Annotated Timeline of Annotated Timeline of The American The American

Literary MovementLiterary Movement

Annotated Timeline of Annotated Timeline of The American The American

Literary MovementLiterary MovementMrs. JamisonMrs. Jamison

Harrison High SchoolHarrison High School

American Literature Overview1. Puritan/Colonial (1650-1750)2. Revolutionary/Age of Reason

(1750-1800) 3. Romanticism (1800-1860)4. American Renaissance/

Transcendentalism (1840-1860)5. Realism (1855-1900)6. The Moderns (1900-1950) 7. Harlem Renaissance (1920s) 8. Post-Modernism (1950 to present)9. Contemporary (1970s-Present)

Puritan/Colonial Period (1650-1750)

OVERVIEW OF PURITAN/COLONIAL PERIOD

• Genre/Style: Sermons, religious tracts, diaries, personal narratives, religious poems.

• Effect/Aspects: Instructive, reinforces authority of the Bible and the church. Very little imaginative literature was produced.

• Historical Context: Puritan settlers fled England where they were being persecuted for their religious beliefs, and came to New England to have religious freedom.

Puritan/Colonial Period (1650-1750)

• Anne Bradstreet– She was the first North American to

publish a book of poems, the first Woman and the first Puritan in North America to publish! Born and educated in England, Anne Bradstreet was the daughter of an earl's estate manager.

– Anne married Simon Bradstreet when she was just 16! Two years later she and her husband left Europe and moved to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

– Her writing is characterized by the Puritan Plain Style (short words, direct statements, and references to ordinary, everyday objects and events).

Puritan/Colonial Period (1650-1750)Cotton Mather

– No timeline of American colonial literature would be complete without mentioning Cotton Mather, the master scholar. Third in the four-generation Mather dynasty of Massachusetts Bay, he wrote at length of New England in over 500 books and pamphlets.

Literary Terms • Allegory: A story or visual image with a

distinct second meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visual meaning.

• Alliteration: The repetition of the same sounds – usually initial consonant sounds of words – in any sequence of neighboring words.

• Allusion: An indirect of passing reference to some event, person, place or artistic work, the nature and relevance of which is not explained to the writer.

Literary Terms • Anapaest – A metrical foot made up of

two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable.

• Apostrophe – The speaker addressed a dead or absent person, or an abstraction or inanimate object.

• Beat Writers – a group of writers in the 1950’s Led by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. (Spontaneous self expression and recitation to jazz accompaniment).

Puritan/Colonial Period (1650-1750)

Edward Taylor – Taylor was a Puritan through and

through. His every action proved it. He was born in England, and left for Massachusetts in his early twenties, attended Harvard College in preparation for the ministry, and spent the remaining 58 years of his life in a town 100 miles west of Boston. It was in the wilderness, and he served there as both minister and town physician.

Puritan/Colonial Period (1650-1750)

Fundamental Puritan Beliefs: – Taylor believed:

– Sinfulness and damnation of man

– Salvation for an elect few

– Redeeming grace of omnipotent God

– He wanted a church that was purified of all Roman Catholic and Anglican embellishments

– He, along with other educated men of his time, believed in evil spirits, devils, and witches.

Revolutionary Period/Age of Reason (1750-1800)

Overview of Revolutionary Period/Age of Reason

• Genre/Style: Political Pamphlets, Travel Writing, and highly ornate persuasive writing.

• Effect/Aspects: Patriotism and pride grows, creates unity about issues, and creates American character.

• Historical Context: Encouraged Revolutionary War support.

Revolutionary Period/Age of

Reason (1750-1800) Benjamin Franklin

– Benjamin Franklin, “practical yet idealistic, hard-working and enormously successful,” was a second-generation immigrant who lived in Boston Massachusetts. Writer, printer, publisher, scientist, philanthropist, and diplomat, Mr. Franklin was the most famous and respected private figure of his time. He was the first great self-made man in America, a poor democrat born in an aristocratic age that he helped to loosen up through his excellent example.

Abigail Adams (1744-1818)

• She wrote letters that campaigned for women’s rights. Her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, published The Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail During the Revolution, which were just what they said they were, letters written by Abigail and her husband.

Age of Reason

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

• Jefferson is best known for writing the Declaration of Independence, the document came about as people started thinking for themselves and realized they wanted to be free from England’s rule.

Age of Reason

Patrick Henry

•Speech at the Virginia Convention – “Give me Liberty of Give me Death”

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) Paine wrote mostly

pamphlets that would spur ideas and immediate action. In the document "The American Crisis," Paine wrote about the oppression that America suffered from Britain, and propelled America into a war with Britain.

