Colonialism- Puritanism 1650-1750

1620 – Mayflower “all people are corrupt

and must be saved by Christ”

Genre/Style:sermons, diaries – Cotton

Matherpersonal narratives /letterspoems – Anne Bradstreet

Rationalism/ Age of Enlightenment1750-1800

the Founding Fathers – The American Revolution (1775-1783)democratic utopia

Genre/Style:political pamphlets – rise of journalismtravel writinghighly ornate writing style

Thomas Paine – The Age of Reason, Common SenseThomas Jefferson – The Declaration of Independence Benjamin Franklin – Poor Richard’s Almanac , Autobiography

19th Century

• Thriving economy• 1850s – the Gold Rush• Industrial Revolution – H. Ford, A. Bell (1876)• Lack of political unity – rivalry North vs South• The Civil War (1861-1865) – Abraham Lincoln• Anti-discrimination measures – 14th, 15th

amendments• Slavery segregation (KKK)• Laws restricting immigration (1882)

American Renaissance/Romanticism1800-1855

Washington Irving – The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip van Winkle (1819)

James Fenimore Cooper – the “American Walter Scott” – The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

Edgar Allen Poe- darker side of human nature – GOTHIC double – supernatural

TRANSCENDENTALISM - finding the truth through feeling and intuitionRalph Waldo Emerson – Nature (1836), Self-Reliance (1841)Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience (1841), Walden (1854)

Nathaniel Hawthorne- man in society The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Herman Melville Moby Dick (1851) – a ‘wild and mad novel’

Mark Twain – the ‘human journey’Life on the Mississippi (1883)The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Harriet Beecher Stowe – “So you’re the little woman who made the book that made the great war” Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Poetry

• Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass (1855) –experimental poetry

“I celebrate myself and sing myselfNothing, not God, is greater than the self is”

• Emily Dickinson – personal and pure kind of poetry – unconventional style

Realism1855-1900

• Content:common characters not idealized (immigrants, laborers)people in society defined by classsociety corrupted by materialism

• William Dean Howells A Modern Instance (1882) – divorce

• Edward BellamyLooking Backward, 2000-1887

• Henry James – ‘recorder of the times’ – psychological realism

The Portrait of a Lady (1881)The Ambassadors (1903)

Naturalism1880-1900

• writers reflect the ideas of Darwin and Karl Marx • the "brute within" • fight for survival in an amoral, indifferent world – ‘the ugly side’• fictional world is commonplace and unheroic - dull existence

Stephen Crane - The Red Badge of Courage (1895)Frank Norris – the world=battlefield between

uncontrollable forces Jack London – Call of the Wild (1903)

1900-1950

• War with Spain (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam the Philippines)

• 1919 – Woodrow Wilson – The League of Nations• 1920s- the Roaring Twenties – excess and enjoyment• 1920-1933 – Prohibition organised crime• 1929 –Wall Street Crash the Great Depression• F.D. Roosevelt – The New Deal• 1945 – US joins the UN• 1948 – the Marshall Plan (Aid)• 1949- NATO

Modernist Fiction

• alienation and disconnection• fragmentation, juxtaposition• interior monologue, stream of consciousness

Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie (1900) An American Tragedy (1925)

Edith Wharton The House of Mirth (1905)

Gertrude Stein

The Lost Generation

• They had “grown up to find al gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”

• The Jazz Age – “borrowed time”

19251929 1929

1937

Modernist Poetry

• Robert Frost - The Road Not Taken• T.S. Eliott – The Waste Land (1923)• Ezra Pound – In a Station of the Metro (1915)• e.e. cummings -

Modernist Drama

1941

1948 1962

1947

Post-War(?) America

• The 50s - Consumerism and baby boom• The Koren War (1950-1951)• Protest against the Vietnam War (1960-1973) –

Make love, not war • Civil Rights Movement – Martin Luther King -1968• The Cold War – the space race – Ronald Reagan • The Gulf War -1991• 9/11 - Afghanistan• globalisation

Postmodernism – the Age of Anxiety

• popular culture • loneliness, “search for self”• mixing of fantasy with nonfiction; blurs lines of reality for reader

no heroesThe Beat Generation (60s,70s) - called for a ‘revolution in consciousness’

1948 1951 1964 1966

1952

1957

1958

1959

1960

1961

1969

1987

Post-modernist Poetry

• Alan Ginsberg – Howl (1956)

• Robert Lowell – confessional poetry• Sylvia Plath

• Langston Hughes – Harlem Renaissance

Nobel Prize winners

• 1930: Sinclair Lewis• 1936: Eugene O'Neill• 1938: Pearl S. Buck• 1948: T. S. Eliot• 1949: William Faulkner• 1954: Ernest Hemingway• 1962: John Steinbeck• 1976: Saul Bellow• 1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer (wrote in Yiddish)• 1987: Joseph Brodsky (wrote in Russian and English)• 1993: Toni Morrison