MAJOR PERIODS IN ENGLISH AND 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.

 ENGLISH LITERATURE

 literature produced in England, from the introduction of Old English by the

Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century to the present. The works of those Irish and
Scottish authors who are closely identified with English life and letters are also
considered part of English literature.

 AMERICAN LITERATURE

 Literary works, fiction and nonfiction of the American colonies and the United
States, written in the English language from about 1600 to the present.
 This literature captures America’s quest to understand and define itself. From
the beginning America was unique in the diversity of its inhabitants; over time
they arrived from all parts of the world.
 Although English quickly became the language of America, regional and ethnic
dialects have enlivened and enriched the country’s literature almost from the
start.

1. OLD ENGLISH OR ANGLO-SAXON ERA (450-1066)

 This period extends from about 450 to 1066, the year of the Norman-French
conquest of England.
 The Germanic tribes from Europe who overran England in the 5th century, after
the Roman withdrawal, brought with them the Old English, or Anglo-Saxon,
language, which is the basis of Modern English.
 Few surviving texts with little in common.
 Language closer to modern German than modern English. Frequently reflect
non-English influence.
 Beowulf, “The Wanderer”
 Much of Old English poetry was probably intended to be chanted, with harp
accompaniment, by the Anglo-Saxon scop, or bard.
 Prose in Old English is represented by a large number of religious works.

2.  MIDDLE ENGLISH (1066-1500)

 Extending from 1066 to 1485, this period is noted for the extensive influence of
French literature on native English forms and theme
 The Middle English literature of the 14th and 15th centuries is much more
diversified than the previous Old English literature.
 Works frequently of a religiously didactic content.
 Written for performance at court or for festivals.
 Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales) “The Cuckoo’s Song”, mystery plays

3.  ENGLISH RENAISSANCE (1500-1660)

 Influence of Aristotle, Ovid, and other Greco-Roman thinkers, as well as science
and exploration.
 Primarily texts for public performance (plays, masques) and some books of
poetry.

 Prominent Writers and their Works:

 William Shakespeare,
 Christopher Marlowe,
 Ben Jonson,
 Francis Bacon,
 John Fletcher,
 Francis Beaumont.

4. 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).
  Writing should be well structured, emotion should be controlled, and emphasize
qualities like wit.

 Prominent Writers and their Works:

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”).
5.  ROMANTIC PERIOD ENGLAND 1785-1830 AMERICA 1800-1860
 Reaction against the scientific rationality of Neoclassicism and the Industrial
Revolution.
 Developed in Germany (Kant, Goethe).
 “I felt before I thought.” -RosseauEmphasized individuality, intuition,
imagination, idealism, nature (as opposed to society & social order).
 Elevation of the common man (folklore, myth).
 Mystery and the supernatural.
 romantic literature everywhere developed, imagination was praised over
reason, emotions over logic, and intuition over science—making way for a vast
body of literature of great sensibility and passion.
 This literature emphasized a new flexibility of form adapted to varying content,
encouraged the development of complex and fast-moving plots, and allowed
mixed genres (tragicomedy and the mingling of the grotesque and the sublime)
and freer style.
 No longer tolerated, for example, were the fixed classical conventions, such as
the famous three unities (time, place, and action) of tragedy.
 In English poetry, for example, blank verse largely superseded the rhymed
couplet that dominated 18th- century poetry.
ROMANTIC THEMES
 LIBERTARIANISM-the desire to be free of convention and tyranny, and the
new emphasis on the rights and dignity of the individual.
Political and social causes became dominant themes in romantic poetry and
prose throughout the Western world, producing many vital human documents that are
still pertinent.
 NATURE-Basic to such sentiments was an interest central to the romantic
movement: the concern with nature and natural surroundings.
 -Delight in unspoiled scenery and in the (presumably) innocent life of rural
dwellers.
 THE LURE OF THE EXOTIC-In the spirit of their new freedom, romantic writers
in all cultures expanded their imaginary horizons spatially and chronologically. -
They turned back to the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century) for themes
and settings and to the Asian setting of Xanadu evoked by Coleridge in his
unfinished lyric “Kubla Khan.

 THE SUPERNATURAL- The trend toward the irrational and the supernatural
was an important component of English and German romantic literature.- It was
reinforced on the one hand by disillusion with 18th-century rationalism and on
the other by the rediscovery of a body of older literature—folktales and ballads—
collected by Percy and by German scholars Jacob and Wilhelm Karl Grimm and
Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. From such material comes, for example,
the motif of the doppelgänger (German for “double”). Many romantic writers,
especially in Germany, were fascinated with this concept, perhaps because of the
general romantic concern with self-identity.

 Prominent Writers and their Works:

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).
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 Philosophy
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).

England Transcendentalism
In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism
developed as an American version of romanticism.
the transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to
commune with the universe and transcend the limitations of the material world.
The transcendentalists found their chief source of inspiration in nature.

6.  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.
 The novel gradually became the dominant form in literature during the
Victorian Age.
 English literature throughout much of the century, the attention of many
writers was directed, sometimes passionately, to such issues as the
growth of English democracy, the education of the masses, the progress
of industrial enterprise and the consequent rise of a materialistic
philosophy, and the plight of the newly industrialized worker.

 Prominent Writers and their Works:

 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).

7. 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.
 Realist literature is defined particularly as the fiction produced in Europe
and the United States from about 1840 until the 1890s, when realism was
superseded by naturalism. This form of realism began in France in the
novels of Gustave Flaubert and the short stories of Guy de Maupassant.
 an attempt to describe human behavior and surroundings or to
represent figures and objects exactly as they act or appear in life.

 Prominent Writers and their Works:

 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).

 Philosophy of Realistic Period

 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.
 Naturalism (literature), in literature, the theory that literary
composition should be based on an objective, empirical
presentation of human being.
 Controlled by heredity and environment.
 Prominent Writers and their Works:
 Stephen Crane (Maggie: A Girl of the Street, The Red
Badge of Courage), Jack London (“To Build a Fire”), Upton
Sinclair (The Jungle).

8.  EDWARDIAN PERIOD (ENGLAND 1901-1914)

 Named for King Edward.
 Some see as a continuation of Victorian Period; however, the status quo
is increasingly threatened.
 Distinction between literature and popular fiction.
 Prominent Writers and their Works:
 Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness), H.G. Wells (War of the
Worlds), E.M. Forster (A Room with a View, A Passage to India), George
Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara), A.C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy).
9.  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.
 During the 20th century a communications revolution that introduced
motion pictures, radio, and television brought the world into view—and
eventually into the living room. The new forms of communication
competed with books as sources of amusement and enlightenment. New
forms of communication and new modes of transportation made American
society increasingly mobile and familiar with many more regions of the
country. Literary voices from even the remotest corners could reach a
national audience. At the same time, American writers—particularly
writers of fiction— began to influence world literature.
 Prominent Writers and their Works:
 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).
 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).

10.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.
 Prominent Writers and their Works:
 Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (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 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).