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v. t. e. The history of literature is the historical development of writings in prose or poetry that attempt to provide entertainment or education to the reader, as well as the development of the literary techniques used in the communication of these pieces. Not all writings constitute literature.
The term “English literature” refers to the body of written works produced in the English language by inhabitants of the British Isles from the 7th century to the present, ranging from drama, poetry, and fiction to autobiography and historical writing. Landmark writers range from William Shakespeare and Arundhati Roy to Jane Austen and Kazuo Ishiguro.
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- Overview
- Pre-colonization
- The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century–1830)
- The Romantic Period (1830–70)
- Realism and Naturalism (1870–1910)
- The Modernist Period (1910–45)
- The Contemporary Period (1945–present)
The history of American literature reaches from the oral traditions of Native peoples to the novels, poetry, and drama created in the United States today. This list describes its six major periods.
Literature has been created in what is today the United States for thousands of years. This history began with the many oral traditions of the Indigenous peoples of North America.
Among the Native peoples of the Plains, the Southwest, and parts of present-day California, Coyote was the central figure of the age before humans were created. Hundreds of tales told by these peoples describe his exploits as a trickster and as a benefactor to humankind.
Raven was Coyote’s counterpart for the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast, the Pacific coast stretching from what is today Alaska to northwestern California. The Raven cycle is a collection of tales that describe the chaos that Raven creates and the order that eventually emerges, often at Raven’s expense.
The oral traditions of the Pueblo, in the Southwest, include stories about kachinas, the ancestral spirit-beings that exist among humans and actively shape their environment.
The first colonists of North America wrote, often in English, about their experiences starting in the 1600s. This literature was 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 as president of the Jamestown Colony. These histories, published in 1608 and 1624, include his controversial accounts of the Powhatan girl Pocahontas.
Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote books on religion, a topic of central concern in colonial America.
Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) may be the earliest collection of poetry written in and about America, although it was published in England.
A new era began when the United States declared its independence in 1776, and much new writing addressed the country’s future. American poetry and fiction were largely modeled on what was being published overseas in Great Britain, and much of what American readers consumed also came from Great Britain.
The Federalist Papers (1787–88), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, shaped the political direction of the United States.
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. Romanticism as a worldview took hold in western Europe in the late 18th century, and American writers embraced it in the early 19th century.
Edgar Allan Poe most vividly depicted, and inhabited, the role of the Romantic individual—a genius, often tormented and always struggling against convention—during the 1830s and up to his mysterious death in 1849.
Poe invented the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).
The poem “The Raven” (1845) is a gloomy depiction of lost love. Its eeriness is intensified by its meter and rhyme scheme.
The short stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) are gripping tales of horror.
In New England, several different groups of writers and thinkers emerged after 1830, each exploring the experiences of individuals in different segments of American society.
The human cost of the Civil War in the United States was immense: more than 2,300,000 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. This was the essence of realism. Naturalism was an intensified form of realism. After the grim realities of a devastating war, these styles became writers’ primary mode of expression.
Samuel Clemens was a typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat captain, and an itinerant laborer before he became, in 1863 at age 27, Mark Twain. He first used that name while reporting on politics in the Nevada Territory. It then appeared on the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865, which catapulted him to national fame. Twain’s story was a humorous tall tale, but its characters were realistic depictions of actual Americans. Twain deployed this combination of humor and realism throughout his writing. The following are some of Twain’s notable works:
Major novels: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
Travel narratives: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), Life on the Mississippi (1883)
Short stories: “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn” (1880), “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899)
Naturalism, like realism, was a literary movement that drew inspiration from French authors of the 19th century who sought to document, through fiction, the reality that they saw around them, particularly among the middle and working classes living in cities.
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. But this break was often an act of destruction, and it caused a loss of faith in traditional structures and beliefs. Despite, or perhaps because of, these contradictory impulses, the modernist period proved to be one of the richest and most productive in American literature.
A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. That sense may be centered on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or toward civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at the prospect of change.
F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925).
Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940).
Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a Black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation.
The United States, which emerged from World War II confident and economically strong, entered the Cold War in the late 1940s. This conflict with the Soviet Union shaped global politics for more than four decades, and the proxy wars and threat of nuclear annihilation that came to define it were just some of the influences shaping American literature during the second half of the 20th century. The 1950s and ’60s brought significant cultural shifts within the United States driven by the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement. By the turn of the 21st century, American literature was recognized as being a complex, inclusive story that is grounded on a wide-ranging body of past writings produced in the United States by people of different backgrounds and is open to the experiences of more and more Americans in the present day.
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. He left the United States for France after World War II, repulsed by the injustice and discrimination he faced as a Black man in America; other Black writers working from the 1950s through the ’70s also wrestled with the desires to escape an unjust society and to change it.
Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) tells the story of an unnamed Black man adrift in, and ignored by, America.
James Baldwin wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and sexuality throughout his life, but his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), was his most accomplished and influential.
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a play about the effects of racism in Chicago, was first performed in 1959.
Gwendolyn Brooks became, in 1950, the first African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Timeline. c. 2500 BCE. Beginning of literature in Sumerian. 2285 BCE - 2250 BCE. Life of Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, and world's first author known by name. c. 2150 BCE - c. 1400 BCE. The tales of Gilgamesh written which inform The Epic of Gilgamesh. c. 1900 BCE - c. 1600 BCE. Composition of The Descent of Inanna .
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Jul 18, 2018 · OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE. The Old English language or Anglo-Saxon is the earliest form of English. The period is a long one and it is generally considered that Old English was spoken from about A.D. 600 to about 1100. Many of the poems of the period are pagan, in particular Widsith and Beowulf.
Mar 25, 2024 · Literary Periods: A brief overview is located below: Literary periods are spans of time for literature that shares intellectual, linguistic, religious, and artistic influences. The following links, organized by literary period, are to the library's catalog for works by author, title, literary movement, type of work, etc.
Mar 29, 2024 · This article traces the history of American poetry, drama, fiction, and social and literary criticism from the early 17th century through the turn of the 21st century. For a description of the oral and written literatures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, see Native American literature. Though the contributions of African Americans to ...
