AMERICAN LITERARY PERIODS

Note: The names vary from source to source. The dates are blurred and overlapping.

THE COLONIAL PERIOD1607 (founding of Jamestown)-1765 The Age of Puritanism

Characterized primarily by religious writing, histories, and diaries. Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Anne Bradstreet

THE NEO-CLASSICAL PERIOD1765 (the stamp act)-1830 THE REVOLUTIONARY & NATIONALISTIC PERIOD, The Enlightenment, The Age of Reason
Characterized by pamphlets, essays, letters, patriotic poetry, histories, journals, diaries, and political writings. Ideals: order, concentration, economy, logic, utility, restrained emotion, accuracy, good taste, symmetry, design Literature judged in terms of its service to humanity.

Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, The Federalists

THE ROMANTIC PERIOD1830 (the 2nd Revolution of Jacksonian democracy)-1865 (end of the Civil War)
AKA: The American Naissance INCLUDES: The Transcendentalists Movement and The Flowering of New England The focus of literary subject matter becomes distinctively American though the literary technique remains European. A reaction to Neo-Classicism. The advent of the periodical opened the door for the advancement of the essay and short fiction. Poetry flourishes. Symbolic novels like those of Hawthorne and Melville emerge. ROMANTICISM: individualism, love of nature, sensibility, primitivism, sympathetic interest in the past, mysticism, unrestrained emotion, enthusiasm for the uncivilized and natural, interest in human rights and social reform, interest in emotional psychology, interest in freeing the writer from the restraints and rules of the classicists.

Longfellow, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whittier, Holmes, Whitman, Dickinson, James F. Cooper, Washington Irving, William C. Bryant, Edgar A. Poe

THE REALISTIC PERIOD1865-1918 (end of World War I)

A reaction to romanticism. Local color and REGIONALISM emerge. A period marked by The Industrial Revolution, Social Darwinism, The Populist Movement, and The Socialist Movement. REALISM: Most simplyfidelity to actuality in representation in literature. William Dean Howells defined is as the truthful treatment of material. Realism is a literary method as well as a political and philosophical attitude. The democratic ideals of the realists tended to make the value of the individual very high, and thus characterization, not plot, central to the work. NATURALISM: a deep interest in nature, the idea that the human being is an animal in the natural world responding to environmental forces and internal stresses and drive, based on the concept of scientific/biological determinism.

Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Edgar Lee Masters

THE MODERN PERIOD1918-1950 (end of World War II and advent of the Cold War)
INCLUDES: The Lost Generation, The Jazz Age, The Southern Renaissance, The Harlem Renaissance A reaction to Realism and Naturalism and the scientific postulates on which they rest. MODERNISM: a strong conscious break with traditional forms and techniques of expression implying historical discontinuity; a sense of alienation, loss, and despair; elevates the inner being over the social being; nonlinear chronology; ambiguity; collage of textual forms; varied POV; internal monologue and stream of consciousness. SYMBOLISM: details of the natural world and the actions of people are used to suggest philosophical ideas and themes. American drama comes of age.

Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, ONeill, Steinbeck, Eliot, Frost, Hughes, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams

THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD (POST-MODERN) PERIOD1950-present

The uncertainty, revolt, and cynicism of the age led many writers toward a private, largely asocial exploration of the self. Flannery OConnor, Carson McCullers, Ralph Ellison, J.D. Salinger, Ginsberg and the Beat Poets, Norman Mailer, Phillip Roth, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Sylvia Plath, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote.