1. By time periods/Literary genres of study
EOCT Review
By time periods/Literary genres of study

2. Time periods of American literature

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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 Movement
Time
Period
Characteristics of the Movement
Representative Writers
Native American Period
Pre
Celebrates the natural word
Oral tradition; original authors and words are largely unknown
Colonial Period
Focuses on historical events, daily life, moral attitudes (Puritanism), political unrest
William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Edward Taylor
Revolutionary Period and Nationalism
Celebrates nationialism and patriotism and examines what it means to be “American”
Political writings by Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison
Romanticism and Transcendentalism
Celebrates individualism, nature, imagination, emotions
Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau

6. Periods of American Literature
Literary Movement
Time
Period
Characteristics of the Movement
Representative Writers
Realism
Examines realities of life, human frailty; regional culture (local color)
Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Kate Chopin
Naturalism
Views life as a set of natural laws to be discovered
Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, James T. Farrell
Modern Period
Themes of alienation, disconnectedness; experiments with new techniques, use of irony and understatement
T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck
Postmodern Period
1950-present
Nontraditional topics and structures; embrace of changing reality
Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oats, J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Theodore Roethke, John Barth, the Beat poets