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Period: Jan 1, 1400 to Dec 31, 1499
Native American Literature
Native American literature was for the most part based off of orally passed on stories, they were the stories that shaped the Native American culture. These stories answered why things were the way they were at the time. Most of what we’ve learned about the Native Americans comes from their stories because they tell about their hardships and what they have gone through to get to where they are. They even included stories about the Europeans arriving in the new world. -
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Puritan Literature
In the 1620’s the Bible because a model for the peoples writing. They saw their lives as a journey of salvation and made connections between real life events and biblical stories. They kept their writings simple so that everyone could easily understand. They thought that things that went on in their everyday life were signs of things like evil or the death of a loved one. Most Puritan writings were in diaries and histories. This happened around the time of the Salem Witch trials. -
Rationalism
Rationalism focused on facts and science which was a huge change during the time, for the most part during that time all writings and beliefs were based off of the Bible. Writings of this time related and responded to politics and social events of the time. During this time writings like The American Crisis came out. Women talked about receiving equal rights and slaves wrote about freedom. Others even wrote about the mistreatment of slaves by their owners. -
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Gothic Fiction
Gothic refers to the use of primitive medieval, wild, or mysterious elements in literature. Gothic elements offended eighteenth-century classical writers but appealed to the Romantic writers who followed them. Gothic novels feature places like mysterious and gloomy castles, where horrifying, supernatural events take place. Writers heavily influences by this type of literature would be those such as Poe. -
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Romanticism
Romanticism was a literary and artistic movement of the nineteenth century that arose in reaction against eighteenth-century Neoclassicism and placed a premium on fancy, imagination, emotion, nature, individuality, and exotica. There’s a movement here from personal and political documents to entertaining ones. Purely American topics were introduced such as frontier life. Romantic elements can be found in the works of American writers as diverse as Cooper, Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, Haw -
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism came about during the late 18th and 19th centuries. They believed that reality exists only in the world of the spirit and that what we observe in the physical world are only appearances. We learn about the world of the spirit through our reason. They believed that each person finds truth within themselves and they also emphasized self-reliance and individuality. They believed that society needs to be reformed. In order to learn what is right a person must rely on reason. -
Realism
Realism is the presentation in art of the details of actual life. Realism was also a literary movement that began during the nineteenth century 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. The Realists, in turn, were followed by the Naturalists, who traced the effects o -
Naturalism
An outgrowth of Realism, Naturalism 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 people as hapless victims of immutable natural laws. Early exponents of Naturalism included Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser. -
Regionalism
Another outgrowth of Realism, Regionalism in literature is the tendency among certain authors to write about specific geographical areas. Regional writers like Willa Cather and William Faulkner, present the distinct culture of an area, including its speech, customs, beliefs, and history. Local-color writing may be considered a type of Regionalism, but Regionalists, like the southern writers of the 1920’s, usually go beyond mere presentation of cultural idiosyncrasies and attempt, instead, a s -
Imagism
Name given to a movement in poetry, originating in 1912 and represented by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and others, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images. In this literary movement these writers believed in using words to the very exact definition and not making things vague. Many writers would write the Japanese haiku poetry because it would help them focus on one image. -
Modern Age
Movement that thrive throughout 1915-1946. An age of disillusionment and confusion. Authors would commonly just look at what was happening in history in the US during these dates. Critics believe this period brought us perhaps our best writers. The authors during this period raised all the great questions of life…but offered no answers. -
Harlem Renaissance
Part of the Modern Age, The Harlem Renaissance, which occurred during the 1920’s, was a time of African American pride and artistic creativity that was centered in Harlem, New York City. African-Americans started to become recognized for their art, entertainment, and writings. Writers of the Harlem Renaissance include Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemps. -
Contemporary
Contemporary is literature that is a continuation of Postmodernism. Began in the 1940s after WWll and still continues in the present. People are learning to cope with problems through communication. People's sense of identity is shaped by cultural and gender attitudes emergence of ethnic writers and women writers, who used styles such as narratives: both fiction and nonfiction, anti-heroes and humorous irony.