HN American Lit Literary Movements

Literary movements and there key characteristics, titles and authors of stories during those periods

Native American

Native American

• Spiritual creator

• Oral tradition

• Valued Earth/Nature

• religious ceremonies

• speakers and storytellers

• good/evil beings

• create myths to feel comfortable

• totem

Puritans

• biblical allusion

• fear striking

• religious theme

• first person POV

• simple writing style

American Enlightenment/Rationalism

• ethos, logos, pathos

• liberalism

• republicanism

Light Romanticism

• Prefers natural over artificial (nature over civilization)

• Personal experience over universal principles

• Truth comes from imagination and beauty

  • Feeling and intuition over reason/logic

  • Poetry is the highest form of expression

• Individual freedom is sought after (don’t want people to conform to society)

• Experience valued over formal education

• Optimistic view of world

Dark Romanticism

• Response to Light Romanticism

  • Nature can be dark and so can humans

• Focuses on nature’s connection with humans

  • Nature can be opposed to humans

  • Nature can be symbolic of human nature

• Love of history, paranormal, gothic, medieval, mystical

• Focus on inherent darkness of humans and how they deliberately deviate from what is good

Civil War Era

• Literature explored the resistance to enslavement

• Depicted a nation divided and vivid accounts of wartime life

• Experimentation of poetic forms

• Examination of the self and its relation to the world

• Emphasis on strength in religion

  • Spirituals: combined traditional African music with Christian hymns

    • Many songs had a dual meaning: religious faith and a desire for freedom

• Narratives of enslaved people

  • Usually shared the horrors of enslavement and exposed enslavers

  • Showed that enslaved people were people not property

Realism

• Focus on ordinary people

  • Character emphasized over plot

  • Exploration of ethical dilemmas

• Presents life as it is

  • No filter

  • Sometimes awful and frightening

  • Rejects sentimental or sensational

• Loss of optimism

• Verisimilitude: “the appearance of being real or true” - Present reality as reality

  • Uses the language of people and places

  • Dialect: a variety of language distinguished from other forms of the same language by grammar, spelling, and vocabulary.

  • Vernacular: plain, everyday language used by ordinary people

• Tone is often comical, satirical, or matter-of-fact

Modernism

• Sense of alienation, despair, and disillusionment

  • God is absent or nonexistent

  • American Dream is impossible and corrupt

• Life is chaotic and unordered

• Hero who is flawed and disillusioned, not ideal

  • Has inner strength

• Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and form

  • Represents the fragmentation of society

• Rejection of traditional themes and values

  • Disconnected from history or institutions

  • Response to conservative nature of realism

• Interest in inner workings of human mind

  • Stream of Consciousness

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Jonathan Edwards, Puritan

The Ministers Black Veil

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Puritan

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

Patrick Henry, American Enlightenment/Rationalism

The Declaration of Independence

Thomas Jefferson, American Enlightenment/Rationalism

Excerpt from Nature

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Light Romanticism

Self Reliance

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Light Romanticism

The Pit and the Pendulum

1. Edgar Allan Poe, Dark Romanticism

The Fall of the House of Usher

2. Edgar Allan Poe, Dark Romanticism

Ain’t I a Woman?

Sojourner Truth, Civil War

Story of an Hour

Kate Chopin, Realism

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

Mark Twain, Realism

The Jury of Her Peers

Susan Glaspell, Modernism

How the World was Made

Native American

The Sky Tree

Native American