major periods of english american literature

Neoclassical Period Enlightenment/Age of ReasonEngland 1660-1785 America 1750-1800  Reaction to the expansiveness of the Renaissance in the direction of order and restraint.. Neoclassic

AN OVERVIEW

Major Periods of English &

American Literature

What is meant by “period”?

 A period is a dominant mode, style, or type of literature within a specific historical context.

 A period is usually indicative of the controlling philosophical perspective of the time.

 As such, periods are not generally confined to the literature of the time; rather, their

characteristics can be seen in other art forms

as well as non-literary texts.

 Dates are approximations.

Old English (450-1066)

Few surviving texts with little in common

Language closer to modern German than modern English

Frequently reflect non-English influence

Beowulf, “The Wanderer”

Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales)

“The Cuckoo’s Song”, mystery plays

Neoclassical Period (Enlightenment/Age of Reason)

England 1660-1785 America 1750-1800

 Reaction to the expansiveness of the Renaissance in the direction of order and restraint.

 Developed in France (Moliere, Rousseau, Voltaire).

 Emphasized classical ideals of rationality and control (human nature is constant through time).

 Art should reflect the universal commonality of human nature (“All men are created equal.”)

 Reason is emphasized as the highest faculty (Deism).

Neoclassical Period (cont.)

 Writing should be well structured, emotion should

be controlled, and emphasize qualities like wit.

England: John Locke, John Milton (Paradise Lost), Alexander Pope (Essay on Man), Jonathon Swift (Gulliver’s Travels), Henry Fielding (Tom Jones), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Jane Austen

(Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Pride and

Prejudice).

America: Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard’s

Almanack, autobiography), Thomas Paine

(“Common Sense”), Thomas Jefferson (“The

Declaration of Independence”), James Madison

(“The Constitution of the United States”).

Romantic Period

England 1785-1830 America 1800-1860

Reaction against the scientific rationality of Neoclassicism and the Industrial Revolution

Developed in Germany (Kant, Goethe)

Emphasized individuality, intuition,

imagination, idealism, nature (as opposed to society & social order)

Elevation of the common man (folklore, myth)

Mystery and the supernatural

Romantic Period (cont.)

England: Robert Burns (“To a Mouse”), William

Blake (Songs of Innocence, Songs of

Experience), William Wordsworth (Lyrical

Ballads, “Tintern Abbey,” “Intimations of

Immortality,” “I Wandered Lonely as a

Cloud”), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“The Rime

of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Kahn”), Lord Byron (“Don Juan”), Percy Bysshe Shelley

(“Ozymandias”), Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

(Frankenstein), John Keats (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”), Sir Walter Scott (Ivanhoe).

Romantic Period (cont.)

America: Washington Irving (“Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”), Edgar Allan Poe (“The

Raven,” Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque,

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Philosophy

of Composition”), James Fennimore Cooper (The

Last of the Mohicans), Herman Melville

(Moby-Dick, Billy Budd), Nathaniel Hawthorne (Twice-Told Tales, The Scarlet Letter), William Cullen Bryant

(“To a Waterfowl”), Oliver Wendell Holmes (“The

Chambered Nautilus”), Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow (“Paul Revere’s Ride”), James Russell

Lowell (“The First Snowfall”).

Romantic Period (cont.)

American Transcendentalism (Romantic

philosophy)

 Named for the core belief that our spiritual

nature transcends rationality and religious

doctrine; thus, it is found in intuition.

 Developed in New England, influenced by Eastern philosophy.

 Pro-suffrage & abolitionist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature, “The American

Scholar”), Henry David Thoreau (Walden, “Civil Disobedience”), Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass).

Victorian Period (England 1832-1901)

 Named for the reign of Queen Victoria, Britain’s longest reigning monarch.

 Period of stability and prosperity for Britain.

 British society extremely class conscious.

 Literature seen as a bridge between Romanticism and Modernism.

