Context of each period including…

• Overview of period• Significant authors• Historical timeline• Characteristics of writing• Political highlights• Philosophy views• Social influences

Puritanism: Discovery to 1800

• Profoundly religious school of thought

• God as the be-all and end-all of human thought

• Believes Bible as the infallible Word of God

• All people are born in sin and need the atoning blood of Christ if they are to be saved

• All human activity—including literature— should foster this end.

Puritanism: Significant Authors

• Jonathan Edwards• Native American oral traditions• Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz• Mary Rowlandson• Olaudah Equiano• Phillis Wheatley• Halimah Abdullah

Puritanism: Timeline• 1493: Askia Muhammad—statesman,

scholar, and strategist—ascends the throne of the Songhai Empire of West Africa.

• 1517: Martin Luther posts list of criticisms on the door of cathedral in Germany to protest policies of the Roman Catholic Church -begins break with Catholicism

• 1635: Roger Williams is banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony after criticizing the colony’s Puritan doctrine; the next year he established a colony in Providence, Rhode Island known for its religious freedom and the separation of church and state.

Puritanism: Characteristics of Puritan Writing

• Bible provided model for Puritan writing• Viewed each individual life as a journey to

salvation• Looked for direct connections between

biblical events and events in own lives.• Diaries and histories most common forms of

literary expression in Puritan society; in them writers described the workings of God

• Favored plain style of writing• Admired clarity of expression and avoided

complicated figures of speech.

Puritanism: Political Highlights

• Mohawk leader Dekanawida establishes the Iroquois Confederacy around 1500, uniting Native American peoples who used to be rivals

• Mayflower Pilgrims adopt the Mayflower Compact and land at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.

Puritanism: Philosophical Views

• Native American worldviews, passed down through oral tradition, stress not progress but the cyclical nature of existence.

• Puritans regard life as a journey toward salvation and look for signs of self-improvement and for the workings of God in their daily lives.

Puritanism: Social Influences

• Slavery is legal and common in all New England colonies in 1620

• Hysteria and paranoia build as more than one hundred people are accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts.

Rationalism

• Fundamentally scientific and empirical in its orientation

• Philosophy of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment

• Experience is its highest authority, rather than Divine Revelation

• Placing ultimate trust in the power of human reason to solve all social, practical, and political problems.

Rationalism : Significant Authors

• Benjamin Franklin• Patrick Henry• Thomas Paine• Thomas Jefferson• Abigail Adams• Elizabeth Cady Stanton• Anne Bradstreet

Rationalism : Timeline

• 1748: French philosopher and jurist Montesquieu proposes the system of checks and balances that has come to characterize the United States government.

• 1771: Ben Franklin’s autobiography is the first American rags-to-riches story.

• 1775-1781: Revolutionary War• 1787-1788: The Federalist Papers:

Collection of eighty-five essays published between October 1787 and August 1788.

Rationalism : The Rationalist Worldview

• People arrive at truth by using reason rather than by relying on the authority of the past, on religion, or on nonrational mental processes, such as intuition.

• God created the universe but does not interfere in its workings.

• World operates according to God’s rules, and through the use of reason, people can discover those rules.

• People are basically good and perfectible.• Since God wants people to be happy, they

worship God best by helping other people (social service of today’s politics)

• Human history is marked by progress toward a more perfect existence.

Rationalism : Political Highlights

• Mounting tension between the colonists and the British Empire results in the Revolutionary War (1775-1783)

• The Second Continental Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

Rationalism : Philosophical Views

• Native American worldviews, passed down through oral tradition, stress not progress but the cyclical nature of existence.

• The rationalists regard reason and logic as God-given gifts and try to find order in the universe.

Rationalism : Social Influences

• An epidemic of smallpox strikes Boston in 1721, affecting nearly half the city’s population.

American Romanticism: 1800-1860

• A reaction against both rationalism and Puritanism, romanticism seeks to plumb the depths of the human spirit by means of intuition and the imagination.

