Revolutionary Age

Colonial Period

William Bradford
John Winthrop
Cotton Mather
Benjamin Franklin
Anne Bradstreet

Revolutionary Age

Thomas Jefferson
Alexander Hamilton
James Madison
Thomas Paine

1775 - 1865: Early National Period

James Fenimore Cooper - 1789 - 1851

• The Leatherstocking Tales, including Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer, among his 32 novels

Edgar Allan Poe
William Cullen Bryant
Harriet Jacobs

Slave narratives:

Olaudah Equiano

Phillis Wheatley – (1753? - 1784)

• Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral (1773, London)
• First book published by an African
• Themes of Christian gift of salvation, pride in African-American achievements

Frederick Douglass - (1818 - 1895)

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
• My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
• Examples of American tales of the self-made man

Sojourner Truth - (1797 - 1883)

• Abolitionist
• An Account of an Experience With Discrimination (1865)

Paul Laurence Dunbar

1828 - 1865: Romantic Period in America (American Renaissance or Age of Transcendentalism)

Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1803 - 1832

• The center of American Transcendentalism
• Book Nature and various essays

Henry David Thoreau - 1817 - 1862

• A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1849)
• "Civil Disobedience" (1849)
• Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)

Edgar Allan Poe - 1809 - 1849

• Numerous short stories of the macabre
• Poetry, including "The Raven"
• Father of the detective story

Herman Mellville - 1819 - 1891

• Novels include Typee (1846), Moby Dick (1851), Billy Budd (1924, posthumous)
• "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853), T he Encantadas (1853), and "Benito Cereno" (1855)

Washington Irving - 1783 - 1859

• Several books of tales and satire
• The Tales of Alhambra, 1832, including "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Nathaniel Hawthorne - 1804 - 1864

• Novels - The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860)
• Over 100 stories, essays and sketches

Harriet Beecher Stowe
John Greenleaf Whittier
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Walt Whitman

American Romanticism stems from the English Romantic poets, such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Blake.

The major themes of American Romanticism are:

• intuition is more valid than reason
• experience is more important than universal principles
• man is at the center of the universe and God is the center of man
• man should seek harmony with nature where the supernatural can be sensed
• we should strive for idealism by changing the world into what it should be, rather than what it is
• passion, beauty, emotion are revered
• return to the "romantic" past, i.e., the Homeric & heroic era

Established principally by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his book Nature (1836)

Principles of Transcendentalism:

• all objects are miniature versions of the universe
• intuition and conscience "transcend" experience and reason
• man is one with nature
• God is everywhere, in nature and in man
• extension of Romanticism

1865 - 1914: Realistic Period - Naturalistic Period

Mark Twain - (Samuel L. Clemens): 1835 - 1910

• Journalist & Humorist - Realist & Regional writer
• Tom Sawyer (1876)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
• Novels, Short Stories & Essays

William Dean Howells - 1837 - 1920

• Most vocal advocate of anti-Romantic realism
• The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
• Editha (1905)

Henry James - 1843 - 1916

• Most influential Realist in British & American Lit.
• International themes
• The Americans (1877)
• Portrait of a Lady (1881)
• Short stories, including "The Turn of the Screw" and "Daisy Miller"

Bret Harte
Sarah Orne Jewett
Stephen Crane - 1871 - 1900

• Realism & Naturalism
• Like Twain, a journalist
• Maggie, Girl of the Streets (1893)
• The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
• Short stories, including "The Open Boat" and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"

Ezra Pound
Emily Dickinson
Frank Norris - 1870 - 1902

• Mixture of Naturalism & Romanticism
• McTeague (1899)
• The Octopus (1901)
• Short stories

Jack London - 1876 - 1916

• Naturalism, mostly from personal experience
• The Call of the Wild (1903)
• The Sea Wolf (1904)
• White Fang (1906)
• Many short stories, including "To Build a Fire," etc.

Theodore Dreiser

The dominant literary style of prose fiction from 1865 to 1900 departs from the nostalgic and idealized life of the Romantics.

The major themes of American Realism are:

• setting is generally the here-and-now
• much of the writing stems from a journalistic documentary style (period of "Yellow Journalism")
• often Regional with local dialect
• characters contend with ethical problems
• psychological overtones (Henry James)
• plausible and everyday experiences
• characters are rooted in social classes

Often included within Realism and Naturalism to indicate literature that is regional in narration and/or dialect. Regional writing is not necessarily associated with a historical period, and extends to present day as a style of fiction.

Characteristics of Regionalism:

• characters speak in the local dialect
• often associated with southern writers like Twain, Chopin, and William Faulkner, et. al.
• setting is a particular "region" of the country where local customs and traditions are an integral part of the story
• present day - not futuristic or historical

An offshoot of Realism, Naturalism shares some of its principles.

