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1. Colonial & Early American Literature (c. 1600–1750)
Key Writers: Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards
Features: Religious sermons, Puritanism, exploration narratives, moral instruction
Enlightenment / Rationalism (1750s-1800s)
Key Writers: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Pain, Thomas Jefferson
Features: Reason, Logic, Individual Rights, Political & Philosophical writtings, Rhetorical questions, Persuasive techniques
American renaissance (1830-65) - influenced by Romanticism (1800s-1860s)
Key Writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe
Features: Symbolism, nature, philosophical depth, exploration of human nature and morality
4. Transcendentalism (c. 1830–1860) (a sub-movement of the American Renaissance)
Key Writers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller
Features: Individualism, self-reliance, nature as a spiritual guide, rejection of materialism
5. Slave Narratives (c. 18th–19th century)
Key Writers: Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs
Features: Personal testimonies of slavery, abolitionist themes, firsthand accounts of oppression and resistance
6. Realism (c. 1865–1910)
Key Writers: Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton
Features: Everyday life, social critique, psychological depth, rejection of romantic idealism
7. Naturalism (c. 1890–1920)
Key Writers: Stephen Crane, Jack London, Upton Sinclair
Features: Determinism, social Darwinism, individuals shaped by environment and fate
8. The Harlem Renaissance (c. 1920–1935)
Key Writers: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay
Features: Celebration of Black culture, jazz influence, racial identity, political consciousness
9. Modernism (c. 1910–1945)
Key Writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot
Features: Experimentation, stream of consciousness, alienation, rejection of traditional values
10. The Beat Generation (c. 1945–1965)
Key Writers: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs
Features: Rebellion, counterculture, spirituality, jazz influence, spontaneous prose
11. Postmodernism (c. 1945–Present)
Key Writers: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison
Features: Fragmentation, irony, metafiction, rejection of grand narratives
12. Contemporary & Multicultural Literature (c. 1980–Present)
Key Writers: Jhumpa Lahiri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colson Whitehead
Features: Global perspectives, identity, postcolonial themes, experimental forms
