LITERARY PERIODS IN

AMERICAN LITERATURE

AN OUTLINEAMERICAN

AN OUTLINEAMERICAN

LITERATURE

LITERATURE

Puritan Times 1650-1750

Content: Errand into the wilderness; be a

city upon a hill;

Christian utopia

Genre/Style: sermons, diaries; personal

narratives; captivity; narratives jeremiads;

written in plain style

Effect: instructive reinforces authority of

the Bible and church

Historical Context: a person's fate is

determined by God all people are corrupt

and must be saved by Christ

Puritan writers stressed

religious

and didactic themes

The first book published in America was the
Bay Psalm Book: The Whole Book of Psalmes
Faithfully Translated into English Metre
(1640).
AUTHORS: William Bradford (1590/1657)
History of Plymouth Plantation (pub. 1856);
John Smith (1579/1631) The Generall
Historie of Virginia (1624) William Byrd
(1674/1744) History of the Dividing Line
(composed and reworked from 1728 but not
published until 1841).
Jonathan Edwards(1703-1758) “Sinners in
the hand of an angry God”

Rationalism/ Age of Enlightenment 1750-

1800

Content: national mission and American character
democratic utopia use of reason history is an act of
individual and national self-assertion

Genre/Style: political pamphlets; travel writing;
highly ornate writing style; fiction employs generic
plots and characters; fiction often tells the story of
how an innocent young woman is tested by a
seductive male

Effect: patriotism grows; instills pride; creates
common agreement about issues; shows differences
between Americans and Europeans

Historical Context: tells readers how to interpret
what they are reading to encourage Revolutionary
War support instructive in values

Authors

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) "first great man of
letters," embodied the Enlightenment ideal of humane
rationality. Practical yet idealistic, hard-working and
enormously successful, Franklin recorded his early life in
his famous Autobiography.
Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813)
Another Enlightenment figure is Hector St. John de
Crèvecoeur, whose Letters from an American Farmer (1782)
gave Europeans a glowing idea of opportunities for peace,
wealth, and pride in America.
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) pamphlet Common Sense
Washington Irving (1789-1859) The Devil and Tom
Walker; The Legend of the Sleep Hollow; Rip Van Winkle
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) The Last of the
Mohicans

American Renaissance/Romanticism 1800-1855

Content: writing that can be interpreted 2 ways, on the
surface for common folk or in depth for philosophical
readers; sense of idealism focus on the individual's inner
feelings; emphasis on the imagination over reason and
intuition over facts; urbanization versus nostalgia for
nature burden of the Puritan past

Genre/Style: literary tale; character sketch; slave
narratives; political novels; poetry; transcendentalism

Effect: helps instill proper gender behavior for men and
women;
fuels the abolitionist movement; allow people to re-
imagine the American past
Historical Context: expansion of magazines; newspapers;
and book publishing; slavery debates

Authors

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) essay
"Self-Reliance"
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) essay
"Civil Disobedience"
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

His famous “Leaves

of Grass (Oh! Captain My Captain) ”-1855

and other writers…

Gothic sub-genre of Romanticism 1800-1850

Content: sublime and overt use of the supernatural; individual
characters
see themselves at the mercy of forces our of their control
which they do not understand; motif of the "double": an
individual with both evil and good characteristics often involve
the persecution of a young woman who is forced apart from
her true love

Style: short stories and novels; hold readers' attention through
dread of a series of terrible possibilities; feature landscapes of
dark forests, extreme vegetation, concealed ruins with horrific
rooms, depressed characters

Effect: today in literature we still see portrayals of alluring
antagonists whose evil characteristics appeal to one's sense of
awe; today in literature we still see stories of the persecuted
young girl forced apart from her true love

Historical Context: industrial revolution brings ideas that the
"old ways" of doing things are now irrelevant
                                                       

