EOCT Review

By time periods/Literary genres of study

TIME PERIODS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

Periods of American Literature

• A literary period is an artistic attitude of shared characteristics. These characteristics may include the style of writing, the genre, or the subject matter. The work of a certain literary period may be a response to historical events, but it is not the same as the historical period.

Periods of American Literature

• American fiction began with the oral histories of Native American and the writings of early explorers and settlers of North America and extended through the Colonial and Romantic eras. Literary output increased with the start of the Westward Expansion and Industrial Age. The two world wars of the twentieth century impacted the styles and themes of American fiction in profound ways. The beliefs and values of the Cold War, Civil Rights and Electronic eras continue to influence experimental as well as traditional writers of contemporary American fiction.

Periods of American Literature

The chart below gives an overview of the important movements and periods in American literature. Study the approximate dates and characteristics of each so that you are able to classify a work of

literature based on its style and content.

Literary Movement

Time Period

Characteristics of the Movement

Representative Writers

Native American Period

Pre-1620-1840

Celebrates the natural word

Oral tradition; original authors and words are largely unknown

Colonial Period 1620-1750

Focuses on historical events, daily life, moral attitudes (Puritanism), political unrest

William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Edward Taylor

Revolutionary Period and Nationalism

1750-1815

Celebrates nationialism and patriotism and examines what it means to be “American”

Political writings by Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison

Romanticism and Transcendentalism

1800-1855

Celebrates individualism, nature, imagination, emotions

Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau

Periods of American Literature

Literary Movement

Time Period

Characteristics of the Movement

Representative Writers

Realism 1850-1900

Examines realities of life, human frailty; regional culture (local color)

Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Kate Chopin

Naturalism 1880-1940

Views life as a set of natural laws to be discovered

Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, James T. Farrell

Modern Period 1900-1950

Themes of alienation, disconnectedness; experiments with new techniques, use of irony and understatement

T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck

Postmodern Period

1950-present

Nontraditional topics and structures; embrace of changing reality

Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oats, J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Theodore Roethke, John Barth, the Beat poets