2. Colonialism- Puritanism 1650-1750
1620 – Mayflower “all people are corrupt and must be saved by Christ”
Genre/Style:
sermons, diaries – Cotton Mather
personal narratives /letters
poems – Anne Bradstreet

3. Rationalism/ Age of Enlightenment 1750-1800
the Founding Fathers – The American Revolution ( ) democratic utopia Genre/Style: political pamphlets – rise of journalism travel writing highly ornate writing style Thomas Paine – The Age of Reason, Common Sense Thomas Jefferson – The Declaration of Independence Benjamin Franklin – Poor Richard’s Almanac , Autobiography

4. 19th Century Thriving economy 1850s – the Gold Rush
Industrial Revolution – H. Ford, A. Bell (1876)
Lack of political unity – rivalry North vs South
The Civil War ( ) – Abraham Lincoln
Anti-discrimination measures – 14th, 15th amendments
Slavery segregation (KKK)
Laws restricting immigration (1882)

5. American Renaissance/Romanticism 1800-1855
Washington Irving – The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip van Winkle (1819) James Fenimore Cooper – the “American Walter Scott” – The Last of the Mohicans (1826) Edgar Allen Poe- darker side of human nature – GOTHIC double – supernatural TRANSCENDENTALISM - finding the truth through feeling and intuition Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature (1836), Self-Reliance (1841) Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience (1841), Walden (1854)

6. Nathaniel Hawthorne- man in society The Scarlet Letter (1850) Herman Melville Moby Dick (1851) – a ‘wild and mad novel’ Mark Twain – the ‘human journey’ Life on the Mississippi (1883) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) Harriet Beecher Stowe – “So you’re the little woman who made the book that made the great war” Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

7. Poetry Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass (1855) –experimental poetry
“I celebrate myself and sing myself
Nothing, not God, is greater than the self is”
Emily Dickinson – personal and pure kind of poetry – unconventional style

8. Realism
Content:
common characters not idealized (immigrants, laborers)
people in society defined by class
society corrupted by materialism
William Dean Howells
A Modern Instance (1882) – divorce
Edward Bellamy
Looking Backward,
Henry James
– ‘recorder of the times’
– psychological realism The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
The Ambassadors (1903)

9. Naturalism 1880-1900 writers reflect the ideas of Darwin and Karl Marx
the "brute within"
fight for survival in an amoral, indifferent world – ‘the ugly side’
fictional world is commonplace and unheroic - dull existence
Stephen Crane - The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Frank Norris – the world=battlefield between
uncontrollable forces
Jack London – Call of the Wild (1903)

10. 1900-1950 War with Spain (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam the Philippines)
1919 – Woodrow Wilson – The League of Nations
1920s- the Roaring Twenties – excess and enjoyment
– Prohibition organised crime
1929 –Wall Street Crash the Great Depression
F.D. Roosevelt – The New Deal
1945 – US joins the UN
1948 – the Marshall Plan (Aid)
1949- NATO

11. Modernist Fiction alienation and disconnection
fragmentation, juxtaposition
interior monologue, stream of consciousness
Theodore Dreiser
Sister Carrie (1900)
An American Tragedy (1925)
Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth (1905)
Gertrude Stein

12. The Lost Generation
They had “grown up to find al gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”
The Jazz Age – “borrowed time”
1925
1937
1929
1929

13. Modernist Poetry Robert Frost - The Road Not Taken
T.S. Eliott – The Waste Land (1923)
Ezra Pound – In a Station of the Metro (1915)
e.e. cummings -

14. Modernist Drama
1947
1941
1948
1962

15. Post-War(?) America The 50s - Consumerism and baby boom
The Koren War ( )
Protest against the Vietnam War ( ) – Make love, not war
Civil Rights Movement – Martin Luther King -1968
The Cold War – the space race – Ronald Reagan
The Gulf War -1991
9/11 - Afghanistan
globalisation

16. Postmodernism – the Age of Anxiety
popular culture
loneliness, “search for self”
mixing of fantasy with nonfiction; blurs lines of reality for reader no heroes
The Beat Generation (60s,70s) - called for a ‘revolution in consciousness’
1948
1966
1951
1964

17. 1952
1958
1959
1957

18. 1960
1961
1987
1969

19. Post-modernist Poetry
Alan Ginsberg – Howl (1956)
Robert Lowell – confessional poetry
Sylvia Plath
Langston Hughes – Harlem Renaissance

20. Nobel Prize winners 1930: Sinclair Lewis 1936: Eugene O'Neill
1938: Pearl S. Buck
1948: T. S. Eliot
1949: William Faulkner
1954: Ernest Hemingway
1962: John Steinbeck
1976: Saul Bellow
1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer (wrote in Yiddish)
1987: Joseph Brodsky (wrote in Russian and English)
1993: Toni Morrison