Age of Reason

RomanticismRomanticism 1800-1850 1800-1850

After the “Age of Reason” came to an After the “Age of Reason” came to an end, the people of America were tired end, the people of America were tired of reality; they wanted to see life as of reality; they wanted to see life as more than it was. This was the Era of more than it was. This was the Era of Romantics. The main medium that Romantics. The main medium that presented itself at that time were presented itself at that time were short stories, poems, and novels. short stories, poems, and novels. During this era, as appose to the “Age During this era, as appose to the “Age of Reason” the imagination of Reason” the imagination dominated; intuition ruled over fact. dominated; intuition ruled over fact.

Gothic literature was also introduced Gothic literature was also introduced at this time, which is a sub-genre of at this time, which is a sub-genre of Romanticism, this genre included Romanticism, this genre included stories about characters that had both stories about characters that had both good and evil traits. Gothic literature good and evil traits. Gothic literature also incorporated to use of also incorporated to use of supernatural elements.supernatural elements.

  

Authors of the

Romanticism

Washington Irving

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Edgar Allen Poe

Herman Melville

Romanticism

•Genre/Style: Character Sketches, Slave Narratives, Poetry, and short stories.

•Characteristics: High regard for inner feelings, imagination over reason, optimism, hopes for a better tomorrow, love for nature.

•Historical Context: Publishing expands and industrial revolution brings new ideas.

• Expansion of US through Louisiana Purchase, Monroe Doctrine Keeps Europeans out of North and South America, Cherokee Indians forced to march the “Trail of Tears”.

Romanticism

Washington Irving (1789-1851)

• Irving was the first “famous” American author; he’s also known as the “Father of American Literature.” He wrote travel books, short stories, and satires. Some of his works include; Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, and Devil and Tom Walker.

Romanticism

RomanticismHerman Melville

– Herman Melville was a descendant of an old, wealthy family that fell suddenly into poverty upon the death of the father. In spite of his aristocratic upbringing, proud family traditions, and hard work, Melville found himself in poverty with no college education.

– At 19 he went to sea. His interest in sailors' lives grew naturally out of his own experiences, and most of his early novels grew out of his voyages.

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

• In his time Melville was not entirely recognized, however, in the more recent years he has been considered one of the most top rated novelist of all time. He is most well known for his epic novel Moby Dick.

Romanticism (1800-1860)

Edgar Allan Poe

– Edgar Allan Poe was a southerner with a darkly metaphysical vision mixed with elements of realism, parody, and burlesque (caricature or parody).

– He refined the short story genre and created detective fiction.

– Many of his stories foreshadow the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy so popular today.

Edgar Allen PoePoe had an unpleasant childhood that made him despise the world, and his works reflected his work. He is credited for creating the modern short story, and the detective story. He also challenged two long-standing theories, one, a poem had to be long, and two, a poem had to teach you something. Some of his works include, "The Raven", "Bells", “The Fall of the House of Usher", and "Dream."

Romanticism

• Poe believed that strangeness was an essential ingredient of beauty

• His stories and poems are populated with doomed, introspective aristocrats (Poe, like many other southerners, cherished an aristocratic ideal).

• These gloomy characters never seem to work or socialize; instead they bury themselves in dark, moldering castles symbolically decorated with bizarre rugs and draperies that hide the real world of sun, windows, walls, and floors.

• Hidden rooms reveal ancient libraries, strange art works, and eclectic oriental objects. The aristocrats play musical instruments or read ancient books while they brood on tragedies, often the deaths of loved ones. Themes of death-in-life, especially being buried alive or returning like a vampire from the grave, appear in many of his works, including "The Premature Burial," "Ligeia," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Fall of the House of Usher."

• Gothic settings are not merely decorative. They reflect the over civilized yet deathly interior of his characters disturbed psyches. They are symbolic expressions of the unconscious, and thus are central to his art.

Nathaniel HawthorneNathaniel Hawthorne, a fifth-generation American of English descent, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a wealthy seaport north of Boston that specialized in East India trade. One of his ancestors had been a judge in an earlier century, during trials in Salem of women accused of being witches. Hawthorne used the idea of a curse on the family of an evil judge in his novel The House of the Seven Gables.

Romanticism

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Romanticism

• Many of Hawthorne's stories are set in Puritan New England

• The Scarlet Letter (1850), has become the classic portrayal of Puritan America. It tells of the passionate, forbidden love affair linking a sensitive, religious young man and the sensuous, beautiful townsperson, Hester Prynne.

• Set in Boston around 1650, the novel highlights the Calvinistic obsession with morality, sexual repression, guilt and confession, and spiritual salvation.