Romanticism: Significant Authors

• Fireside Poets/Schoolroom Poets– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow– John Greenleaf Whittier– Oliver Wendell Holms– James Russell Lowell

• William Cullen Bryant

American Romanticism timeline

• 1798: English Romantic period begins in Britain with Wordsworth’s publication of “Lyrical Ballads”, which emphasizes the role of emotion in poetry and urges poets to draw inspiration from the everyday life and speech of ordinary people.

• 1814: Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a poem; the song officially became the national anthem by an act of Congress in 1931.

• 1828: Noah Webster published dictionaries, a grammar book, and a speller that sold sixty million copies and distinguished American spelling from British spelling.

• 1835: Alexis de Tocqueville was sent to the United States by the French government to study the penitentiary system, but he ultimately wrote the earliest and most enduringingly influential analysis of American democracy.

• 1845: Margaret Fuller argued in “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” for equal opportunity for women and for the abolition of stereotyped gender roles.

• 1845-1849: Irish potato famine was caused by a blight that killed most of the potato crop – the staple food for most of Ireland’s population; between 1847 and 1854 more than 1.6 million Irish immigrants had entered the United States.

• 1850-1859: The slavery issue was key during this decade, a time of fierce sectional quarrels between the North and the South, and between abolitionists and pro-slavery forces of various regions.

American Romanticism: Characteristics

• Values feeling and intuition over reason• Places faith in inner experience and the power of the

imagination• Shuns the artificiality of civilization and seeks unspoiled

nature• Prefers youthful innocence to educated sophistication• Champions individual freedom and the worth of the

individual• Reflects on nature’s beauty as a path to spiritual and

moral development• Looks backward to the wisdom of the past and distrusts

progress• Finds beauty and truth in exotic locales, the supernatural

realm, and the inner world of the imagination• Sees poetry as the highest expression of the imagination• Finds inspiration in myth, legend, and folklore.

American Romanticism: Characteristics of the Hero

• Is young or possesses youthful qualities• Is innocent and pure of purpose• Has a sense of honor based not on

society’s rules but on some higher principle

• Has a knowledge of people and life based on deep, intuitive understanding, not on formal learning.

• Loves nature and avoids town life• Quests for some higher truth in the

natural world

Gothic (Dark) Romanticism

• Gothic romanticism is concerned primarily with the darker aspects of the psyche—madness, obsession, the fragmentation of the self.

• It tends to be both anti-political and anti-religious, in the conventional sense of those terms.

• Explores the conflict between good and evil, the effects of guilt and sin, and the destructive underside of appearances

Gothic Romanticism: Significant Authors

• Edgar Allen Poe• Nathaniel Hawthorne• Herman Melville• Washington Irving

Transcendentalism

• A parallel to Gothic romanticism, transcendentalism is the sunny, optimistic side of the romantic tendency.

• To the transcendentalist, the psyche of the soul is part and particle of God; ultimate spiritual fulfillment is to be found by following the inmost promptings of the individual soul.

• The transcendentalist finds as much to admire in the Eastern religions Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism of the cultivation of the spirit as in traditional Christianity.

Transcendental Significant Authors

• Henry David Thoreau• Ralph Waldo Emerson

Transcendental View of the World

• Everything in the world, including human beings is a reflection of the Divine Soul.

• The physical facts of the natural world are a doorway to the spiritual or ideal world.

• People can use their intuition to behold God’s spirit revealed in nature or in their own souls.

• Self-reliance and individualism must outweigh external authority and blind conformity to custom and tradition.

• Spontaneous feelings and intuition are superior to deliberate intellectualism and rationality.

Romanticism Social Influences

• The lyceum movement furthers American education, self-improvement, and cultural development.

• Reform movements begin for women’s rights, child labor, temperance, and the abolition of slavery involving many Americans in social activism.

• Utopian planners attempt to turn idealized visions of human potential into practical realities.

Realism: 1860 - 1914

• A literary reaction against what it saw as the excess and delusions of the romantics, realism seeks to view humans not as gods or demons, not as damned sinners or reasoning machines, but as ordinary-sized humans.

