EOCT Review

By time periods/Literary genres of

study
TIME PERIODS OF AMERICAN
LITERATURE
 Periods of American Literature
• A literary period is an artistic attitude of
shared characteristics. These characteristics
may include the style of writing, the genre, or
the subject matter. The work of a certain
literary period may be a response to historical
events, but it is not the same as the historical
period.
 Periods of American Literature
• American fiction began with the oral histories of
Native American and the writings of early explorers
and settlers of North America and extended through
the Colonial and Romantic eras. Literary output
increased with the start of the Westward Expansion
and Industrial Age. The two world wars of the
twentieth century impacted the styles and themes of
American fiction in profound ways. The beliefs and
values of the Cold War, Civil Rights and Electronic
eras continue to influence experimental as well as
traditional writers of contemporary American fiction.
 Periods of American Literature
The chart below gives an overview of the important movements and periods in American literature. Study the approximate dates
and characteristics of each so that you are able to classify a work of literature based on its style and content.

Literary Time Characteristics of Representative Writers

Movement Period the Movement
Native American Pre-1620- Celebrates the natural word Oral tradition; original authors
Period 1840 and words are largely unknown

Colonial Period 1620-1750 Focuses on historical William Bradford, Anne

events, daily life, moral
attitudes (Puritanism),
political unrest
Revolutionary Period 1750-1815 Celebrates nationialism and
and Nationalism patriotism and examines
what it means to be
“American”
Romanticism and 1800-1855 Celebrates individualism,
Transcendentalism nature, imagination,
emotions
Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards,
Edward Taylor
Political writings by Thomas
Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and
Thomas Jefferson, Alexander
Hamilton, James Madison
Washington Irving, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Herman Melville,
Emily Dickinson, Walt
Whitman, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau
Periods of American Literature
Literary Time Characteristics of
Movement Period the Movement
Realism 1850-1900 Examines realities of life,
human frailty; regional
culture (local color)
Naturalism 1880-1940 Views life as a set of natural
laws to be discovered
Modern Period 1900-1950 Themes of alienation,
disconnectedness;
experiments with new
techniques, use of irony and
understatement
Postmodern Period 1950-present Nontraditional topics and
structures; embrace of
changing reality
Representative Writers
Mark Twain, William Dean
Howells, Henry James, Kate
Chopin
Theodore Dreiser, Jack London,
Frank Norris, Stephen Crane,
James T. Farrell
T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Ernest Hemingway, Langston
Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston,
Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos,
William Faulkner, John
Steinbeck
Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol
Oats, J.D. Salinger, Kurt
Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon,
Theodore Roethke, John Barth,
the Beat poets