Native American Literature: ... humans in community with nature, the spirituality, balance, and harmony of the natural world; from their oral literature we have translated myths and songs and occasionally other artifacts. IROQUOIS CONSTITUTION, Blues-ing on the Brown Vibe
Puritan Era: ... Devotion to God, simplicity, plainness, humility, diligence, hard work; we have sermons and poetry mostly, the purpose of all of which is to glorify God. Jonathan Edwards and Anne Bradstreet are two famous authors of the period.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Huswifery, Verses on the Burning of our House, Precious Puritans
Age of Reason (Neoclassicism): .... The authors of this time period stressed reason, clarity, and order, and believed that each thing aspires to an ideal form. There was an optimistic belief in man’s power to improve himself through application of thought and logic, and a proliferation of political writing—our Declaration of Independence and Constitution (and here) are two masterpieces of this time. BEN FRANKLIN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (chapter 9). Hamilton.
Romanticism: .... Romanticism arose in the nineteenth century in reaction against Neoclassicism. It placed an emphasis on imagination, emotion, and individual transformation over the Neoclassical ideals of logic, reason, and societal transformation. Romantics value the exotic, the spiritual, the unique, over the general ideal. Poe is a great example of an American Romantic; to some extent, so are Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. OVAL PORTRAIT, The Raven, Tracy K. Smith Sci-Fi
Transcendentalism: .... Transcendentalism, an outgrowth of Romanticism, was a philosophical movement whose basic belief was in the divinity of every single speck of existence. Transcendentalists believed that the senses and logical reason limit us from experiencing the deeper reality of the universe; if we use our intuition and our deepest conscience to transcend ordinary perception, we will experience the basic divinity and interconnectedness of all things. The most famous Transcendentalists were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Walt Whitman has a great deal in common with them as well. SELF-RELIANCE, Because I Could Not Stop for Death, I Sing the Body Electric, I hear America Singing, Langston Hughes I Too Sing America.
Read 274-280, 288-296, 372-394, 460-464: Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman
Realism: ... Realism is the presentation in art of the details of actual life. Realism was also a literary movement that arose in response to our Civil War and stressed the actual as opposed to the imagined or the fanciful. The Realists tried to write truthfully and objectively about ordinary characters in ordinary situations. They reacted against Romanticism, rejecting heroic, adventurous, unusual, or unfamiliar subjects. Mark Twain and Henry James are famous Realists, as are other writers who were showing the “local color” of the regions in which they lived and wrote: Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, and others. Check out Mark Twain's screed against the Romantic novelist James Fenimore Cooper. JUMPING FROG
A Raisin in the Sun: 1989 version with Danny Glover. 2008 version with Sean Combs.
Naturalism: .... Naturalism, a darker outgrowth of realism, was a literary movement among novelists at the end of the nineteenth century and during the early decades of the twentieth century. The naturalists tended to view humans as victims of unchanging natural laws: we live, in this view, in a cold, uncaring universe, and although we think we can affect the course of our lives, we are actually at the mercy of our heredity (who we are) and our environment (where we are). STORY OF AN HOUR, To Build a Fire, Ralph Ellison's Battle Royal
Modernism: ... In reaction to World War I, a literary movement in which authors expressed disillusion and alienation from conventional forms and easy answers. No neat, pat answers: a deep questioning of why human beings are so isolated and lonely in their essential experience. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Flannery O’Connor, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Eudora Welty—these are some of the famous ones… Oh, here are two great examples of Modernism: T.S. Eliot's the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and your own Love Song of Jose. JILTING OF GRANNY WEATHERALL:
Harlem Renaissance:... The Harlem Renaissance, which took place during the 1920’s, was a time of African American artistic creativity centered in Harlem, in New York City. Writers of the Harlem Renaissance include Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemps. A BLACK MAN TALKS OF REAPING, I, Too, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Harlem
Imagism: ... Imagism was a literary movement that flourished between 1912 and 1927. Led by Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, the Imagist poets rejected nineteenth-century poetic forms and language. Instead, they wrote short poems that used ordinary language and free verse to create sharp, exact, concentrated pictures. They were against abstraction, believing that poetry, at its best, functions like a painting, evoking emotion through direct experience of an image. H.D. and William Carlos Williams are other famous Imagists. RED WHEELBARROW, In a Station of the Metro