An Overview

1
Major Periods of English American Literature

• An Overview

2
What is meant by period?

• A period is a dominant mode, style, or type of
  literature within a specific historical context.
• A period is usually indicative of the controlling
  philosophical perspective of the time.
• As such, periods are not generally confined to
  the literature of the time rather, their
  characteristics can be seen in other art forms as
  well as non-literary texts.
• Dates are approximations.

3
Old English (450-1066)

• Few surviving texts with little in common.
• Language closer to modern German than modern
  English.
• Frequently reflect non-English influence.
• Beowulf, The Wanderer

4
Middle English (1066-1500)

• Works frequently of a religiously didactic
  content.
• Written for performance at court or for
  festivals.
• Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales)
• The Cuckoos Song, mystery plays

5
English Renaissance (1500-1660)

• Influence of Aristotle, Ovid, and other
  Greco-Roman thinkers, as well as science and
  exploration.
• Primarily texts for public performance (plays,
  masques) and some books of poetry.
• William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben
  Jonson, Francis Bacon, John Fletcher, Francis
  Beaumont.

6
Neoclassical Period(Enlightenment/Age of Reason)

• England 1660-1785 America 1750-1800
• Reaction to the expansiveness of the Renaissance
  in the direction of order and restraint.
• Developed in France (Moliere, Rousseau,
  Voltaire).
• Emphasized classical ideals of rationality and
  control (human nature is constant through time).
• Art should reflect the universal commonality of
  human nature. (All men are created equal.)
• Reason is emphasized as the highest faculty
  (Deism).

7
Neoclassical Period (cont.)

• Writing should be well structured, emotion should
  be controlled, and emphasize qualities like wit.
• England John Locke, John Milton (Paradise Lost),
  Alexander Pope (Essay on Man), Jonathon Swift
  (Gullivers Travels), Henry Fielding (Tom Jones),
  Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Jane Austen
  (Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Pride and
  Prejudice).
• America Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richards
  Almanack, autobiography), Thomas Paine (Common
  Sense), Thomas Jefferson (The Declaration of
  Independence), James Madison (The Constitution
  of the United States).

8
Romantic Period

• England 1785-1830 America 1800-1860
• Reaction against the scientific rationality of
  Neoclassicism and the Industrial Revolution.
• Developed in Germany (Kant, Goethe).
• Emphasized individuality, intuition, imagination,
  idealism, nature (as opposed to society social
  order).
• Elevation of the common man (folklore, myth).
• Mystery and the supernatural.

9
Romantic Period (cont.)

• England Robert Burns (To a Mouse), William
  Blake (Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience),
  William Wordsworth (Lyrical Ballads, Tintern
  Abbey, Intimations of Immortality, I Wandered
  Lonely as a Cloud), Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla
  Kahn), Lord Byron (Don Juan), Percy Bysshe
  Shelley (Ozymandias), Mary Wollstonecraft
  Shelley (Frankenstein), John Keats (Ode on a
  Grecian Urn), Sir Walter Scott (Ivanhoe).

10
Romantic Period (cont.)

• America Washington Irving (Rip Van Winkle,
  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow), Edgar Allan Poe
  (The Raven, Tales of the Grotesque and
  Arabesque, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The
  Philosophy of Composition), James Fennimore
  Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans), Herman
  Melville (Moby-Dick, Billy Budd), Nathaniel
  Hawthorne (Twice-Told Tales, The Scarlet Letter),
  William Cullen Bryant (To a Waterfowl), Oliver
  Wendell Holmes (The Chambered Nautilus), Henry
  Wadsworth Longfellow (Paul Reveres Ride),
  James Russell Lowell (The First Snowfall).

11
Romantic Period (cont.)

• American Transcendentalism (Romantic philosophy)
• Named for the core belief that our spiritual
  nature transcends rationality and religious
  doctrine thus, it is found in intuition.
• Developed in New England, influenced by Eastern
  philosophy.
• Pro-suffrage abolitionist.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature, The American
  Scholar), Henry David Thoreau (Walden, Civil
  Disobedience), Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass).

12
Victorian Period (England 1832-1901)

• Named for the reign of Queen Victoria, Britains
  longest reigning monarch.
• Period of stability and prosperity for Britain.
• British society extremely class conscious.
• Literature seen as a bridge between Romanticism
  and Modernism.
• Generally emphasized realistic portrayals of
  common people, sometimes to promote social
  change.
• Some writers continue to explore gothic themes
  begun in Romantic Period.

