Cummings expressed a spirit of revolution and experimentation in their poetry. After the grim realities of a devastating war, they became writers’ primary mode of expression. Start studying American Literature Timeline. John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). While the exact number, dates, and names of these periods vary, the following lists conform to widespread acceptance. . A detailed timeline about how Romanticism became a literary movement. Eugene O’Neill was the foremost American playwright of the period. He also wrote the first African American play to be published, The Escape (1858). Edwardian Age (1901-1910)Romanticism (1798-1837) – This period was mainly a reaction against the philosophy of Enlightenment period that dominated much of European Philosophy. Thornton Wilder presented a realistic (and enormously influential) vision of small-town America in Our Town, first produced in 1938. Dec 4, 2016 - Graphical timeline representing literary periods & movements, as well as major events or authors from literature history. It then appeared on the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865, which catapulted him to national fame. 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. Richard II was the monarch from 1377 - 99, and the types of literature were Medieval and Gothic. To learn more about specific eras, browse through their Literary Periods page. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by Stephen Crane, and McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903), by Frank Norris, are novels that vividly depict the reality of urban life, war, and capitalism. While … Hello! Here are some of the most commonly agreed upon periods of American literature from the colonial period to the present. Naturalism was an intensified form of realism. Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a play about the effects of racism in Chicago, was first performed in 1959. Among the important poets of this period are, In the early decades of the contemporary period, American drama was dominated by three men: Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. American Literature Timeline Period Dates Period Name Period Characteristics Famous Authors and Works Arrived 40,000 - 20,000 B.C Native Americans 1. Literary Period Introductions Tracing the evolution of literature through time scholars often group works from a certain timeframe together and label it as a period or movement. Literary Periods and Movements is the evolution of literature through time. Following the tables, in chronological That is a real name, believe it or not. /* 728x90, created 5/23/10 litnet homepage top leader */ My name is Elspeth Green, as you might see in the little bar down there. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which he wrote during the 1770s and ’80s, told a quintessentially American life story. google_ad_slot = "8641330477"; It also values the wildness of nature over human-made order. William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929). Literature written by African Americans during the contemporary period was shaped in many ways by Richard Wright, whose autobiography Black Boy was published in 1945. 1500–1650, The Elizabethan Era But the book, which went through many subsequent editions, became a landmark in American poetry, and it epitomized the ethos of the Romantic period. She received a Nobel Prize in 1993. Its eeriness is intensified by its meter and rhyme scheme. The United States, which emerged from World War II confident and economically strong, entered the Cold War in the late 1940s. Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most important organ for poetry not just in the United States but for the English-speaking world. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Individual achievements are highly valued. By the turn of the 21st century, 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. Despite, or perhaps because of, these contradictory impulses, the modernist period proved to be one of the richest and most productive in American literature. I'm going to be your intrepid guide as we go on a magical mystery tour of books. Victorian Period. Hello! Classical influences on poetry and drama. Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) questioned the American Dream through the destruction of its main character, while Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) excavated his characters’ dreams and frustrations. Shakespeare wrote over 150 sonnets! This section of The Literature Network aims to disect these movements for the better understanding of you, the reader. As the first millennium passed, more sophisticated and elaborately decorated churches emerged; windows and silhouettes were adorned wit… 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. The era about specific eras you can browse back to our literary periods timeline was a humorous tale! 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