1. This will be on your quiz on Friday!! Major American Literary Movements

2. Colonialism 1620-1770s Emphasis: history, religion, the New World Major Authors: Benjamin Franklin, Cotton Mather, Anne Bradstreet

3. Revolutionary 1750s – 1800 Emphasis: great documents of American revolution and independence Major Authors: Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin

4. Nationalism 1770s – 1820s Emphasis: authentic American settings and characters Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe

5. Romanticism 1780s – 1880s Emphasis: emotion and imagination over logic and scientific thought Major Authors: Nathanial Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Some would make the argument that Poe, and Irving are also Romantic authors)

6. Transcendentalism 1830s – 1850s Emphasis: self-reliance, independence from modern innovations Major Authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman

7. Realism 1850s – 1900 Emphasis: simpler style, everyday concerns Major Authors: Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin

8. Naturalism 1880s – 1940s Emphasis: how heredity and environment control people Major Authors: Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser

9. Modernism 1900 – 1950 (some say it continues through the present) Emphasis: alienation, reaction to modern life Major Authors: T.S. Elliot, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck

10. The Lost Generation 1914 – 1930s Emphasis: post-WWI disillusionment Major Authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound

11. Harlem Renaissance 1920s Emphasis: African- American literary movement Major Authors: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston

12. Southern Agrarians 1930s Emphasis: Southern American poets return to metrical verse and narrative Major Authors: John Crowe Ransom, Rober Penn Warren

13. New York School 1940s – 1960s Emphasis: urban, alternative lifestyles, leftist Major Authors: Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest

14. Beat Generation 1950s – 1960s Emphasis: anti- establishment Major Authors: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson

15. Confessional Poets 1950s – 1960s Emphasis: self-exploration, often brutal Major Authors: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath

16. Postmodernism 1950 – present Emphasis: post-WWII skepticism about absolutes, embracing of diversity, iron, and word play Major Authors: Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates