American Literature: Group 7

GROUP 7
Arnado, Erlinda
Batiancila, Icel
Cagula, Monaliza
American Literature
 American Literature was shaped by the history begins with the arrival of English
speaking Europians in what would become the United States. It stretches across more
than 400 years. It is divided into five major periods, each of which has unique
characteristics, notable authors, and representative works. American Literature was
naturally a colonial literature, by authors who were Englishmen and who thought and
wrote as such.
Periods of American Literature
The Colonial and Early National Period

( 17th century to 1830)
 The first European settlers of North America wrote about their experiences starting in
the 1600s. This was the earliest American literature: practical, straightforward, often
derivative of literature in Great Britain, and focused on the future.
 John Smith wrote

“Histories of Virginia” based on his
experiences as an English explorer
and a president of the Jamestown
Colony. These histories, published in
1608 and 1624, are among the
earliest works of American Literature
The Romantic Period (1830 to 1870)
 Romanticism is a way of thinking that values the individual over the group, the
subjective over the objective, and a person’s emotional experience over reason. It also
values the wildness of nature over human-made order.
 Edgar Allan Poe American short story-
writer, poet, critic, and editor who is
famous for his cultivation of mystery
and the macabre and known for his
“Gothic” Writing Style. His “The Raven”
in 1845 and “The Black Cat”.
 William Cullen Bryant was an

American romantic poet, journalist, and
longtime editor of the New York Evening
Post.
 “Thanatopsis”
 Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American

novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer.
His works often focus on history, morality, and
religion. He published “Young Goodman Brown,
The Birth-Mark, and The Scarlet Letter”.
Realism and Naturalism
( 1870 to 1910 )
The human cost of the Civil War in the United States was immense: more than 2.3 million
soldiers fought in the war, and perhaps as many as 851,000 people died in 1861–65. Walt
Whitman claimed that “a great literature will…arise out of the era of those four years,” and
what emerged in the following decades was a literature that presented a detailed and
unembellished vision of the world as it truly was. Naturalism was an intensified form of realism.
After the grim realities of a devastating war, they became writers’ primary mode of expression.
 Samuel Langhorne Clemens American

humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who
acquired international fame for his travel
narratives. He published a short story that
entitled of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras Country” in 1865.
The Modernist Period (1910 to 1945)

 Advances in science and technology in Western countries rapidly intensified at the start
of the 20th century and brought about a sense of unprecedented progress. The
devastation of World War I and the Great Depression also caused widespread suffering
in Europe and the United States. These contradictory impulses can be found swirling
within modernism, a movement in the arts defined first and foremost as a radical break
from the past.
 Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald F. American

short-story writer and novelist famous for his
depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s), his most
brilliant novel being The Great Gatsby (1925)
The Contemporary Period (1945 to present)
The 1950s and ’60s brought significant cultural shifts within the United States driven by the civil
rights movement and the women’s movement. American literature had become a much more
complex and inclusive story grounded on a wide-ranging body of past writings produced in the
United States by people of different backgrounds and open to more Americans in the present
day.
 Ralph Ellison, American writer

who won eminence with his first
novel (and the only one published
during his lifetime), “Invisible Man”
(1952).

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GROUP 7

The Colonial and Early National Period

 John Smith wrote

 William Cullen Bryant was an

 Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American

 Samuel Langhorne Clemens American

The Modernist Period (1910 to 1945)

 Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald F. American

 Ralph Ellison, American writer

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