13
Victorian Period (cont.)

• Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, Oliver Twist,
  Great Expectations), George Eliot (Middlemarch),
  Thomas Hardy (Tess of the DUbervilles), Robert
  Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
  and Mr. Hyde), Rudyard Kipling (Jungle Book),
  Lewis Carroll (Alices Adventures in Wonderland),
  Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre), Emily Brontë
  (Wuthering Heights), Alfred, Lord Tennyson (In
  Memoriam), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets
  from the Portuguese), Robert Browning (My Last
  Duchess), Matthew Arnold (Dover Beach), Oscar
  Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest).

14
Realistic Period (America 1860-1914)

• Reaction against Romantic values (Civil War).
• Developed in France (Balzac, Flaubert, Zola).
• Emphasized the commonplace and ordinary (as
  opposed to the romanticized individual).
• Sought to depict life as it was, not idealized.
• Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn),
  Ambrose Bierce (An Occurrence at Owl Creek
  Bridge), William Dean Howells (A Modern
  Instance), Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie).

15
Realistic Period (cont.)

• Naturalism hyper-realism
• Named for the belief that man is simply a higher
  order animal, and thus under the same natural
  constraints and limitations as other animals.
• Controlled by heredity and environment.
• Stephen Crane (Maggie A Girl of the Street, The
  Red Badge of Courage), Jack London (To Build a
  Fire), Upton Sinclair (The Jungle).

16
Edwardian Period (England 1901-1914)

• Named for King Edward.
• Some see as a continuation of Victorian Period
  however, the status quo is increasingly
  threatened.
• Distinction between literature and popular
  fiction.
• Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness), H.G.
  Wells (War of the Worlds), E.M. Forster (A Room
  with a View, A Passage to India), George Bernard
  Shaw (Major Barbara), A.C. Bradley (Shakespearean
  Tragedy).

17
Modern Period (1914-1945)

• Reaction against the values which led to WWI.
• Influenced by Schopenhauer (negation of the
  will), Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil),
  Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling), as well as
  Darwin and Marx.
• If previous values are invalid, art is a tool to
  establish new values (Pound Make it new).
• Writers experiment with form.
• Form and content reflect the confusion and
  vicissitudes of modern life.
• Expositions and resolutions are omitted themes
  are implied rather than stated.

18
Modern Period (cont.)

• Poetry
• Ezra Pound (The Fourth Canto), T.S. Eliot
  (Prufrock and other Observations, The Waste Land,
  The Hollow Men), W.B. Yeats (The Wanderings of
  Oisin and Other Poems, The Swans at Coole), H.D.
  (Pear Tree), Wallace Stevens (Harmonium),
  William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow,
  This Is Just to Say), Robert Frost (Mending
  Wall, The Road Not Taken).

19
Modern Period (cont.)

• Fiction
• James Joyce (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist
  as a Young Man), Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis,
  The Trial, The Castle), Ernest Hemingway (In Our
  Time, The Sun Also Rises), William Faulkner (As I
  Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury), F. Scott
  Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), John Steinbeck
  (The Grapes of Wrath), Thornton Wilder (Our Town,
  The Bridge at San Luis Rey), D.H. Lawrence (The
  Rainbow), Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway, To the
  Lighthouse).

20
Post-Modern Period (1945-?)

• Critical dispute over whether an actual period or
  a renewal and continuation Modernism post-WWII.
• Influenced by Freud, Sartre, Camus, Derrida, and
  Foucault.
• Deconstruction Text has no inherent meaning
  meaning derives from the tension between the
  texts ambiguities and contradictions revealed
  upon close reading.
• Some believe it leads directly to the
  counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s.

21
Post-Modern Period (cont.)

• Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Gabriel
  Garcia Marques (One Hundred Years of Solitude),
  William Burroughs (Naked Lunch), J.D. Salinger (A
  Catcher in the Rye), Kurt Vonnegut
  (Slaughterhouse Five), Thomas Pynchon (Gravitys
  Rainbow), John Updike (Rabbit Run), Phillip Roth
  (Portnoys Complaint, American Pastoral), J.M.
  Coetzee (Life Times of Michael K), Joyce Carol
  Oates (Where Are You Going, Where Have You
  Been?), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaidens Tale),
  Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian), Allen Ginsberg
  (Howl and Other Poems), Charles Bukowski (The
  Last Night of the Earth Poems).