American Literary Periods
Literary Period
Romanticism
Timeframe
Mid-19th century
Transcendentalism
Mid-19th century
Realism
Mid- to late 19th
century
Regionalism
19th century
Naturalism
19th century
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Imagism
Early 20th century
The Lost Generation
1914-
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The Harlem Renaissance
Modernism
1920s
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1918-1945
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Characteristics
Feeling more important than reason
Importance of the individual
Elements of the supernatural
Appreciation of beauty of nature
Personal introspection
Offshoot of Romanticism
Self-reliance, non-conformism
Seeks sublime in ordinary
Seeks self-perfection
Desire to transcend above the ordinary
Pre- and post-Civil War
Rejects sentimentality
Represent true life experience, including
the way people really acted and spoke
Avoid flowery diction
Opposes Romanticism
Beginning of rise of women’s movement
Extension of Realism
Focus on local settings, customs, dialects
Extension of Realism
Dark themes: crime, poverty, prejudice,
etc.
Wants to understand scientific or
psychological reasons for behavior
Poetry movement
Use images as the things themselves
Willingness to play with forms
A phrase coined by Gertrude Stein but
made popular by Ernest Hemingway
Refers to the generation who lost fathers,
husbands, sons, and brothers in WWI
Feelings of aimlessness
Disillusioned by traditional American
values
Became expatriots, who left the US for
Europe, Mexico, and elsewhere (Paris was
a popular destination.)
Explosion of African-American visual arts,
dance, music, and literature
Primarily centered in Harlem, NY
Langston Hughes is a symbol of the period.
Period between the end of WW I and the
end of WW II
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Post Modernism
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1945-
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The Beat Movement
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1950s
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Gonzo Journalism
1970-
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Magical Realism
1960s
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Creative Nonfiction
Late 20th and early 21st
centuries
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Themes: Alienation and the loss of the
individual to the machine.
Influential historical context – Industrial
Revolution, mass immigration to US,
women’s rights, Great Depression
Begins with use of atomic bomb to end
WW II
Themes: alienation due to race, gender,
etc.; intolerance; political and social
oppression
Post-apocalyptic themes
Satire
The absurd
Anti-heroes
Rise of multiculturalism and diversity
Leaders were poet Allen Ginsberg and
novelist Jack Kerouac
Rejected mainstream American values
Embraced nonconformity and Eastern
philosophy
Forefather of the 1960s counter-culture
movement (Hippie Movement)
Any new kind of journalism where the
writer can be part of the story, blending
fact and fiction
Magical and supernatural elements appear
in otherwise realistic settings
Began in painting
Mostly associated with Latin American
writers
Blends elements of literature with
nonfiction
Includes memoir, travel and place essays,
personal narratives, etc.
Literary Timeline
Timeframe
800 – 400 BC
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250 BC – 150 AD
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450 – 1066
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1066 – 1500
Prominent Authors
WORLD LIT: Greeks – Homer (The Iliad and Odyssey), Sophocles
(Oedipus Rex and Antigone), Euripedes (Medea)
WORLD LIT: Romans – Vergil (The Aenid), Horace (poet and satirist),
Ovid (lyrical poet)
WORLD LIT: Haiku poetry in Japan
BRITISH LIT: Anglo-Saxon Period – Beowulf
WORLD LIT: Italian writers – Petrarch (sonnets), Dante Alighieri (The
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1500 – 1650: The
Renaissance
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1660 – 1785: The
Neoclassical Period
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1750 – 1800: The Age of
Reason / Revolutionary
Literature
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1785 – 1830: The
Romantic Period /
Romanticism
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1832 – 1901: The
Victorian Period
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Divine Comedy – Paradiso, Inferno, Purgatorio), Boccaccio (The
Decameron)
BRITISH LIT: Middle English Period – Geoffrey Chaucer (The
Canterbury Tales)
Historical Note: German Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing
press.
WORLD LIT: Spanish writer – Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
BRITISH LIT: Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe (Dr. Faustus), Ben
Jonson (satirical plays and lyric poetry), John Donne (metaphysical
conceits), Edmund Spencer (The Faerie Queen), Andrew Marvell (“To
His Coy Mistress”), John Milton (Paradise Lost)
WORLD LIT: French writers: Moliere (Tartuffe), Voltaire (Candide),
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (philosopher); German writer: Johann
Wolfgang van Goethe
BRITISH LIT: Alexander Pope (poetry), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe
and Moll Flanders), Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels and “A Modest
Proposal”), Samuel Johnson
AMERICAN LIT: Jonathan Edwards (Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God), Anne Bradstreet (poet)
Historical Notes: In British lit, this is the time period of the rise of the
novel. In American lit, the Puritans controlled writing and used a
plain style and viewed writing’s purpose as to instruct.
