Periods of American Literature

"The division of American literature into convenient historical segments, or 'periods', lacks the fairly clear consensus among literary scholars that we find with reference to English literature..."

1607 - 1775: Colonial Period

William Bradford John Winthrop Cotton Mather Benjamin Franklin Anne Bradstreet

1765 - 1790: Revolutionary Age

Thomas Jefferson Alexander Hamilton James Madison Thomas Paine

1775 - 1865: Early National Period

James Fenimore Cooper - 1789 - 1851

• The Leatherstocking Tales, including Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer, among his 32 novels

Edgar Allan Poe William Cullen Bryant Harriet Jacobs

Slave narratives:

Olaudah Equiano

Phillis Wheatley – (1753? - 1784)

• Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral (1773, London)

• First book published by an African

• Themes of Christian gift of salvation, pride in African-American achievements

Frederick Douglass - (1818 - 1895)

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

• My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

• Examples of American tales of the self-made man

Sojourner Truth - (1797 - 1883)

• Abolitionist

• An Account of an Experience With Discrimination (1865)

Paul Laurence Dunbar

1828 - 1865: Romantic Period in America (American Renaissance or Age of Transcendentalism)

Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1803 - 1832

• The center of American Transcendentalism

• Book Nature and various essays

Henry David Thoreau - 1817 - 1862

• A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1849)

• "Civil Disobedience" (1849)

• Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)

Edgar Allan Poe - 1809 - 1849

• Numerous short stories of the macabre

• Poetry, including "The Raven"

• Father of the detective story

Herman Mellville - 1819 - 1891

• Novels include Typee (1846), Moby Dick (1851), Billy Budd (1924, posthumous)

• "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853), The Encantadas (1853), and "Benito Cereno" (1855)

Washington Irving - 1783 - 1859

• Several books of tales and satire

• The Tales of Alhambra, 1832, including "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Nathaniel Hawthorne - 1804 - 1864

• Novels - The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851) , The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860)

• Over 100 stories, essays and sketches

Harriet Beecher Stowe John Greenleaf Whittier Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Walt Whitman

American Romanticism stems from the English Romantic poets, such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Blake.

The major themes of American Romanticism are:

• intuition is more valid than reason

• experience is more important than universal principles

• man is at the center of the universe and God is the center of man

• man should seek harmony with nature where the supernatural can be sensed

• we should strive for idealism by changing the world into what it should be, rather than what it is

• passion, beauty, emotion are revered

• return to the "romantic" past, i.e., the Homeric & heroic era

Established principally by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his book Nature (1836)

Principles of Transcendentalism:

• all objects are miniature versions of the universe

• intuition and conscience "transcend" experience and reason

• man is one with nature

• God is everywhere, in nature and in man

• extension of Romanticism