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 Turtle’s 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
Person’s 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 man’s 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 20’s”
• Harlem Renaissance
• The Great Depression
• Karl Marx
• rise of youth culture
HARLEM RENAISSANCE 1920s
• 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.
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…