1. Art imitating life; life imitating art.

2.   What represents our era? Brainstorm with your group and list on your paper the following:  Two genres of music (or songs)  One or two films  Three prominent people  Two historical events  Religious/scientific events Who are we?

3.   Also known as the “Classical Period”  Greek/Roman epics and tragedies  Philosophy – Plato, Socrates, Aristotle  Stories are not written, per se – later transcribed 800BC – 500AD ~ Ancient

4.   Introduction of Western Literature  Europe is “closed” off – small kingdoms  Catholic church rules!  Small warfare ~  Beowulf (700AD) – reflects warring entities  Chaucer’s (1390) The Canterbury Tales – later gives rise to Protestant Reformation 500-1500 Medieval

5.   Europe “opens” up  Rise of the monarch vs. the church (Protestant Reformation)  Navies, travel, globalization, trading  Elizabethan Era (1558 – 1603)– Queen Elizabeth I  Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)  Edmund Spenser – The Faerie Queen  Pilgrims go to America!  Puritans 1500-1660 Renaissance

6.   Also known as “Age of Reason” and “Neoclassical”– rise in philosophy and science  Revolutions – American, French  Europe returns to the “Old World”  United States establishing itself  Ben Franklin  John Locke 1700-1800 Enlightenment/Colonial

7.   Industrial Revolution begins in Europe  British –  New Imperialism  Mary Shelley – Frankenstein  Jane Austen  William Wordsworth  American –  Civil War  Fantasy and mysticism  Edgar Allan Poe  Walt Whitman  Emily Dickenson 1800-1870 Romantic

8.   Queen Victoria in England  Social Darwinism – strong crush the weak  Behavior – manners, manners, manners!  Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre  Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights  Robert Browning  Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment 1830 – 1901 Victorian

9.   American movement  Idea of the “Oversoul”  Ralph Waldo Emerson – “Self-Reliance”  Henry David Thoreau – “Civil Disobedience” 1830-1860 Transcendentalism

10.   Jim Crowe Laws – Separate but equal  Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorn Clemons) – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  Robert Louis Stevenson – Treasure Island  Industrial Revolution in U.S.  U.S. strives to be a world power  Automobile  Unions  WWI begins  Brits –  Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Earnest 1860 – 1914 Realism

11.   Disillusionment after WWI  Rise of cynical perspectives  What does it all mean?  Kierkegaard – “father” of the movement  Albert Camus – The Stranger 1900 – Present Existentialism

12.   Experimentation with new forms in art  WWI and WWII  Brits  W. B. Yeats  Dylan Thomas  Virginia Woolf  Americans  Robert Frost  The Lost Generation ~  Ernest Hemingway  F. Scott Fitzgerald  Gertrude Stein  Harlem Renaissance (Rise of black writers)  Langston Hughes 1910 – 1965 Modernism

13.   Anything goes!  Fragmented Poetry  This is US! 1965 – Present Post- Modernism