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400
Native Americans
They lived in the United States long time before Christopher Columbus will arrive. First people in the United States are called Native Americans. -
400
Native Americans
They lived in tribes in many different areas each one had its religion, customs, and language. They learned to survive,they learned fishing, hunting, building, planting, cooking, etc. In the middle of the country lived tribes such as the Comanche and Arapaho, in the southeast area lived tribes such as the Cherokee and the Seminole. -
400
Native Americans Literature.
This literature is oral and written. It includes ancient hieroglyphic, pictographic, folktales, myths,oral histories, and storytellers. -
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Native Americans Literature.
Some characteristics about this literature are:
Hero Initiation:Rituals and initiation in native American tribes.
Trickster:Animals represent tricksters in native American culture.
Symbolic Landmarks and Mythology:Totem poles.
Oral Tradition: Native American woman who is part of literature. -
400
Native Americans Literature.
The literature of this period express beliefs about the nature of the physical world,beliefs about social order and appropriate behavior and beliefs about human nature and the problem of good and evil.
People used topics like formation of the world through struggle and robbery ,movement from a sky world to a water world by means of a fall,creation story,a fall. -
400
Native Americans Literature.
The most famous people and their works during this time were:
Onondaga-Northeast Woodlands Indians myth :The Earth on Turtle's Back.
Navajo Indians myth:The Navajo Origin Legend.
Modoc Indians myth:When Grizzlies Walked Upright. -
Early American and Colonial Period
It period is divided in three sub periods.
Puritanism
Rationalism
The Enlightenment -
Puritanism
The first puritans were pilgrims who settled in New England.
Puritans were settled in the north , they were related with industries , they believed in God , they were religious and also hard working. -
Puritanism Literature
Puritan literature is focused on offering instruction from a Biblical point of view. Puritan authors approached writing from a personal point of view with many of their writings coming in the form of journals, diaries, and day-to-day experiences.People wrote in self perspective. -
Puritanism Literature
Famous writers and their works of the period:
William Bradford: Of Plymouth Plantation.
John Smith: The general Virginia's history, New England, and the Summer Isles.
Mary Rowlandson: A narration of the captivity and restoration of Ms. Mary Rowlandson.
Jonathan Edwards: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. -
Puritanism Literature
The most famous people and their works during this period:
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672): To My Dear and Loving Husband, The Prologue, The Author to Her Book, Upon the Burning of Our House.
Edward Taylor (1642-1729): Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold, Huswifery.
William Byrd (1674-1744): From the Secret Diary of William Byrd. -
Rationalism
During the rationalism, the writers and philosophers gave scientific reason and logical thought more importance about anything. -
Rationalism Literature
In this period, the literature gives to understand that people could discover truth through deductive reasoning, discourage dependence on religion. People wrote about topic like national mission,American character, democratic utopia, use of reason and history as an act of personal and national self-assertion. -
Rationalism Literature
People in this period usually wrote speeches, political pamphlets, travel writing, essays, and documents. -
Rationalism Literature
Famous writers and their works of the period:
Patrick Henry:Speech to the Virginia Convention.
Thomas Jefferson:The Declaration of Independence.
Thomas Paine:Common Sense and The Age of Reason. -
The Enlightenment
It is the age of reason or simply,it was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 18th century. -
The Enlightenment Literature
The enlightenment is a period where people understood and changed the world,during this period people express their feelings raw and unbridled passion. -
The Enlightenment Literature
The most famous people during this period were:
William Congreve
Denis Diderot
Benjamin Franklin
David Hume
Samuel Johnson
John Locke
Immanuel Kant
Sir Isaac Newton
Thomas Paine
Alexander Pope
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jonathan Swift
Voltaire
Mary Wollstonecraft -
The Romantic Period
Romanticism is an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual period.
This period is divided in two sub periods:
transcendentalism and dark romantics. -
The Romantic Literature
During this period people focused in make emphasize in the feelings, idealism, inductive reasoning, and intuition.
