1914 - 1939: Modern Period - Jazz Age - Harlem Renaissance

Edgar Lee Masters Ezra Pound Edwin Arlington Robinson William Carlos Williams Robert Frost Carl Sandburg Wallace Stevens Robinson Jeffers Marianne Moore T.S. Eliot Edna St. Vincent Millay E.E. Cummings Amy Lowell H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) Edith Wharton Sinclair Lewis Willa Cather Gertrude Stein Sherwood Anderson John Dos Passos F. Scott Fitzgerald (jazz age) - (1896 - 1940)

• 1920's The Jazz Age

• Glamor, "conspicuous consumption," personal experiences

• The Great Gatsby (1925)

• Tender Is the Night (1934)

• Succumbed to alcoholism

William Faulkner - (1897 - 1962)

• Regional: Mississippi

• Dense, experimental style: "stream of consciousness"

• The Sound and the Fury (1929)

• Themes: Truths and conflicts of the heart, glamorous Southern past as an illusion

• Anti-slavery, harmony with nature

Ernest Hemingway - (1899 - 1961)

• Modern world stripped of illusion, psychologically and physically dangerous, living beneath the shadow of moral ruin

• simple diction, sentence structure

• Themes: Love and its loss, death and its avoidance

• grace under pressure, conformity to an ethical code

• Numerous novels and short stories

• 1954 Nobel prize for The Old Man and the Sea

Thomas Wolfe - (1900 - 1938)

• Romantic quest for self-knowledge, based on autobiography and invention

• Look Homeward Angel (1929)

• Novels and short stories

John Steinbeck - (1902 - 1968)

• Depression era success (1930s)

• Literary naturalist

• Subjects are poor, uneducated, struggling with prejudice, social attitudes, injustice

• Of Mice and Men (1937)

• The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

• Local writer (Salinas)

• Nobel prize 1962

Eugene O'Neill H.L. Mencken

Harlem Renaissance:

Langston Hughes Countee Cullen Jean Toomer W.E.B. DuBois James Baldwin - (1924 - 1987)

• Journalist, spokesman for African-Americans, conscience of America

• Themes: Social injustice, struggle of blacks for self-realization, anti-separatism

• Naturalistic realism

• Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

Etc.

Modernism was an international literary/art movement lasting from the turn of the century to around 1950. The movement involves a rejection of tradition and a hostile attitude toward the immediate past.

The major characteristics of Modernism are:

• movement away from Romanticism and Naturalism

• expresses the irrational workings of the unconscious

• stream of consciousness characterizations

• characters contend with ethical problems

• Movement to cultural relativism

• Imagistic and precision in language

• Was:

• Analytical

• Experimental

• Cultural relativism, anthropological (Eliot)

• Resort to mythological references

• Precision of language, spare, imagery

• Irrational workings of the unconscious mind

• Stream of consciousness

Post-Modernism challenged the philosophy of art and literature since about the 1960s.

Characteristics of Post-Modernism:

• reaction against an ordered view of the world

• eclectic writing style, often using parody

• development of such concepts as the absurd, the anti-hero, antinovel, magic realism

• proliferation of critical theories such as deconstructionism

1939 - : Contemporary Period Vladimir Nabokov Eudora Welty Robert Penn Warren Bernard Malamud Saul Bellow Norman Mailer John Updike Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Thomas Pynchon John Barth E.L. Doctorow Marianne Moore Theodore Roethke Elizabeth Bishop Robert Lowell Allen Ginsberg (Beat Generation) Adrienne Rich Sylvia Plath Thornton Wilder Arthur Miller Tennessee Williams Edward Albee African American writers: Ralph Ellison Zora Neal Hurston Alice Walker James Baldwin Richard Wright Gwendolyn Brooks LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka) Toni Morrison Etc.

Contemporary: Cultural Diversity in American Literature: Post - 1945

Literature began to deal with political and social issues. With the women's liberation movement of the 1970s, criticism came from feminit, gay, African-American, Native-American, an Marxist cultures and philosophies.

• Increase in genre literature

• Experimental styles

• Non-traditional (anything goes)

• Emphasis on cultural diversity - ethnic novelists, poets