PERIODS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

1
PERIODS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

• ?1650 present day

2
Pre-Colonial/ Native American ? 1600

• CHARACTERISTICS
• 1ST Americans
• Creation Origin Myths
• Legends
• Storytelling
• Oral Tradition

3
Pre-Colonial/ Native American

• Writers Works
• Earth on a Turtles Back

4
Colonial(Puritans Age of Reason)1600-1800

• CHARACTERISTICS
• PURITANS
• 1600-1700
• Sermons
• Personal Narratives
• Plain Style
• Authority of Bible church

5
Colonial(Puritans Age of Reason)1600-1800

• CHARACTERISTICS
• AGE OF REASON
• 1700-1800
• Political pamphlets
• Ornate Style
• Persuasive Writing
• Patriotism

6
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

7
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

8
ROMANTICISM1800-1860

• CHARACTERISTICS
• VALUE FEELING INTUITION OVER REASON
• IMAGINATION
• MYSTERY
• SLAVE NARRATIVES
• POETRY
• SHORT STORIES

9
ROMANTICISM

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

10
ROMANTICISM

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

11
TRANSCENDENTALISM/ Anti-Transcendentalism

• CHARACTERISTICS
• TRANSCENDENTALISM
• 1840-1860
• American Renaissance
• Self-Reliance
• Individualism
• Inner-Light
• Idealist
• Utopia
• Intuition

12
TRANSCENDENTALISM/ Anti-Transcendentalism

• CHARACTERISTICS
• ANTI-TRANSCENDENTALISM
• Dark Romanticism
• Symbolism
• Sin, Pain, Evil

13
TRANSCENDENTALISM/ ANTI-TRANSCENDENTALISM

• WRITERS
• TRANSCENDENTALISM
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• ANTI-TRANSCENDENTALISM
• Edgar Allan Poe

14
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

15
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

16
REALISM/ REGIONALISM/ NATURALISM

• WRITERS
• Walt Whitman
• Mark Twain
• Ambrose Bierce
• Stephen Crane
• Frederick Douglas
• Kate Chopin
• Edith Wharton
• Edwin Arlington Robinson

17
MODERNISM

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

18
MODERNISM

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

19
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.

20
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

21
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)

22
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

23
POST-MODERNISM/ CONTEMPORARY

• WRITERS
• Arthur Miller
• Toni Morrison
• Sylvia Plath
• J.D. Salinger
• Beat Poets
• Maya Angelou
• Alice Walker

24
and the rest is unwritten