• Realistic literature tends to focus on homely situations, the "facts of life" accessible to the reporter, the historian, the student of society.

Realism Significant Authors

• Emily Dickinson

• Walt Whitman

• Frederick Douglass

• Harriet A. Jacobs

• Ambrose Bierce

• Abraham Lincoln

• Mark Twain

• Stephen Jay Gould

• Kate Chopin

• Edwin Arlington Robinson

• Chief Joseph

• William Dean Howells

Realism timeline• 1850: Sojourner Truth, a freed slave, traveled across the

country, speaking in support of feminism, religion, and abolition.

• 1850: Harriet Jacobs, abused by her owner’s father, escaped to the North but was pursued there after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Her narrative describes her life in bondage and as a fugitive.

• 1876: The Battle of the Little Bighorn, led by General George A. Custer, marked the last major victory for the Lakota in the intense fight between Native Americans and white settlers for land in the West.

• 1881: Booker T. Washington’s approach to improving life for African American after the war sparked considerable controversy since he believed that blacks; interests were best served through vocational education rather than academic instruction or participation in politics.

• 1896: Paul Laurence Dunbar became known for his poetry while working as an elevator operator, establishing himself as a leading African American writer.

Realism Characteristics• Rejection of the idealized, larger –than-

life hero of Romantic literature• Detailed depiction of ordinary

characters and realistic events• Emphasis on characters from cities and

lower classes.• Avoidance of the exotic, sensational,

and overly dramatic• Use of everyday speech patterns to

reveal class distinctions• Focus on the ethical struggles and

social issues of real-life situations

Realism Political Highlights

• Civil War (1861 – 1865) results in the loss of more than 600,000 men and a reunited but bitter republic.

• Slavery, a leading cause of the Civil War, is abolished in 1865.

• Abraham Lincoln is assassinated in Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865.

Realism Philosophical Views

• Romanticism is overtaken by more realistic attitudes toward art and life.

• Advances in sociology and psychology lead to growing interest in analyzing everyday life and the behavior of society as a whole.

Realism Social Influences

• Reformers and muckraking journalists expose abuses in industries such as mining and meatpacking.

• Large numbers of immigrants from Europe settle in American cities.

• In 1908, Henry Ford introduces the Model T, an invention that will drastically change the landscape and reshape the American way of life.

Naturalism

• Naturalism takes the down-scaling tendency of realism a step farther, and to picture humans as small, helpless beings in the grip of forces far beyond their control—forces of biology sex, hunger, disease, and death and society economics, politics, war.

• To the pessimistic naturalists, the freedom of the human will is a delusion, and life is inherently a losing proposition.

Naturalism Significant Authors

• Stephen Crane • Jack London• Frank Norris• Theodore Dreiser• Henry James

Naturalism Elements

• Attempt to analyze human behavior objectively, as a scientist would.

• Belief that human behavior is determined by heredity and environment

• Sense that human begins cannot control their own destinies

• Sense of life as a losing battle against an uncaring universe

• Combined realism with Darwinism

Modernism: 1914 - 1939• A complex of movements emerging in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernism has roots in – the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche famous for

saying "God is dead“– the sociology of Karl Marx: human history is the

record of conflict among economic classes– the psychology of Sigmund Freud: the psyche

explained in terms of primal energies, basically sexual in nature.

• The vast, senseless carnage of World War I prompted modernists to a wide variety of literary experimentation, attempting to define a viable position for the self in social and philosophical predicaments of many kinds.

Modernist Significant Authors

• Mid-century Voices– John Steinbeck– Eudora Welty– Katherine Anne Porter– James Thurber– Robert Frost

• Harlem Renaissance– Countee Cullen– Langston Hughes– Lucille Clifton– Zora Neale Hurston

• “Make It New”– Ezra Pound– T. S. Eliot– Marianne Moore– William Carlos

Williams– e. e. cummings

• Modern American Fiction– William Faulkner– Ernest Hemingway– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Modernism Timeline• 1914: Panama Canal opened, connecting Atlantic

and Pacific oceans and shortening the voyage between east and west coasts by about 8,000 nautical miles.

