Period

Characteristics

Genres (Types)

Authors

Works

Early Native American Period (Up to 1600s)

·        valued nature and working together in tribes

·        learned about the universe by living in harmony with nature

·        oral, not written

·        folktales

·         myths with archetypes

·        poems/songs

·        anonymous

·        “Coyote Finishes His Work”

·        “The Song of the Sky Loom”

Exploration Period (1000 – 1650s)

·        valued risk-taking

·        learned about the universe by exploring

·        ships’ logs

·        journals

·        Christopher Columbus

·        Cabeza de Vaca

·        “Introduction to the Literary Period”

Puritan (1650 – 1750)

·        valued Bible study because people were sinners

·        learned about the universe through prayer and Bible study

·        poems

·        explanations of Biblical material, faith diaries in plain style

·        sermons

·        Anne Bradstreet

·        Cotton Mather

·        Jonathan Edwards

·        “Upon the Burning of Our House”

·        "The Wonders of The Invisible World" (in “Intro

·        “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”

Rationalist Period/ Age of Enlightenment

(1730s and 1740s)

·        valued reason and good deeds

·        learned about the universe through interacting with and helping others

·        autobiographies

·        scientific research

·        satire

·        self-help books

·        often used ornate style

·        Ben Franklin

The Autobiography

/Revolutionary Period

(1750 – 1800)

·        valued reason over tradition

·        learned about the universe through the application of reason to problems

·        political pamphlets

·        often used ornate style

·        Patrick Henry

Patrick Henry’s “Speech to the Virginia Convention”

American Romantic Period (1800 -1860)

·        valued feelings and intuition over reason

·        divided into two groups: transcendentalists and anti-transcendentalists

·        transcendentalists valued the individual’s ability to use nature’s beauty and human emotions to accomplish great things

·        anti-transcendentalists found evil, sin, and pain as unavoidable

·        learned about the universe by looking inside themselves

·        poems

·        essays

·        novels

·        William Cullen Bryant

·        Ralph Waldo Emerson

·        Henry David Thoreau

·        Nathaniel Hawthorne

·        Edgar Allan Poe

·        Herman Melville Poems of Walt Whitman

·        Poems of Emily Dickinson

·        William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis"

·        Emerson’s Nature and Self-Reliance

·        Thoreau’s Walden

·        “Dr. Heideggar’s Experiment”

·        “The Raven”

·        Moby Dick

·         “I Hear America Singing” and Leaves of Grass

·        Poems of Emily Dickinson (“I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died,” etc.)

Realism (1850 -1914)

·        valued the reality of common people (immigrants, laborers), their everyday lives, and their local environments

·        some valued naturalism: the belief that people are victims of humans’ natural weaknesses

·        rejected God and the supernatural

·        learned that the universe was indifferent to humanity

·        short stories

·        novels

·        Mark Twain

·        Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1914 – 1939)

·        valued flawed, not romantic, heroes and experimenting with writing styles

·        felt that American dream was no longer possible and technology was threatening

·        learned about the universe by looking at how a person’s mind worked

·        poems

·        short stories

·        novellas

·        novels

·        plays

·        T. S. Elliot

·        Williams Faulkner

·        Robert Frost

·        Langston Hughes

·        John Steinbeck

·        “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

·        “A Rose for Emily”

·        “The Death of the Hired Man”

·        “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Mother to Son”

·        Of Mice and Men

Contemporary (Postmodern) Period 1939 - Present

·        values cultural diversity, a variety of writing forms and styles, past literary periods, self-analysis, and the blending of fiction into nonfiction

·        learns about the universe by using every possible time, place, and experience

·        all genres

·        Gabriel García Márquez

·        Arthur Miller

·        “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”

·        The Crucible