American Lit: Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine (Common Sense),
Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley (poet)
Historical Note: recognized by emerging nationalism, characterized
by philosophical, persuasive writing, speeches, pamphlets, and the
beginning of newspapers in America.
BRITISH LIT: William Blake (poet), William Wordsworth (poet),
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), Jane
Austen (novelist), Lord Byron (poet), Percy Bysshe Shelley (poet),
John Keats (poet), Alfred Lord Tennyson (poet), Mary Shelley
(Frankenstein)
AMERICAN LIT: Washington Irving (Rip Van Winkle), William Cullen
Bryant (Thanatopsis), James Fenmore Cooper (The Last of the
Mohicans)
WORLD LIT: Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen (A Doll’s House);
French writers – Victor Hugo (Les Miserables) and Gustave Flaubert
(Madame Bovary)
BRITISH LIT: Robert Browning (poet), Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(poet), Charles Dickens (Great Expectations), Charlotte Bronte (Jane
Eyre), Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights), William Makepeace
Thackeray (Vanity Fair), George Eliot (pen name of Marian Evans,
Middlemarch)
AMERICAN LIT: Henry James (novelist), Frederick Douglass (Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave), Harriet Jacobs
(Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), Paul Laurence Dunbar (Lyrics of a
Lowly Life)
1840 – 1860: American
Renaissance
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1855 – 1900: American
Realism / Regionalism
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1901 – 1914
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1919 – 1945:
Modernism
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1950 – : PostModernism
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TRANSCENDENTALISM and AMERICAN GOTHIC (dark Romantics):
Emily Dickinson (poet), Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Nathaniel
Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Herman Melville (Moby Dick), Edgar
Allen Poe (poems and short stories)
TRANSCENDENTALIST WRITERS: Ralph Waldo Emerson (essays and
aphorisms), Henry David Thoreau (Walden), Bronson Alcott,
Margaret Fuller (first major feminist writer)
AMERICAN LIT: Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemons; The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn), Bret Harte (regional writer), Stephen Crane (Red
Badge of Courage), Kate Chopin (The Awakening), Charlotte Perkins
Gilman (“The Yellow Wallpaper”)
BRITISH LIT (EDWARDIAN PERIOD): Joseph Conrad, Heart of
Darkness
AMERICAN LIT (NATURALISM): Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie), WEB
DuBois (The Souls of Black Folk), Jack London (The Call of the Wild),
Edith Wharton (Ethan Frome)
WORLD LIT: French writer, Albert Camus (The Stranger)
BRITISH LIT: George Orwell (born Eric Blair), Animal Farm and 1984
AMERICAN LIT: John Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of
Wrath), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God),
Langston Hughes (poet), Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie)
BRITISH LIT: William Golding, Lord of the Flies
AMERICAN LIT: JD Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye), Ralph Ellison
(African-American novelist, Invisible Man), Arthur Miller (playwright,
The Crucible and Death of a Salesman), Ray Bradbury (science fiction,
Fahrenheit 451), Eugene O’Neill (playwright, Long Day’s Journey Into
Night), Jack Kerouac (Beat writer, On the Road), Elie Wiesel
(Romanian-American, Night), Joseph Heller (Catch 22), John Knowles
(A Separate Peace), Ken Kesey (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest),
Sylvia Plath (poetry, The Bell Jar), Chaim Potok (Jewish-American, The
Chosen), Maya Angelou (African-American, I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings), Toni Morrison (African-American, The Bluest Eye),
Rudolfo Anaya (Mexican-American, Bless Me), Maxine Hong Kingston
(Asian-American, The Woman Warrior), Alice Walker (AfricanAmerican, The Color Purple), August Wilson (African-American
playwright, Fences and The Piano Lesson), Sandra Cisneros (HispanicAmerican, The House on Mango Street), Louise Erdrich (Native
American, Love Medicine), Amy Tan (Asian-American, The Joy Luck
Club)
Note – Ethnicities are included only to show the diversity of
American writing in the 20th and 21st centuries.