Precolonial Literature
Folklore, Myths, cultural and religious rituals.
Colonial Literature
religion and politics; plain rhetoric
Pre/Colonial Writers
Bradford, Bradstreet, Byrd, Edwards, Mather Smith, Winthrop
Revolutionary Literature
Ben Franklin - end of Puritan ideology, beginning of American myth telling
Revolutionary Writers
John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson
Romantic Literature
Distinct American writing, slavery novels, Transcendentalism,
Romanticism
considered nature to be the swelling place of divinity
Literary Independence
entirely American point of view
Romantic Writers
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Thoreau
Civil War Literature
abolition of slavery/ Civil War themes
Civil War Writers
Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln,
Local Color Literature
conformity, self-discpline, dreams of materialism, rags to riches stories
Local Color Writers
Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Emily Dickinson
Realism
scientific interest by Darwin, strong social consciousness, went out of its way to point out cruel and ugly side of real life
Humanism
emphasized man's freedom of will; self-restraint as the highest ethical principle
Realism Writers
Edith Wharton
Naturalism
focused on a man's subjection to natural law, natural selection. man controlled by passion and environment
naturalism Writers
JackLondon, Stephen Crane
American Modernism
alienation and disconnection, paved way for multicultural lit, wrote from certain social cultural and ethnic perspectives
Modern Writers
Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Eliot, Cummings, Frost
Harlem Renaissance
black prose and poetry
Harlem Renaissance Writers
Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston,
Twentieth Century
blurring the lines of reality, individual in isolation.
20th Century Writers
Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, JD Salinger, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan,
Old English Lit
heroic ages, epic battles, supernatural characters (BEOWULF)
Medevial Lit
morality plays; themes of vice vs. virtue; allegories; folk ballads
medevial Lit Writers
Chaucer
Renaissance British Lit
religious and scientific inquiry
the Reformation
challenging the practices of the church
Elizabethan period
literary group, theater!
Elizabethan writers
Shakespeare, Marlowe
Shakespeare Sonnet
octave (8 lines) conflict and a seset 96) lines resolves conflict
Jacobean
metaphysical poetry; means of structure; anxiety about the church and law (Francis Bacon)
Carolinean
carpe diem lifestyle
Commonwealth Age
restoration comedies, sexually explicit, murder, incest and madness (John Dryden)
18th Century Lit
reasoned arguments, good humor, common sense, newspapers, satire and comedy
18th Century Writers
Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope
British Romantic Period
passion, imagination, deep sense of wonder and mystery
British Romantic Writers
William Blake, Wordswort, John Keats, Shelley, Jane Austen
Early Victorian
embraced the nation's identity; lonely and complex individuals
Early Victorian writers
Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Browning,
Middle Victorian
tension between middle class values and commitment to values, realism as a way of looking at the world
Middle Victorian writers
Lewis Carroll, Darwin, George Eliot, Lord Tennyson,
Late Victorian
skepticism toward traditional morality, Darwinism, described people as real people instead of heroes.
Late Victorian writers
Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde
20th century British lit
portray anxiety of changing society, photography and film, modernism, existentialism
20th century British writers
James Joyce, Salmon Rushdie, Orwell, DH LAwrence
Ancient Greek lit
Greek comedies and tragedies, epics, Homer, Socrates, plato, Aristotle
Ancient Roman lit
high-edge life of roman elite, Virgil and Ovid
Middle Ages
colloquial humor, Dante Aligheri
Modern World literature
fururism, shifting and uncertain nature of reality, Nabokov, Sartre, Rilke, Tolstoy, Achebe,