Nathaniel Hawthorne•For its time, The Scarlet Letter was a daring and even subversive book. Hawthorne's gentle style, remote historical setting, and ambiguity softened his grim themes and contented the general public, but sophisticated writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville recognized the book's "hellish" power. It treated issues that were usually suppressed in 19th-century America, such as the impact of the new, liberating democratic experience on individual behavior, especially on sexual and religious freedom.•The book is superbly organized and beautifully written. Appropriately, it uses allegory, a technique the early Puritan colonists themselves practiced.

Romanticism

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Enjoyed a long career as a poetHis poetry was optimistic and sentimentalHe became known as one of the “Fireside Poets”

Romanticism

Writers of the Romantic Period (and their works)

• William Cullen Bryant – Thanatopsis• Edgar Allen Poe – “Fall of the House of

Usher”• Nathanial Hawthorne – The Minister’s Black

Veil• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – “A Psalm of

Life”• James Russell Lowell – “The First Snowfall”• John Greenleaf Whittier – “Snowbound”

TranscendentalismTranscendentalism1840-18551840-1855

This movement pushed America from the elaborate and fantasy like writings displayed in the period Romanticism, into a period of literature that stressed individualism, confidence, non-conformity and self-reliance. It also stressed the fundamental idea of a unity between God and the world (Emerson’s “Over-Soul”), that each person was a microcosm for the world.

This period in literature, which was invented by Emerson and carried on by Thoreau, lasted a relatively short time (about a decade).

Authors of the Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

Walt Whitman

[Sarah] Margaret Fuller

American Renaissance/Transcendentalism

• Genre/Style: Poetry, Short Stories, and Novels.

• Historical Context: Publication of Emerson Publishes Nature, which defines Transcendental beliefs

• Happiness comes through individualism and self-reliance

• Reverence for Nature

American Renaissance/ Transcendentalism

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow– One of the most important Boston

poets was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow, a professor of modern languages at Harvard, was the best-known American poet of his day. He was responsible for the misty, historical, legendary sense of the past that joined American and European traditions.

American Renaissance/ Transcendentalism

• Walt Whitman– Born on Long Island, New York, Walt

Whitman was a part-time carpenter, whose brilliant, pioneering work expressed the country's democratic spirit. Whitman was mostly self-taught, he left school at the age of 11 to go to work. His Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains "Song of Myself," the most amazingly original poem ever written by an American.

Realism Realism 1865-19151865-1915

This literary movement took place during the This literary movement took place during the Civil War; at a time when a war and people Civil War; at a time when a war and people wanted to see things how they were, so wanted to see things how they were, so Realism Realism came about.came about.

Realism also came about as a reaction to Realism also came about as a reaction to Romanticism, in which there were heroic Romanticism, in which there were heroic characters, and adventures, with strange and characters, and adventures, with strange and unfamiliar settings. In response Realism unfamiliar settings. In response Realism authors tried to write truthfully and authors tried to write truthfully and objectively about ordinary characters in objectively about ordinary characters in ordinary situations.ordinary situations.

Characteristics of Realism• Expression of life as it is actually lived• Factual description of ordinary characters and

events rather than larger than life heroes in imagined settings

• Subject matter often consists of factories, slums, workers, bosses, criminals, and social outcasts

• Regionalism or local color. Focus on dialect, customs, and characters of a particular region

• Examples: Walt Whitman Song of Myself, Frederick Douglas, My Bondage, and My Freedom, Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, Kate Chopin, Story of an Hour.

Realism (1855-1900)•Genre/Style: Novels, Short Stories,

Objective Narrator, and does not tell reader how to interpret the story.

•Effect/Aspects: Social and Aesthetic realism.

•Historical Context: Civil War brought demand for a more true type of literature.

Realism (1855-1900)• Mark Twain

– Ernest Hemingway's well-known statement, that all of American literature comes from one great book: Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; shows Twain’s high place in the tradition.

– Twain's style, based on strong, realistic, everyday American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation for their national voice.

• Emily Dickinson Poems• Bret Harte “Outcasts of Poker Flat”

Realism (1855-1900)• Stephen Crane

– Wrote The Red Badge of Courage

– Realism is often called "the faithful representation of reality”, and Crane writes about the war as if he were there, even though he never saw battle.

Realism (1855-1900)• Jack London

– Jack London was a poor, self-taught worker from California. He became instantly famous from his first collection of stories, The Son of the Wolf (1900), set mainly in the Klondike region of Alaska and the Canadian Yukon.

