American Time Periods

Colonial Period

1607-1765; Foundign colony of Jamestown thru the Stamp Act in 1765; Edward Taylor, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin most important; lots of Puritan influence; newspapers and almanacs flourished

Revolutionary & Early Nat'l Period

1765-1830; Period begins with revolution and ends with 'second' revolution with Jacksonian democracy; Decl. of Ind., Constitution written; Knickerbockers; Godfrey made first American play; Bryant in poetry; William Hill Brown w/first American novel

Revolutionary & Early Nat'l Period: Revolutionary Age

1765-1790; Ends w/formation of federal govt; poetry was neoclassical; graveyard school; Trumbull, Hopkinson, Frencau, Barlow w/patriotic works; Federalist Papers by Paine, Samuel Adams, Hamilton, Madison; 1st Amer. Novel; Franklin's biography; Decl. of Ind.

Revolutionary & Early Nat'l Period: Federalist Age

1790-1830; called this bc of Federalist party; War of 1812; "era of good feeling" at first…till war…Washington Irving, Brackenridge writing; Longfellow, Poe, Hawthorne, Whittier, Simms, Holmes are BORN…not super popular yet…romanticism emerging

Romantic Period

1830-1865; Bryant, Irving, Poe, Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Lowell, Simms; moral qualities; almost ALL of the same qualities of the British version

Realistic Period

1865-1900; Begins w/end of Civil War; political corruption, criticism of capitalism; Darwin, Marx, Comte, Spencer begin to change minds thru science; Twain, Henry James, Howells; Ezra Pound; William James' Pragmatism; ART OF ART'S SAKE (aestheticism); Oscar Wilde (even though British); separation of art and morality (no more didacticism);

Naturalistic & Symbolic Period

1900-1930; this era marked between the two Wars; Henry James for novels; Amer. Criticism emerges w/Brownell, Hunkner, Spingarn; avant garde groups and Little Magazines; Willa Cather, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens; IMAGISTS in poetry emerge; Muckraking; F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Cummings, Wilson, Sinclair Lewis; Fugitives, agrarians, New Criticism emerge; Lost generation; dadaism; Harlem Renaissance

Period of Conformity & Criticism

1930-1960; Faulkner and Hemingway still writing; Henry Miller, Steinbeck, Wolfe, Farrell did their best works; Robinson, Frost, and Eliot still dominating poetry; Maxwell Anderson, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller dominate drama; The Fugitive Magazine still around…and New Criticism

Period of Confessional Self / Postmodernism

1960- ; time of uncertainty and revolt (Cold War); Tennessee Williams more established; Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Roethke, Robert Lowell in poetry; John Updike, Mailer, Styron in novels….along with others like Louise Gluck, James Tate