Principles of Naturalism:

• Nature dwarfs the individual who has no control over it
• characterized by a pessimistic world-view
• people are less individual than a part of a "class"
• Our fate is not in our hands so everything depends on how we cope (everything is a test of character)
• Nature is "indifferent" and we have only each other (God is not a factor)
• the lessons of life are hard and whining is not allowed
  * Dr. Paul Douglass, professor, English 68B handout, San Jose State University

1914 - 1939: Modern Period - Jazz Age - Harlem Renaissance

Edgar Lee Masters
Ezra Pound
Edwin Arlington Robinson
William Carlos Williams
Robert Frost
Carl Sandburg
Wallace Stevens
Robinson Jeffers
Marianne Moore
T.S. Eliot
Edna St. Vincent Millay
E.E. Cummings
Amy Lowell
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Edith Wharton
Sinclair Lewis
Willa Cather
Gertrude Stein
Sherwood Anderson
John Dos Passos
F. Scott Fitzgerald (jazz age) - (1896 - 1940)

• 1920's The Jazz Age
• Glamor, "conspicuous consumption," personal experiences
• The Great Gatsby (1925)
• Tender Is the Night (1934)
• Succumbed to alcoholism

William Faulkner - (1897 - 1962)

• Regional: Mississippi
• Dense, experimental style: "stream of consciousness"
• The Sound and the Fury (1929)
• Themes: Truths and conflicts of the heart, glamorous Southern past as an illusion
• Anti-slavery, harmony with nature

Ernest Hemingway - (1899 - 1961)

• Modern world stripped of illusion, psychologically and physically dangerous, living beneath the shadow of moral ruin
• simple diction, sentence structure
• Themes: Love and its loss, death and its avoidance
• grace under pressure, conformity to an ethical code
• Numerous novels and short stories
• 1954 Nobel prize for The Old Man and the Sea

Thomas Wolfe - (1900 - 1938)

• Romantic quest for self-knowledge, based on autobiography and invention
• Look Homeward Angel (1929)
• Novels and short stories

John Steinbeck - (1902 - 1968)

• Depression era success (1930s)
• Literary naturalist
• Subjects are poor, uneducated, struggling with prejudice, social attitudes, injustice
• Of Mice and Men (1937)
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
• Local writer (Salinas)
• Nobel prize 1962

Eugene O'Neill
H.L. Mencken

Harlem Renaissance:

Langston Hughes
Countee Cullen
Jean Toomer
W.E.B. DuBois
James Baldwin - (1924 - 1987)

• Journalist, spokesman for African-Americans, conscience of America
• Themes: Social injustice, struggle of blacks for self-realization, anti-separatism
• Naturalistic realism
• Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

Etc.

Modernism was an international literary/art movement lasting from the turn of the century to around 1950. The movement involves a rejection of tradition and a hostile attitude toward the immediate past.

The major characteristics of Modernism are:

• movement away from Romanticism and Naturalism
• expresses the irrational workings of the unconscious
• stream of consciousness characterizations
• characters contend with ethical problems
• Movement to cultural relativism
• Imagistic and precision in language
• Was:
• Analytical
• Experimental
• Cultural relativism, anthropological (Eliot)
• Resort to mythological references
• Precision of language, spare, imagery
• Irrational workings of the unconscious mind
• Stream of consciousness

Post-Modernism challenged the philosophy of art and literature since about the 1960s.

Characteristics of Post-Modernism:

• reaction against an ordered view of the world
• eclectic writing style, often using parody
• development of such concepts as the absurd, the anti-hero, antinovel, magic realism
• proliferation of critical theories such as deconstructionism

1939 -: Contemporary Period

Vladimir Nabokov
Eudora Welty
Robert Penn Warren
Bernard Malamud
Saul Bellow
Norman Mailer
John Updike
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Thomas Pynchon
John Barth
E.L. Doctorow
Marianne Moore
Theodore Roethke
Elizabeth Bishop
Robert Lowell
Allen Ginsberg (Beat Generation)
Adrienne Rich
Sylvia Plath
Thornton Wilder
Arthur Miller
Tennessee Williams
Edward Albee
African American writers:
Ralph Ellison
Zora Neal Hurston
Alice Walker
James Baldwin
Richard Wright
Gwendolyn Brooks
LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka)
Toni Morrison
Etc.

Contemporary: Cultural Diversity in American Literature: Post - 1945

Literature began to deal with political and social issues. With the women's liberation movement of the 1970s, criticism came from feminit, gay, African-American, Native-American, an Marxist cultures and philosophies.

• Increase in genre literature
• Experimental styles
• Non-traditional (anything goes)
• Emphasis on cultural diversity - ethnic novelists, poets

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