• 1920: Prohibition and the Eighteenth Amendment resulted in a rise in criminal alcohol production and sale and restrictions on individual freedoms.

• 1927: Charles Lindberg’s flight from New York to Paris too 33 ½ hours and made him an international hero overnight.

• 1933: Eleanor Roosevelt took on responsibilities unprecedented for a president’s wife, traveling widely, giving speeches, holding press conferences, and she often represented her husband on occasions when he was unable to appear.

Modernism Elements• Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and

form, reflecting the fragmentation of society• Rejection of traditional themes, subjects, and

forms• Sense of disillusionment and loss of faith in the

American dream (America as a New Eden, a belief in progress, triumph of the individual)

• Rejection of sentimentality and artificiality• Rejection of the ideal of a hero as infallible in

favor of a hero who is flawed and disillusioned but shows “grace under pressure”

• Interest in the inner workings of the human mind, sometimes expressed through new narrative techniques, such as stream of consciousness

• Revolt against the spiritual debasement of the modern world.

Modernism: Political Highlights

• In 1917, the United States enters World War I on the side of the Allied nations.

• Women win the right to vote when the Nineteenth Amendment is passed in 1920.

• The stock market crash of 1929 ushers in the Great Depression.

Modernism: Philosophical Views

• Marxism, which embraced socialism as the desired social structure, takes hold in Russia and finds some support in the United States.

• The science of psychoanalysis encourages exploration of the human subconscious and the meaning of dreams.

Modernism: Social Influences

• Speak-easies and jazz clubs spring up during Prohibition. The underground social scene becomes popular.

• During the 1920s, many young women flout tradition and become more independent in thought, dress, and attitude.

Postmodernism/Contemporary1939 to Present

• Postmodern writers allow for multiple meanings and multiple worlds in their works, often structuring their works in a variety of nontraditional forms.

• They do not abide by conventional rules for shaping writing.

Postmodernism: Timeline• 1959: Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the

Sun opens• 1963: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have a

Dream” speech reached an audience of more than 200,000 gathered in Washington, D. C., in a passionate demonstration for civil rights and racial justice.

• 1979 – 1981: Iranian Hostage Crisis began when militants, backed by Islamic fundamentalists, ousted the shah of Iran from power and seized the U. S. embassy in Tehran, taking a large group of U. S. citizens hostage, and refusing to release them until the former shah of Iran was returned from the U. S. for trial.

• 1991: Dissolution of the Soviet Union• 2001: World Trade Center is destroyed, plunging

the U.S. into conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.

Postmodernism: Significant Authors

• Toni Morrison• Donald Barthelme• Amy Tan• Philip Roth• Elie Wiesel• John Hersey• Margaret Bourke-White• Julia Alvarez• Theodore Roethke• Richard Wilbur• Billy Collins

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• Richard Wright• Maxine Hong Kingston• N. Scott Momaday• Alice Walker• James Baldwin• Sandra Cisneros• Sylvia Plath• Anne Sexton• Gwendolyn Brooks• Judith Ortiz Cofer

Postmodernism: Characteristics

• Allows for multiple meanings and multiple worlds

• Structures works in nontraditional forms

• Comments on itself• Can be intensely personal• Features cultural diversity• Blends fiction and nonfiction• Uses the past fearlessly

Postmodernism: Political Influences

• World War II ends in 1945• The Soviet Union becomes a

nuclear power in 1949, touching off a dangerous arms race with the United States

• Mikhail Gorbachev presides over the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, ending the cold war.

Postmodernism: Philosophical Influences

• In the 1950s, America creates a culture marked by conformity and vigorous anti-Communism.

• In the 1980s, postmodernism takes root in philosophy, linguistics, and literature

• Proponents of multiculturalism challenge traditional views of what writers should write and what students should read.

Postmodernism: Social Influences

• The counterculture movement of the late 1960s reject conformity in politics and art in favor of dissent and experimentation.

• The communications revolution of the 1990s promises new levels of prosperity as well as new types of communication.