AUTHORS

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) Dickinson's 1,775 poems
continue to intrigue critics, who often disagree about them.
Some stress her mystical side, some her sensitivity to
nature; many note her odd, exotic appeal. One modern
critic, R.P. Blackmur, comments that Dickinson's poetry
sometimes feels as if "a cat came at us speaking English."
Her clean, clear, chiseled poems are some of the most
fascinating and challenging in American literature.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) The House of the
Seven Gables; The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Herman Melville (1819-1891) Moby-Dick

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) "The Raven" (1845);
Annabel Lee; The Bell. Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque (1840) : The Black Cat; The Fall of the House of
Usher…
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass; An American Slave

Realism 1855-1900

Content: common characters not idealized
(immigrants, laborers);
people in society defined by class society corrupted by
materialism;
emphasizes moralism through observation

Style: novel and short stories are important; prefers
objective narrator; dialogue includes many voices from
around the country; does not tell the reader how to
interpret the story

Effect: social realism: aims to change a specific social
problem; aesthetic realism: art that insists on detailing
the world as one sees it

Historical Context: Civil War brings demand for a
"truer" type of literature that does not idealize people
or places

AUTHORS

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835-1910) Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn; Life on the Mississippi
Henry James (1843-1916) The Portrait of a Lady (1881);
The Bostonians (1886) …
Stephen Crane (1871-1900) The Red Badge of Courage
Jack London (1876-1916) The Son of the Wolf (1900); The
Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904)
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) An American Tragedy

Naturalism (sub-genre of realism) 1880-1900

Content: dominant themes: survival fate violence taboo;
nature is an indifferent force acting on humans; "brute
within" each individual is comprised of strong and warring
emotions such as greed, power, and fight for survival in an
amoral, indifferent world.
Genre/Style: short story, novel; characters usually lower
class or lower middle class; fictional world is commonplace
and unheroic; everyday life is a dull round of daily existence;
characters ultimately emerge to act heroically or
adventurously with acts of violence, passion, and/or bodily
strength in a tragic ending
Effect: this type of literature continues to capture audiences
in present day: the pitting of man against nature
Historical Context: writers reflect the ideas of Darwin
(survival of the fittest) and Karl Marx (how money and class
structure control a nation)

AUTHORS

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) developed an
abstract, experimental prose poetry. collection
Tender Buttons (1914)
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) The Sun
Also Rises(1926)…
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) The Great
Gatsby; This Side of Paradise
William Faulkner (1897-1962) The Sound
and the Fury (1929)
Poets: Ezra Pound (1885-1972); T.S. Eliot
(1888-1965); Robert Frost (1874-1963);

Modernism 1900-1946

Content: dominant mood: alienation and
disconnection; people unable to communicate
effectively; fear of eroding traditions and grief over
loss of the past

Genre/Style: highly experimental; allusions in writing
often refer to classical Greek and Roman writings; use
of fragments, juxtaposition, interior monologue, and
stream of consciousness; writers seeking to create a
unique style

Effect: common readers are alienated by this
literature

Historical Context: overwhelming technological
changes of the 20th Century; World War I was the first
war of mass destruction due to technological
advances; rise of the youth culture

Harlem Renaissance (runs parallel to
modernism) 1920s

Content: celebrated characteristics of African-
American life; enjoyment of life without fear; writing
defines the African-American heritage and celebrates
their new identity as Americans

Genre/Style: allusions in writing often refer to
African-American spirituals; uses the structure of
blues songs in poetry (ex-repetition of key phrases) ;
superficial stereotypes later revealed to be characters
capable of complex moral judgments

Effect: this period gave birth to a new form of
religious music called "gospel music“; blues and jazz
are transmitted across America via radio and
phonographs

Historical Context: mass African-American migration
to Northern urban centers. African-Americans have
more access to media and publishing outlets after
they move north.