The ways to write more used during this period were:Poetry, character sketches, slave narratives, short stories,highly imaginative and subjective,emotional, individualistic, revolutionary,fantasy and formal language. -
The Romantic Literature
Writers in this period based their writings in topics like emotional intensity,escapism,common man as hero,nature as a refuge and source of knowledge or spirituality,and universe as perplexing and irrational. -
The romantic Literature
The most famous writers and their works of the period were:
Edgar Allan Poe:The Fall of the House of Usher.
Frederick Douglass:Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and an American Slave.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:The Song of Hiawatha. -
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism believes that knowledge could be arrived not just through the senses, if not also through intuition and contemplation of the internal spirit. -
Transcendentalism Literature
In this period people emphasize reliance on self and trust in one's own intuition and imagination apart from outside sources, also they have the idea that through intuition, people can see God's spirit in nature or in their individual souls. -
Transcendentalism Literature
People used these style of writing during this period: poetry, short stories,novels,symbolism, and idealistic.
They wrote about individualism,nature and non-conformity. -
Transcendentalism Literature
The most famous writers and their masterpieces were:
Ralph Waldo Emerson:Nature,Self-Reliance.
Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
Henry David Thoreau: Walden.
William Henry Channing
George Ripley
Emily Dickinson
Walt Whitman
Jones Very
Amos Bronson Alcott
Convers Francis
Elizabeth Peabody
Frederick Henry Hedge -
Dark Romantic Period
It is a literary subgenre of romanticism, it reflects the popular fascination with the irrational, the demonic and the grotesque. -
Dark Romantic Literature
People think that values beliefs and emotions as more important than logic or facts. The individual comes first, and often involves the worship of nature. In dark romanticism people are pessimistic in other hand in Romanticism people are optimists. -
Dark Romantic Literature
Dark Romantics focus on human fallibility, self-destruction, judgement, punishment, as well as the psychological effects of guilt and sin.
The noted writers of the period were:
Edgar Allan Poe
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
Emily Dickinson. -
The Renaissance
The Renaissance is a fervent period of culture, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages. -
The Renaissance Literature
Renaissance literature is characterized by the adoption of a humanist philosophy and the recovery of the classical literature. -
Rationalism Literature
The most popular ways to write literature during the renaissance were: the poem and the drama.
The most famous people of the period were:
Elizabeth I
Thomas Campion
John Donne
Ben Jonson
William Shakespeare
Christopher Marlowe
John Milton
Edmund Spenser
Sir Philip Sydney
Sir Thomas More
Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder
Sir Walter Raleigh
John Calvin
Mary Wroth -
Realism and Naturalism
Realism and Naturalism are a reaction against romanticism and its ideas like imagination, poetry and prose, as well as the main themes nature, exoticism, history, and heroes depicted as exceptional individuals. -
Realism Literature
Realism coincided with Victorianism,realism rejects imaginative idealization in favour of a close observation of outward appearances.
The most famous people in this period were:
Honoré de Balzac
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
George Eliot
Gustave Flaubert
William Dean Howells
Henry James
Mark Twain
Edith Wharton -
Realism Literature
During this period the most famous people were:
Honoré de Balzac
Dostoyevsky Fyodor
George Eliot
Gustave Flaubert
William Dean Howells
Henry James
Mark Twain
Edith Wharton -
Naturalism Literature
Naturalism literature was inspired by adaptation of the principles and methods of natural science, especially the Darwinian view of nature. -
Naturalism Literature
During this period the most famous people were:
Edith Wharton
Frank Norris
Emile Zola
Stephen Crane
Theodore Dreiser
Abraham Cahan
Ellen Glasgow
David Graham Phillips
Jack London -
Modernism
In this period starts the modern life, it was more scientific,technological ,mechanized.The devastation of World War I and the Great Depression also caused widespread suffering in Europe and the United States. -
Modernism Literature
In this period the poets were who took fullest advantage of the new spirit of the times and stretched the possibilities of their craft to lengths not previously imagined.
