History of English and American Literature

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.

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE PERIODS:

 ANGLO SAXON PERIOD – Period of invasion (England)

 MIDDLE/DARK AGES – Period of Chivalry or
knighthood/Contributions of the priests (England)
 RENAISSANCE- period of rebirth a.k.a ELIZABETHAN
PERIOD
 PERIOD OF EXPLORATION (1620) Emigrants from England to
America landed in Massachusetts, known as New England
 NEOCLASSICAL PERIOD - Art should reflect the universal
commonality of human nature.
 ROMANTIC PERIOD- Emphasized individuality, intuition,
imagination, idealism, nature (as opposed to society & social
order).
 VICTORIAN ERA- Generally emphasized realistic portrayals of
common people, sometimes to promote social change.
 REALISTIC PERIOD – (in America) Sought to depict life as it
was, not idealized.
 EDWARDIAN PERIOD (IN ENGLAND) English people started
to threaten the Victorian theme
  MODERN PERIOD-new forms of communication competed with
books as sources of amusement and enlightenment.
 HARLEM RENAISSANCE –(America)Black Americans were
given an opportunity to publish their works
 POST-MODERN PERIOD- Literary works were analyzed by
scholars

ENGLISH LITERATURE
 literature produced in England, from the introduction of Old
English by the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century to the present.
 The works of those Irish and Scottish authors who are closely
identified with English life and letters are also considered part of
English literature.
AMERICAN LITERATURE
• Literary works, fiction and nonfiction of the American colonies
and the United States, written in the English language from about
1600 to the present.
• This literature captures America’s quest to understand and define
itself. From the beginning, America was unique in the diversity of
its inhabitants; over time they arrived from all parts of the world.
• Although English quickly became the language of America,
regional and ethnic dialects have enlivened and enriched the
country’s literature almost from the start.

Old English or Anglo-Saxon Era (450-1066)

• This period extends from about 450 to 1066, the year of the
Norman-French conquest of England.
• The Germanic tribes from Europe who overran England in the 5th
century, after the Roman withdrawal, brought with them the Old
English, or Anglo-Saxon, language, which is the basis of Modern
English.
• Few surviving texts with little in common.
• Language closer to modern German than modern English.
• Frequently reflect non-English influence.
• Beowulf, “The Wanderer” –famous Old English epic
• Much of Old English poetry was probably intended to be chanted,
with harp accompaniment, by the Anglo-Saxon scop, or bard.
• Prose in Old English is represented by a large number of religious
works.

Middle English (1066-1500)

• Extending from 1066 to 1485, this period is noted for the extensive
influence of French literature on native English forms and theme
• The Middle English literature of the 14th and 15th centuries is
much more diversified than the previous Old English literature.
• Works frequently of a religiously didactic content.
• Written for performance at court or for festivals.
• Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales) “The Cuckoo’s Song”,
mystery plays

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.
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).
• 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 (Gulliver’s Travels), Daniel
Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility,
Emma, Pride and Prejudice).
• America: Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard’s Almanack,
autobiography), Thomas Paine (“Common Sense”), Thomas
Jefferson (“The Declaration of Independence”), James Madison
(“The Constitution of the United States”).

Romantic Period England 1785-1830 ;America 1800-1860

• Reaction against the scientific rationality of Neoclassicism and the
Industrial Revolution
• Developed in Germany (Kant, Goethe).
• “I felt before I thought.” –Rosseau
• Emphasized individuality, intuition, imagination, idealism, nature
(as opposed to society & social order).
 • Elevation of the common man (folklore, myth).
• Mystery and the supernatural.
• Romantic literature everywhere developed, imagination was
praised over reason, emotions over logic, and intuition over
science—making way for a vast body of literature of great
sensibility and passion.
• This literature emphasized a new flexibility of form adapted to
varying content, encouraged the development of complex and fast-
moving plots, and allowed mixed genres (tragicomedy and the
mingling of the grotesque and the sublime) and freer style.
• No longer tolerated, for example, were the fixed classical
conventions, such as the famous three unities (time, place, and
action) of tragedy.
• 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).

In English poetry, for example, blank verse largely superseded the

rhymed couplet that dominated 18th- century poetry.

ROMANTIC THEMES
• LIBERTARIANISM-the desire to be free of convention and
tyranny, and the new emphasis on the rights and dignity of the
individual.
 • Political and social causes became dominant themes in romantic
poetry and prose throughout the Western world, producing many
vital human documents that are still pertinent.
• NATURE- Basic to such sentiments was an interest central to the
romantic movement: the concern with nature and natural
surroundings.
• NATURE- Delight in unspoiled scenery and in the (presumably)
innocent life of rural dwellers.
• THE LURE OF THE EXOTIC-In the spirit of their new freedom,
romantic writers in all cultures expanded their imaginary horizons
spatially and chronologically.
-They turned back to the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century) for
themes and settings and to the Asian setting of Xanadu evoked by
Coleridge in his unfinished lyric “Kubla Khan.

• THE SUPERNATURAL- The trend toward the irrational and the

supernatural was an important component of English and German
romantic literature
• It was reinforced on the one hand by disillusion with 18th-century
rationalism and on the other by the rediscovery of a body of older
literature—folktales and ballads—collected by Percy and by
German scholars Jacob and Wilhelm Karl Grimm and Danish
writer Hans Christian Andersen.
• From such material comes, for example, the motif of the
doppelgänger (German for “double”). Many romantic writers,
especially in Germany, were fascinated with this concept, perhaps
because of the general romantic concern with self-identity.
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).

Victorian Period (England 1832-1901)

• Named for the reign of Queen Victoria, Britain’s 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.
• The novel gradually became the dominant form in literature during
the Victorian Age.
• English literature throughout much of the century, the attention of
many writers was directed, sometimes passionately, to such issues
as the growth of English democracy, the education of the masses,
the progress of industrial enterprise and the consequent rise of a
materialistic philosophy, and the plight of the newly industrialized
worker.
 • Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Great
Expectations), George Eliot (Middlemarch), Thomas Hardy (Tess
of the D’Ubervilles), Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Rudyard Kipling (Jungle Book), Lewis
Carroll (Alice’s 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).

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).
• Realist literature is defined particularly as the fiction produced in
Europe and the United States from about 1840 until the 1890s,
when realism was superseded by naturalism. This form of realism
began in France in the novels of Gustave Flaubert and the short
stories of Guy de Maupassant.
• an attempt to describe human behavior and surroundings or to
represent figures and objects exactly as they act or appear in life.
 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.
• Naturalism (literature), in literature, the theory that literary
composition should be based on an objective, empirical
presentation of human being.
• 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).

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).

Modern Period (1914-1945)

During the 20th century a communications revolution that
introduced motion pictures, radio, and television brought the world
into view—and eventually into the living room. The new forms of
communication competed with books as sources of amusement and
enlightenment. New forms of communication and new modes of
transportation made American society increasingly mobile and
 familiar with many more regions of the country. Literary voices
from even the remotest corners could reach a national audience. At
the same time, American writers—particularly writers of fiction—
began to influence world literature.

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 text’s ambiguities and contradictions
revealed upon close reading.
• Some believe it leads directly to the counter-cultural revolution of
the 1960s.