PERIODS OF AMERICAN

LITERATURE
 Native American
[ Before 1650]
CHARACTERISTICS
•1ST Americans
•Creation & Origin Myths
•Legends
•Storytelling
•Oral Tradition
 Puritans
[1650-1750]

CHARACTERISTICS
PURITANS
[1650-1750]
• Sermons
• Personal Narratives
• Plain Style
• Authority of Bible & church
Revolutionary / Age of Reason
[1750-1800]
CHARACTERISTICS
AGE OF REASON
[1750-1800]
• Political pamphlets
• Ornate Style
• Persuasive Writing
• Patriotism
 Two Extremes
PURITANS
• Purify Church/ Journey to establish God’s Law
• Person’s fate determined by God
• All are corrupt & must be saved by Christ

AGE OF REASON/REVOLUTIONARY
• Establish government and law based on
REASON & LOGIC
• Revolutionary War support and greed-driven
business
• Instructive in values – can learn to be good;
choices between good & evil
 Literature
PURITAN
• William Bradford
• Mary Rowlandson
• Jonathan Edwards
• The Crucible (Arthur Miller)

AGE OF REASON
• Thomas Jefferson
• Benjamin Franklin
• Thomas Paine
• Patrick Henry
 ROMANTICISM
[1800-1860]
CHARACTERISTICS
• SLAVE NARRATIVES
• POETRY
• SHORT STORIES
• VALUE FEELINGS & INTUITION OVER
REASON
• IMAGINATION & CREATIVITY
 ROMANTICISM
HISTORY

• Expansion of magazines, newspaper, 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
• Emily Dickinson
• Walt Whitman
• Edgar Allan Poe
 DARK Romanticism
CHARACTERISTICS
• Duality of the human psyche (everyone
has a “dark” side)
• Symbolism
• Sin, Pain, & Evil
• Supernatural (ghosts,
• hauntings)
• Psychological terrors
TRANSCENDENTALISM
CHARACTERISTICS
TRANSCENDENTALISM
[1840-1860]
• “American Renaissance”
• Self-Reliance
• Individualism
• Inner-Light
• Idealist
TRANSCENDENTALISM/ ANTI-
TRANSCENDENTALISM
WRITERS
TRANSCENDENTALISM
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Nathaniel Hawthorne*

DARK ROMANTICS
• Edgar Allan Poe
REALISM/ REGIONALISM/ NATURALISM
CHARACTERISTICS
• “Verisimilitude”
• “Local Color”
• Aesthetic Realism
• Social Realism
• Objective Narrator
• Open Interpretation
 REALISM/ REGIONALISM/
NATURALISM
HISTORY
[1855-1900]
• Civil War & post Civil War
• Influence of Sigmund Freud & Charles
Darwin
• Demand for “truer” type of lit. that does not
idealize people or places
• Invention of camera (showed reality of war)
• Man vs. Nature (“taming” the Wild West)
REALISM/ REGIONALISM/
NATURALISM
WRITERS
• Mark Twain
• Ambrose Bierce
• Stephen Crane
• Frederick Douglas
• Kate Chopin
• Edith Wharton
 MODERNISM
CHARACTERISTICS
• Plays, Poetry, Novels
• “American Dream”
• Optimism (before
The Great Depression)
• Use of interior monologue & stream of
consciousness
• BOTH World Wars (WWI and WWII)
 MODERNISM
HISTORY
[1900-1950]
• WWI & WWII
• “Jazz Age”
• Harlem Renaissance
• The Great Depression
• Karl Marx
• rise of youth culture (“teenager” becomes
a concept in the 1950’s)
MODERNISM
WRITERS
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Robert Frost
• T.S. Elliot
• Carl Sandburg
• John Steinbeck
• William Faulkner
• Arthur Miller*
• Langston Hughes
• W.E.B. DuBois
POST-MODERNISM/
CONTEMPORARY
CHARACTERISTICS
POST-MODERNISM
[1950 → Present]
• Mix of fantasy w/ non-fiction
• No heroes
• Individual Isolation
• Social Issues (ethnic &
feminist)
• Sexual Revolution / Explicit sex
POST-MODERNISM/
CONTEMPORARY
CHARACTERISTICS
CONTEMPORARY
[1970→]
• Narratives
• Anti-Heroes
• Emotion-Provoking
• Humorous Irony
• Storytelling
• Autobiographies
POST-MODERNISM/
CONTEMPORARY
HISTORY
POST-MODERNISM
• Post WWII prosperity
• Media culture interprets values

CONTEMPORARY
• New century & millennium
• Media influence
POST-MODERNISM/
CONTEMPORARY
WRITERS
POST-MODERNISM
• Arthur Miller
• Sylvia Plath
• Nikki Giovanni
• Truman Capote
• J.D.Salinger
• “Beat Poets”
POST-MODERNISM/
CONTEMPORARY
WRITERS
CONTEMPORARY
• Sandra Cisneros
• Gary Soto
• Maya Angelou
• Alice Walker
• John Grisham
• Amy Tan
…and the rest is unwritten…