Literary Eras

Overview:

• Emphasis on being able to understand the world through reason alone

• Sees humanity as imperfect and of limited potential

• In response cultivates values of restraint, order, common sense thinking, and conservatism in religious, politics, and economics

• Everything, including art and literature, should be pragmatic and serve a purpose

Writers/Theorists Include:

• John Bunyan (The Pilgrim's Progress)

• John Dryden ("A Model of Christian Charity")

• Alexander Pope (The Rape of the Lock)

Overview:

• Primarily academic and essay writing to reflect on the state of the colonies, their mission, the religious context, and (ultimately) the notion of revolution

• Some poetry in the work of Phillis Wheatley

Writers/Theorists Include:

• John Winthrop ("A Model of Christian Charity")

• Jonathan Edwards (Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God)

• Alexander Hamilton (The Federalist Papers)

• Thomas Paine (Common Sense)

• Phillis Wheatley ("On Being Brought from Africa to America")

Overview:

• Focus on things that are known through emotion and the imagination

  • Includes a dive into the psychology of characters as part of that reflection

• Treats Nature as a site of Divine Revelation and personal meaning

• Beginning of Gothic fiction, questioning the limits of humanity through comparison to supernatural and quasi-human characters

• Includes allusions to folklore, myth, and medieval tales as part of developing their world

Writers/Theorists Include:

• Samuel Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

• William Wordsworth ("The World is Too Much with Us")

• Lord Byron

• Percy Shelley

• Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson (In Memoriam)

Explore more about Romanticism

Overview:

• Exploration of National Identity, what does it mean to be American separate from its English roots

• Utilized an English style, but with American settings (the American Frontier) and characters (including Native Americans)

• Mostly novels that depicted the lives of everyday Americans in a realistic style, though with more Romanticism than the Revolutionary Period

• Some Slave Narratives

Writers/Theorists Include:

• James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans)

• Washington Irving ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle")

Overview:

• Revival of Rationalism

• Aims to represent life truthfully with little to no romantic idealism

  • Lives of everyday people

  • Detailed descriptions of settings and social conditions

  • Explore Determinism vs. Free Will to critique how societal forces shape individual choices

  • Response to the Historical Context of Industrialization, Victorian Morality, and Social Class.

  • Raise awareness and encourage reform

Writers/Theorists Include:

• Charles Dickens (Great Expectations; A Tale of Two Cities)

• George Eliot / Mary Evans (Middlemarch)

• Connection to Russian Authors like Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

Split into the Dark Romantics and the Transcendentalists.

Dark Romantics Overview:

• Dive into the psychology of the human mind and its faults/sins

• See Nature as menacing and dangerous, a source of the grotesque

• Often utilizes allegory to offer a lesson about humanity

• Includes writers like Edgar Allan Poe ("The Tell-Tale Heart") and Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

Transcendentalists Overview:

• Emphasis on Individualism and Self-Reliance

• See the Sublime in Nature, allowing it to be a mirror for the soul

• Inherent goodness of humanity, but rejection of social norms and conformity

• Includes writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson ("On Self-Reliance" and "On Nature") and Henry David Thoreau (Walden and "Civil Disobedience")

Overview:

• Version of Romanticism

• Aims to replace middle-class values of thrift and responsibility with Beauty

  • Focus on the senses and emotions over real-life depictions

  • Explore passion/excess as Beautiful rather than assaults to morality

  • Focus on the individual

  • Hellenistic revival (allusions to Greek Myth)

  • Art has no purpose, certainly not reform

Writers/Theorists Include:

• Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

• Walter Pater

• Aubrey Beardsley

Overview:

• Influenced by British Realism and Russian Realists like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

• Aims to represent life truthfully with little to no romantic idealism

  • Lives of everyday people, their psychology, and their flaws

  • Detailed descriptions of settings and social conditions

  • Engages with Historical Context such as the American Dream, Westward Expansion, and American Individualism in the aftermath of the Civil War

  • Addresses specifically American issues, like Race and Gender inequality

Writers/Theorists Include:

• Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)

• Upton Sinclair (The Jungle)

• Kate Chopin (The Awakening)

Overview:

• Shaped by the experiences of the Two World Wars

• Express a disillusionment with the world and spirituality after the destruction and death of war

  • Growth in the use of Irony to emphasize the cost of progress

  • Questioning of Values that had guided humanity in the past, including Religion and Technology

    • Uses Religious/Classical imagery and language as part of their questioning

  • Rise in clear imagery and thick description of the world (Return to Realist and Neoclassical Writing)

• Experimentation with new forms, like Stream of Consciousness writing (see James Joyce's Ulysses)

Writers/Theorists Include:

• T. S. Eliot ("The Hollow Men")

• Wilfred Owen ("Dulce et Decorum Est")

• W. H. Auden ("Musée des Beaux Arts")

• W. B. Yeats ("The Second Coming")

• J. R. R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings)

• James Joyce (Ulysses)

• Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

Explore more about British Modernity

The Lost Generation:

• Response to the experiences of the World Wars and the Great Depression

• Expresses disillusionment with the world and a critique of traditional values (patriotism) and materialism (The American Dream)

  • Explore the moral decay of the US and the search for a new basis of identity

  • Includes some of the Hedonism of Aestheticism as a potential way of making meaning in a chaotic world

• Experimentation of form as a reflection of the break from the past and its traditional values

  • Subtly hinting at characterization through vague dialogue and introspection

• Includes writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms), and John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath; The Winter of our Discontent), and William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying)

Harlem Renaissance:

• Major era of African American literature and arts

• Fueled by the Great Migration of Black people to NYC and Harlem from the south after the Civil War

• Includes reflections of African American Identity, challenging racial stereotypes, and encouraging pride in one's self

• Writing mirrors other aspects of Black culture that developed during the Renaissance, such as Jazz (Duke Ellington), Religion (W. E. B. DuBois), Dance, Fashion (zoot suit), and Painting (Jacob Lawrence)

• Includes writers like Langston Hughes ("The Weary Blues") and Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God)