American Literature Timeline

• American Literature Timeline provides period dates, period names, characteristics, and famous authors and works for American literary movements.

Native Americans (Arrived 40,000 - 20,000 B.C.)

• Oral tradition includes epics, creation myths, stories, poems, and songs.
• Stories were used to teach moral lessons and practical information about the natural world.
• Deep respect for nature and animals was held.
• They had a cyclical worldview
• They used figurative language and parallelism

Puritanism (1600-1800)

• Predominantly wrote diaries and histories expressing connections between God and everyday life.
• Sought to purify the Church of England by simplifying worship and church organization based on the New Testament.
• Religion was viewed as a personal, inner experience.
• They Believed in original sin, and that only the "elect" would be saved.
• Used a plain writing style.
• Famous authors: William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, and Edward Taylor.

Rationalism (1750-1800)

• Primarily comprised of philosophers, scientists, speeches, and pamphlets.
• Human beings can arrive at truth (God's rules) through deductive reasoning.
• This truth can be achieved rather than relying on the past, religious faith, or intuition.
• Famous authors: Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, and Phyllis Wheatley.

Romanticism (1800-1860)

• Valued feeling, intuition, idealism, and inductive reasoning.
• Placed faith in inner experience and imagination's power.
• Shunned civilization's artificiality, seeking unspoiled nature for spirituality.
• Championed individual freedom and the worth of the individual.
• Poetry was seen as the highest expression of imagination.
• Dark Romantics used dark and supernatural themes/settings and had a gothic style
• Famous authors: Washington Irving, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Transcendentalism (1840-1860)

• Everything, including humans, reflects the Divine Soul.
• People can use intuition to see God's spirit in nature or their own souls.
• They believed self-reliance and individualism must outweigh external authority and blind conformity to tradition
• Famous authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott.

Realism (1850-1900)

• Feelings of disillusionment.
• Common subjects included slums, factories replacing farmlands, poor factory workers, and corrupt politicians.
• Represented everyday life and ordinary people as realistically as possible (regionalism).
• Sought to explain behavior (psychologically/socially).
• Famous authors: Mark Twain, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, and Kate Chopin

Modernism (1900-1950)

• Sense of disillusionment and loss of faith in the "American Dream" (the independence, self-reliant, individual will triumph).
• Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and form over the traditional.
• Interest in the inner workings of the human mind (e.g., stream of consciousness).
• Famous authors: Lorraine Hansberry, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Robert Frost, and T.S. Eliot.

Harlem Renaissance (1920-1940)

• Black cultural movement in Harlem, New York.
• Some poetry rhythms are based on spirituals and jazz, lyrics on blues, and diction from the street talk of ghettos.
• Other poetry used conventional lyrical forms.
• Famous authors: James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Contemporary / Postmodernism (1950-present)

• Influenced by media, language, and information technology studies.
• The culture duplicates and copies itself endlessly with little originality.
• New literary forms and techniques include works of dialogue or mixing fiction and nonfiction, experimenting with the physical appearance of work
• Famous authors: Alice Walker, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Maya Angelou, Anne Sexton, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Sandra Cisneros, and Amy Tan.