISM
HISTORY
Expansion of magazines, np, and book
publishing
Slavery debates
Industrial Revolution: old ways of doing
things are now irrelevant

ROMANTICISM
WRITERS
Washington Irving
William Cullen Bryant
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Edgar Allan Poe
Emily Dickinson
Herman Melville

TRANSCENDENTALISM/ AntiTranscendentalism
CHARACTERISTICS
TRANSCENDENTALISM
[1840-1860]
American Renaissance
Self-Reliance
Individualism
Inner-Light
Idealist
Utopia
Intuition

TRANSCENDENTALISM/ AntiTranscendentalism
CHARACTERISTICS
ANTI-TRANSCENDENTALISM
Dark Romanticism
Symbolism
Sin, Pain, & Evil

TRANSCENDENTALISM/ ANTITRANSCENDENTALISM
WRITERS
TRANSCENDENTALISM
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Nathaniel Hawthorne*
ANTI-TRANSCENDENTALISM
Edgar Allan Poe*

REALISM/ REGIONALISM/
NATURALISM
CHARACTERISTICS
Local Color
Ordinary People
Real-life, Every-day events
Objective Narrator
Open Interpretation
Slave Narratives
Fate and circumstance is beyond mans control

REALISM/ REGIONALISM/
NATURALISM
HISTORY
[1860-1900]
Civil War & post Civil War
Influence of Sigmund Freud & Charles
Darwin
Demand for truer type of lit. that does not
idealize people or places

REALISM/ REGIONALISM/
NATURALISM
WRITERS
Walt Whitman
Mark Twain
Ambrose Bierce
Stephen Crane
Frederick Douglas
Kate Chopin
Edith Wharton
Edwin Arlington Robinson

MODERNISM
CHARACTERISTICS
Pessimism
American Dream
Imagism
Lost Generation
Beat Generation
Use of interior monologue & stream of
consciousness
Plays, Poetry, Novels

MODERNISM
HISTORY
[1900-1950]
WWI & WWII
Jazz Age/ Roaring 20s
Harlem Renaissance
The Great Depression
Karl Marx
rise of youth culture

HARLEM RENAISSANCE
Literary movement parallel to
Modernism.
It focused on African
American thought and
community.
Civil rights and equality
were major themes of Harlem
Renaissance writing.
During this period African
Americans were for the first
time recognized as artists,
writers and musicians.

1920s

MODERNISM
WRITERS
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Robert Frost
T.S. Elliot
John Steinbeck
William Faulkner
Langston Hughes
W.E.B. DuBois
Ezra Pound
William Carlos Williams
Arthur Miller*

POST-MODERNISM/
CONTEMPORARY
CHARACTERISTICS
[1950 ]
Mix of fantasy w/ non-fiction
Media culture interprets values
Narratives
Anti-Heroes
Emotion-Provoking
Humorous Irony
Storytelling
Autobiographies
Individual Isolation
Social Issues (ethnic & feminist)

POST-MODERNISM/
CONTEMPORARY
HISTORY
Post WWII prosperity
New century & millennium
Space exploration
Korean War
Vietnam War
Gulf War
WTC/ 9-11
Iraqi War
Advances in technology

POST-MODERNISM/
CONTEMPORARY
WRITERS
Arthur Miller
Toni Morrison
Sylvia Plath
J.D. Salinger
Beat Poets
Maya Angelou
Alice Walker

and the rest is

unwritten