Modernism

1915-1946

Modernism is one of the most experimental types of writing styles. Modernist authors used fragments, stream of consciousness, and interior dialogue. The main thing that authors were trying to achieve with Modernism was a unique style that would stand out.

During this period Technology was taking incredible leaps and two World Wars took place. The younger generation began to take over the main stage, and many of them protested what was going on in the world.

Authors of the Modernism

Ernest Hemingway

F. Scott Fitzgerald

John Steinbeck

Robert Frost

The Moderns (1900-1950)

• Genre/Style: Novels, Plays, Poetry, experiments in writing styles, interior monologue, and stream of consciousness.

• Effect/Aspects: Pursuit of American Dream, Admiration for America, Optimism, and Individual Importance.

• Historical Context: Writers reflected the ideas of Darwin and Karl Marx, during WWI and WWII.

Modernism – 1918 – Present (Historical Context)

• Time of Prohibition of alcoholic beverages

• 1929 – stock market crash• 1930 – 1940 – Great Depression• 1941 – Japanese bombing of Pearl

Harbor; United States enters World War II.

• 1954 – Segregation in public schools becomes illegal.

Modernism – 1918 – Present (Historical Context)

• 1963 – President John F. Kennedy assassinated

• 1968 – Martin Luther King, civil rights leader, murdered in Memphis; Vietnam war accelerates

• 1969 – American Neil Armstrong becomes the first person to land on the moon

• 1972 – Vietnam peace treaty signed• 1974 – President Richard Nixon resigns from

office• 1980 – Ronald Reagan elected President of

United States.

Modernism – Characteristics • Opposition to dehumanizing trends in modern life• Dignity of people in spite of great challenges• Short stories with a more open form that stress

mood and character rather than plot• Loss of idealism due to war, industrialization,

political changes• Experimental forms of poetry such as free verse

(irregular and/or unrhymed verse lines) and symbols that suggest meaning and moods.

• Imagist – short poems with sharp, precise images.

• HARLEM RENAISSANCE – during the 1920’s helped to preserve African-American heritage and raise awareness of Black Culture and concerns. Writers include: Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen.

The ModernsT.S. Elliot

– Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a wealthy family with ancestry in the northeastern United States. He received the best education of any major American writer of his generation at Harvard College, the Sorbonne, and Merton College of Oxford University. He studied Sanskrit and Oriental philosophy, which influenced his poetry.

The Moderns Ernest Hemingway

– Ernest Hemingway came from the Midwest United States. He was Born in Illinois and spent childhood vacations in Michigan on hunting and fishing trips. He volunteered for an ambulance unit in France during World War I, but was wounded and hospitalized for six months.

Contemporary Contemporary 1946-present1946-present

In the years since the In the years since the Modernism period, American Modernism period, American authors have begun to write authors have begun to write from a plethora of genres. from a plethora of genres. Americans have realized that Americans have realized that the best way to go is have the best way to go is have many authors writing what many authors writing what ever it is they are best at. ever it is they are best at.

Some Authors of the Contemporary

Period

J. D. Salinger

Stephen King

Joyce Carol Oates

Robert Jordan

Contemporary 1946-presentContemporary 1946-presentStories:

• Flannery O’Conner• Katherine Anne

PorterNovels:

• F. Scott Fitzgerald• Ernest Hemingway• William Faulkner• John Steinbeck• Ralph Ellison

• Joyce Carol Oates• Alice Walker

Poetry:

• T.S. Eliot• Langston

Hughes• Gwendolyn

Brooks• Robert Lowell• Sylvia Plath

J. D. Salinger• Salinger studied at NYU, and

Columbia University. After which he decided to devote his life to his writing. His writing career was interrupted by World War I, where he served in the U.S. Army. His most well known work was his novel Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, a novel about a high school student who tries to run away from his life that he thinks is “phony.”

Contemporary

Stephen King (b.1947)

• King writes novels that both frighten and intrigue. Some of his major works are; Carrie published in 1974; The Shining, publishing in 1998; Salem's Lot, published in 1993; The Stand, published in 1991, and The Dark tower Series.

Contemporary

Joyce Carol Oates (b.1938)Oates received a type writer

at the age of fourteen and trained herself to write novel after novel through high school and college. She earned an M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin. Some of her works include; Blonde, published in 2000; Wonderland, published in 1971; and The Tattooed Girl, published in 2003.

Contemporary

Robert Jordan (b.1948)- • He went to the Citadel,

the Military College of South Carolina, where he received a degree in physics. Jordan’s main area of expertise is in the genre of fantasy. He is currently in the process of writing a series of novel entitled The Wheel of Time.

Contemporary