Literature Overview

Advanced ELLs will be comparing and contrasting adapted and original versions of the writers below.

Early American Literature (1620-1820)

The literature of colonists and explorers writing about their experiences living in the New World, including the hardships of rustic living, sermons and other theological texts, and accounts of interactions with American Indians (natives), first-hand accounts of lifre in Puritan New England and in the Virginia colony, leading up to the literatur eof the American Revolution and the Enlightenment. Important authors include: John Smith, William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anned Bradstreet, William Byrd, Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather, Mary Rowlandson, Roger Williams, and Phyllis Wheatley.

The Neoclassical Age, Age of Reason, or Enlightenment (end of the 18th century)

The Enlightenment begins in England in the 17th century and then spreads to America and the colonies in the 18th century. The legacy of the Enlightenment in America is a dedication to pragmatism, common sense, and science, a belief in justice, liberty and equality, and the "natural rights of man." Religion shifts from overt theism to deism, a worldview in which God is considereed to be like a clockmaker, having created the world and lfeft it to its own physical and natural "laws." Literature from this period is characterized by an interest in the classics (including the Bible), interest in nature and science, optimism, and faith in humanity. Important authors include: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine.

Romanticism (19th century) A reaction to the neoclassical age, and an outgrowth of the Romantic movement in Europe (Goethe, Coleridge, British poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc.) In America, Romanticism is tied up with patriotism, a call for an American literature that would express teh emerging greatness of the new country after Independence. Themes include: the subconscious mind, individual psychology, nature, fantasy, and the importance of intuition over the rational mind. The Romantics were interested in folk beliefs and practices and in the common man, the individual. Literature of this period forms a foundation for the abolition and early women's movement. Important authors include: James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendall Holmes, James Russel Lowell.

Transcendentalism Transcendentalism was an intellectual movement within Romanticism, an intuitional idealism rooted in the work of German philosopher Immanual Kant, which took hold in the American Unitarian church. Transcendentalists recognize the sanctity of the individual and the individual's freedom to follow his/her intuition. They believed that knowledge comes largely from intutition, rather than from ojective experience. Key authros include: Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller (editor The Dial).

Realism (mid to late 19th century)

After the Civil War, writers are shaken, idealism gives way to skeptisim. Literature assumes the important role of an instrument of social critique, and writers gain a wider and more general audience. Important authors include: Henry James, W.D. Howwells, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B DuBois, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman. Includes regionalism- literature of this genree is about place, and its reader is the common man. Natives, settlesrs, slaves, and dialect are common features, as is the vivid landscape of a "new" country. Authors try to preserve a sense of the country in its preindustrial state. Important authors iclude Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Bret Harte.

Naturalism (end of 19th century to early 20th century)

A more negaive form of realism, a response to Darwin's theory of evolution (the survival of the fittest). A key idea is that the environment shapes human fate: war, the open sea, the American city, particularly its slums, have th power to shape character. Foreshadows existentialsim, morals matter more than circumstances. Important authors include: Henry Adams, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Hart Crane, Stephen Crane, E.E. Cummings T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Jack London, Marriane Moore, Eugene O'Neil, Ezra Pound, Marjorie K. Rawlings, Edward Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Steven, Edith Wharroton, William Carlos Williams, Thomas Wolfe.

Modernism (Early 20th Centry to WWII) Authors experiement with narrative structure, structuring the events of a novel so as to present a coherent world, or vision of reality. Incongruous, contradictory, or seemingly inconsequential strings of facts or ideas come to adhere in a significant way, to construct a particular world. Importan authors include William Faulkner, James Dickey, Ralph Ellison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gertrude stein, John Steinbeck, Eudor Welty, Richard Writght, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Randal Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, Richard Wilbur.

Harlem Renaissance (end of the Great Depression to WWII)

The flowering of African American art, music, and literature inteh U.S. and abroad, symbolically rooted in post-Depression Harlem. Important authors include: Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston.

Post-Moderism (after WWII)

Like modernism, but post-modern literature might completely ignore the structural relationships that tie the seemingly incongrous bits of a narrative together in an attempt to mimic the chaos of the post-war world, where things are seldome neat and tidy. Post-modern fiction is also intensely self reflective, or meta-fictional, in that the writer might make reference to the acto fo writing the book, or to himself in the act of writing the book, or o the book's place in the world.