 Generally emphasized realistic portrayals of

common people, sometimes to promote social

change.

 Some writers continue to explore gothic themes begun in Romantic Period.

Victorian Period (cont.)

Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, Oliver Twist,

Great Expectations), George Eliot (Middlemarch),

Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D’Ubervilles), Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll

and Mr Hyde), Rudyard Kipling (Jungle Book),

Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre), Emily Brontë

(Wuthering Heights), Alfred, Lord Tennyson (In

Memoriam), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets from the Portuguese), Robert Browning (“My Last

Duchess”), Matthew Arnold (“Dover Beach”),

Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest).

Realistic Period (America 1860-1914)

Reaction against Romantic values (Civil War)

Developed in France (Balzac, Flaubert, Zola)

Emphasized the commonplace and ordinary (as opposed to the romanticized individual)

Sought to depict life as it was, not idealized

Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn), Ambrose Bierce (“An Occurrence at

Owl Creek Bridge”), William Dean Howells (A

Modern Instance), Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie).

Realistic Period (cont.)

Naturalism – hyper-realism

Named for the belief that man is simply a

higher order animal, and thus under the same natural constraints and limitations as other

animals

Controlled by heredity and environment

Stephen Crane (Maggie: A Girl of the Street,

The Red Badge of Courage), Jack London (“To

Build a Fire”), Upton Sinclair (The Jungle).

Edwardian Period (England

1901-1914)

 Named for King Edward.

 Some see as a continuation of Victorian Period; however, the status quo is increasingly

Room with a View, A Passage to India), George

Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara), A.C Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy).

Modern Period (1914-1945)

 Reaction against the values which led to WWI.

 Influenced by Schopenhauer (“negation of the will”),

Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil), Kierkegaard

(Fear and Trembling), as well as Darwin and Marx.

 If previous values are invalid, art is a tool to

establish new values (Pound: “Make it new”).

 Writers experiment with form.

 Form and content reflect the confusion and

vicissitudes of modern life.

 Expositions and resolutions are omitted; themes are implied rather than stated.

Modern Period (cont.)

Poetry:

Ezra Pound (The Fourth Canto), T.S Eliot

(Prufrock and other Observations, The Waste

Land, “The Hollow Men”), W.B Yeats (The

Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, The Swans at Coole), H.D (“Pear Tree”), Wallace

Stevens (Harmonium), William Carlos

Williams (“The Red Wheelbarrow,” “This Is

Just to Say”), Robert Frost (Mending Wall,

The Road Not Taken).

Modern Period (cont.)

Fiction:

James Joyce (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as

a Young Man), Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle), Ernest Hemingway (In

Our Time, The Sun Also Rises), William Faulkner

(As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury), F

Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), John

Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath), Thornton

Wilder (Our Town, The Bridge at San Luis Rey), D.H Lawrence (The Rainbow), Virginia Woolf

(Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse).

Post-Modern Period (1945-?)

 Critical dispute over whether an actual period or

a renewal and continuation Modernism

post-WWII.

 Influenced by Freud, Sartre, Camus, Derrida, and Foucault.

 Deconstruction: Text has no inherent meaning;

meaning derives from the tension between the

text’s ambiguities and contradictions revealed

upon close reading.

 Some believe it leads directly to the

counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s

Post-Modern Period (cont.)

Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Gabriel Garcia

Marques (One Hundred Years of Solitude), William

Burroughs (Naked Lunch), J.D Salinger (A Catcher in the Rye), Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five),

Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow), John Updike

(Rabbit Run), Phillip Roth (Portnoy’s Complaint,

American Pastoral), J.M Coetzee (Life & Times of

Michael K), Joyce Carol Oates (“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”), Margaret Atwood (The

Handmaiden’s Tale), Cormac McCarthy (Blood

Meridian), Allen Ginsberg (Howl and Other Poems),

Charles Bukowski (The Last Night of the Earth Poems).