Authors

Harlem Renaissance:

Jean Toomer (1894-1967) Cane (1923)
Richard Wright (1908-1960) his autobiography
Black Boy (1945);Native Son (1940)
Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960) Mules and Men
(1935)
Toni Morrison (1931- ) Beloved (1987)

Modernism 1900-1946

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) Babbitt (1922).
John Dos Passos (1896-1970) The 42nd Parallel
(1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936).
John Steinbeck (1902-1968) The Grapes of Wrath
(1939); Of Mice and Men(1937)

Postmodernism 1946-Present

Content: people observe life as the media presents it,
rather than experiencing life directly; popular culture
saturates people's lives;
absurdity and coincidence

Genre/Style: mixing of fantasy with nonfiction; blurs
lines of reality for reader; no heroes; concern with
individual in isolation; detached, unemotional usually
humorless; narratives; metafiction; present tense;
magic realism

Effect: erodes distinctions between classes of people;
insists that values are not permanent but only "local"
or "historical"

Historical Context: Post-World War II prosperity;
media culture interprets values
                                  

                                                        

    

        

Contemporary (continuation of
Postmodernism) 1980s-Present

Content: identity politics; people learning to cope with
problems through communication; people's sense of
identity is shaped by cultural and gender attitudes;
emergence of ethnic writers and women writers

Style: narratives: both fiction and nonfiction; anti-
heroes; concern with connections between people;
emotion-provoking; humorous irony; storytelling
emphasized; autobiographical essays

Effect:   too soon to tell

Historical Context: people beginning a new century
and a new millennium; media culture interprets values

AUTHORS

James Baldwin (1924-1987) Go Tell It On the Mountain
(1953)
Saul Bellow (1915- ) The Victim (1947)
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) Long Day's Journey Into Night
(1956)
Arthur Miller (1915- ) Death of a Salesman
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) The Glass Menagerie (1944)
and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) Ship of Fools (1962)
John Updike (1932- ) Rabbit, Run (1960)
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) On the Road (1957)
Tom Wolfe (1931-) The Right Stuf (1979), and a novel, The
Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?; Minority Report
Walter Mosley (1952 -) Devil in A Blue Dress (1990) A Red
Death (1991);White Butterfly (1992) Gone Fishin‘(1997); Bad Boy
Brawly Brown (2002)…
Edward Albee (1928- ) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)

ELEMENTS OF FICTION

Plot
Theme
Setting
Characters
Point of View

5 MAJOR ELEMENTS

PLOT



The main point of intrigue or suspense -- what

happens in the story. Unlike the story’s theme

(which can be applied to life situations), the plot

is unique to each story. The plot usually involves

several steps:



EXPOSITION: Introducing the characters,

establishing the setting, and laying the

groundwork for a problem to develop



CONFLICT: the major problem -- may be both

External and Internal



COMPLICATIONS: Just as it says, problems pile

on.



CLIMAX: the highest point of conflict



RESOLUTION: everything winds down to the

conclusion.

THEME

The broader subject or topic of the story.

What type of universal statement is the

author making? What is this story really

about? Is it about the dangers of

jealousy? the consequences of your

decisions or actions? Is the author

concerned

about

nature?

survival?

prejudice? the importance of making

independent decisions?

SETTING

WHEN and WHERE the story occurs. If the

author doesn’t tell you exactly, look for hints.

For example, if it occurs on Mars, chances

are that the story takes place in the future in

space. Be sure to note whether it takes place

in the past, present or future and whether it

takes place on land, in the water, in the air,

or in space. Then add more details to be as

specific as possible. Setting is critical in

establishing the mood (atmosphere) and

making the story and characters credible.

CHARACTERS

In a short story, there may be only one
character. If there are quite a few, chances are
that only one or two are the main characters.
In a novel, there are usually several major
characters as well as several minor characters.
Why are certain characters considered to be
major?
Are the characters static or dynamic (do they
remain the same or do they change?)
Are the characters round (multi-dimensional)
or flat (one-dimensional)?

POINT OF VIEW

This is NOT your opinion of the story. It

refers to who is telling the story. A story

can be told from different points of view.

You are probably most familiar with the

first person (“I”) narrative and with the

omniscient narrative (where the story

changes viewpoint, depending on who is

talking or thinking). Get in the habit of

looking at the point of view; sometimes

you learn more about the story that way