The most famous people of the period were:
Elizabeth Bishop
Joseph Conrad
Hilda Doolittle
Thomas Stearns Eliot
William Faulkner
Langston Hughes
Henry James
D. H Lawrence
Amy Lowell
Ezra Pound
George Bernard Shaw
Wallace Stevens
Tennessee Williams
Virginia Woolf
William Butler Yeats -
Modernism Literature
The most famous writers and theirs masterpieces of the period were: F. Scott Fitzgerald: skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby.
Richard Wright: exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son.
Zora Neale Hurston: told the story of a black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Ernest Hemingway:The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation. -
Modernism Literature
The most famous writers and their masterpieces were:
Willa Cather: told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia.
William Faulkner: used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury.
John Steinbeck: depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath . -
Contemporary
The United States which emerged from World War II confident and economically strong, entered the Cold War in the late 1940s. This conflict with the Soviet Union shaped global politics for more than four decades, and the proxy wars and threat of nuclear annihilation that came to define it were just some of the influences shaping American literature during the second half of the 20th century. -
Contemporary Literature
Contemporary literature reflects society's social and political viewpoints, shown through realistic characters, connections to current events and socioeconomic messages.
The writers are looking for trends that illuminate societal strengths and weaknesses to remind society of lessons they should learn and questions they should ask. -
Contemporary Literature
The most famous people and their works were:
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man tells the story of an unnamed black man adrift in, and ignored by, America.
James Baldwin: wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and sexuality throughout his life, but his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was his most accomplished and influential.
Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun, a play about the effects of racism in Chicago.
Gwendolyn Brooks: the first African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize. -
Contemporary Literature
The most famous people and their masterpieces in this period were:
Toni Morrison:The Bluest Eye , launched a writing career that would put the lives of black women at its center.
Alice Walker: began writing novels, poetry, and short stories that reflected her involvement in the civil rights movement.
Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner’s Song
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five -
Postmodernism
Postmodern literature is a form of literature which is marked to be stylistical and ideological. It is written as fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia, dark humor and authorial self-reference. -
Postmodernism Literature
Some noted people and their works of the period were:
Julia Alvarez:Antojos,Homecoming, The Other Side, The Woman I Kept to Myself, and In the Time of the Butterflies.
Harper Lee:To Kill A Mockingbird
Ian Frazier: Coyote v. Acme, Dating Your Mom, Family, On the Rez, and The Fish's Eye
Anna Quindlen: One Day, Now Broken in Two,Object Lessons, Black and Blue, One True Thing, and Blessings.
Rita Dove :For the Love of Books, Thomas and Beulah, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and American Smooth. -
Postmodernism Literature
The most famous writers and their works of the period were:
Martin Luther King Jr.: Letter from Birmingham City Jail
Arthur Miller: All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and The Last Yankee.
Field:The Lost Son and Words for the Wind.
Robert Hayden:Frederick Douglass, and A Ballad of Remembrance.
James Baldwin:The Rockpile and Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Theodore Roethke:Cuttings, Open House, The Waking and The Far.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy: Inaugural Address -
Contemporary Literature
The noted people and their works of the period were:
Eudora Welty: The Optimist’s Daughter
Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint, American Pastoral
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness
Saul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon, Beloved
Alice Walker: The Color Purple
Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street
Jamaica Kincaid: Annie John
Maxine Hong Kingston: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest
Don DeLillo: Underworld
Ha Jin: Waiting -
Postmodernism Literature
Postmodern authors tend to reject outright meanings in their novels, stories and poems, and, instead, highlight and celebrate the possibility of multiple meanings, or a complete lack of meaning, within a single literary work.
The most famous people and their works of the period were:
John Hershey: Hiroshima, The Wall, A Single Pebble, The War Lover, and Fling and Other Stories
Lawrence Ferlinghetti:Constantly Risking Absurdity, City Lights, Howl and other poems, and A Coney Island of the Mind.
