American Literature

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American Literature
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Native American

• Dates very unclear, usually before European
  Settlers
• Form typically myths

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Puritan

• Dates 1472-1750
• Form Non-fiction, usually histories, journals,
  personal poems, sermons, and diaries.
• utilitarian, very personal, or religious.
• strongly influenced by Puritan ideals and values.
  
• Authors Jonathan Edwards, William Bradford,
  Cotton Mather, Anne Bradstreet.

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Enlightenment (Revolutionary)

• Dates 1750-1800
• Form political writings
• Genre documents, speeches, and letters.
• Authors Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas
  Jefferson, Patrick Henry
• There is a lack of emphasis and dependence on
  the Bible and more use of common sense (logic)
  and science.
• Not a divorce from the Bible but an adding to or
  expanding of the truths found there.

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Romanticism

• Dates 1800-1840
• Form fiction
• Followed the British Romantic Period with a focus
  on fancy, imagination, emotion, nature,
  individuality, and exotica.
• Change from personal and political documents to
  entertaining ones.
• Authors Cooper, Poe, Thoreau, Emerson,
  Dickinson, Hawthorne, and Melville.
• Romanticism is particularly evident in the works
  of the New England Transcendentalists.

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Transcendentalism

• Dates 1840-1855
• Primarily based in New England,
• A philosophical movement
• intuition and the individual conscience
  transcend experience and therefore are better
  guides to truth than are the senses and logical
  reason
• respected the individual spirit and the natural
  world, believing that divinity was present
  everywhere, in nature and in each person
• Authors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David
  Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, W.H. Channing, Margaret
  Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody.

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Transcendentalism
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Transcendentalism (sub)

• Anti-Transcendentalist (Hawthorne and Melville)
• Fireside poets (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John
  Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James
  Russell Lowell, and William Cullen Bryant) wrote
  about more practical aspects of life such as
  dying and patriotism.

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Realism

• Dates 1865-1915
• Realism is the presentation of actual life
  problems and events as opposed to the imagined or
  the fanciful.
• truthfully and objectively portray ordinary
  characters in ordinary situations.
• reacted against Romanticism, rejecting heroic,
  adventurous, unusual, or unfamiliar subjects.
• Authors Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, Ambrose
  Bierce, Mark Twain, O. Henry and Henry James

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Realism
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Realism (sub)

• Naturalism - tended to view people as hapless
  victims of immutable natural laws. People were
  the victims of heredity and environment.
• Authors Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Theodore
  Dreiser.

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Realism (sub)

• Regionalism the tendency among certain authors
  to write about specific geographical areas.
• Present the distinct culture of an area,
  including its speech, customs, beliefs, and
  history.
• Authors William Faulkner, Kate Chopin and Willa
  Cather

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Modernism

• Dates 1915-1946
• An age of disillusionment and confusion (look at
  our history!)
• Raised all the great questions of lifebut
  offered no answers.
• Authors Faulkner, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald,
  Hemingway, and Frost.

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Modernism
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Modernism (sub)

• Harlem Renaissance
• Dates 1920s
• African American artistic creativity centered in
  Harlem, in New York City.
• Authors Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean
  Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemps.

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Contemporary

• Dates 1946 present
• Forms you name it!!!
• Style undefined (usually done in retrospect)
• Authors King, Miller, Morrison, Salinger, Plath,
  Ginsberg, Kerouac, Palahnuik, Dillard