Major American Literary Movements

1. Major American Literary Movements This will be on your quiz on Friday!!

2. Colonialism • 1620-1770s • Emphasis: history, religion, the New World • Major Authors: Benjamin Franklin, Cotton Mather, Anne Bradstreet

3. Revolutionary • 1750s – 1800 • Emphasis: great documents of American revolution and independence • Major Authors: Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin

4. Nationalism • 1770s – 1820s • Emphasis: authentic American settings and characters • Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe

5. Romanticism • 1780s – 1880s • Emphasis: emotion and imagination over logic and scientific thought • Major Authors: Nathanial Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • (Some would make the argument that Poe, and Irving are also Romantic authors)

6. Transcendentalism • 1830s – 1850s • Emphasis: self-reliance, independence from modern innovations • Major Authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman

7. Realism • 1850s – 1900 • Emphasis: simpler style, everyday concerns • Major Authors: Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin

8. Naturalism • 1880s – 1940s • Emphasis: how heredity and environment control people • Major Authors: Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser

9. Modernism • 1900 – 1950 (some say it continues through the present) • Emphasis: alienation, reaction to modern life • Major Authors: T.S. Elliot, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck

10. The Lost Generation • 1914 – 1930s • Emphasis: post-WWI disillusionment • Major Authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound

11. Harlem Renaissance • 1920s • Emphasis: African-American literary movement • Major Authors: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston

12. Southern Agrarians • 1930s • Emphasis: Southern American poets return to metrical verse and narrative • Major Authors: John Crowe Ransom, Rober Penn Warren

13. New York School • 1940s – 1960s • Emphasis: urban, alternative lifestyles, leftist • Major Authors: Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest

14. Beat Generation • 1950s – 1960s • Emphasis: anti-establishment • Major Authors: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson

15. Confessional Poets • 1950s – 1960s • Emphasis: self-exploration, often brutal • Major Authors: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath

16. Postmodernism • 1950 – present • Emphasis: post-WWII skepticism about absolutes, embracing of diversity, iron, and word play • Major Authors: Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates