Periods of American Literature
A number of recent historians, anthologists, and teachers of American literature
simply divide their survey into dated sections, without affixing period names. A
prominent tendency, however, is to recognize the importance of major wars in
marking significant changes in literature.
The following divisions of American literary history recognize the importance
assigned by many literary historians to the Revolutionary War (1775-81), the Civil
War (1861-65), World War I (1914-18), and World War II (1939-45). Under these
broad divisions are listed some of the more widely used terms to distinguish periods
and subperiods of American literature.
These terms, it will be noted, are diverse in kind; they may signify a span of time, or
else a form of political organization, or a prominent intellectual or imaginative mode,
or a predominant literary form.
1607-1775. This overall era, from the founding of the first settlement at Jamestown to
the outbreak of the American Revolution, is often called the Colonial Period. Writings
were for the most part religious, practical, or historical. Notable among the
seventeenth-century writers of journals and narratives concerning the founding and
early history of some of the colonies were William Bradford, John Winthrop, and the
theologian Cotton Mather.
The period between the Stamp Act of 1765 and 1790 is sometimes distinguished as
the Revolutionary Age. It was the time of Thomas Paine's influential revolutionary
tracts; of Thomas Jefferson's "Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom,"
"Declaration of Independence," and many other writings;
1775-1865. The years 1775-1828, the Early National Period ending with the triumph
of Jacksonian democracy in 1828, signalized the emergence of a national imaginative
literature, including the first American comedy (Royall Tyler's The Contrast, 1787),
the earliest American novel (William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, 1789),
and the establishment in 1815 of the first enduring American magazine, The North
American Review.
The span 1828-1865 from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War, often identified as the
Romantic Period in America (see neoclassic and romantic), marks the full coming of
age of a distinctively American literature. This period is sometimes known as the
American Renaissance, the title of F. O. Matthiessen's influential book'(1941) about
its outstanding writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan
Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (see also symbolism); it is also
sometimes called the Age of Transcendentalism, after the philosophical and literary
movement, centered on Emerson, that was dominant in New England (see
Transcendentalism). In all the major literary genres except drama, writers produced
works of an originality and excellence not exceeded in later American history.
Emerson, Thoreau, and the early feminist Margaret Fuller shaped the ideas, ideals,
and literary aims of many contemporary and later American writers.
1865-1914. The cataclysm of the bloody Civil War and the Reconstruction, followed
by a burgeoning industrialism and urbanization in the North, profoundly altered the
American sense of itself, and also American literary modes. 1865-1900 is often
known as the Realistic Period, by reference to the novels by Mark Twain, William
Dean Howells, and Henry James, as well as by John W DeForest, Harold Frederic,
and the African-American novelist Charles Chesnutt.
The years 1900-1914—although James, Howells, and Mark Twain were still writ
ing, and Edith Wharton was publishing her earlier novels—are discriminated
as the Naturalistic Period, in recognition of the powerful though sometimes
crudely wrought novels by Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser,
which typically represent characters who are joint victims of their instinctual
drives and of external sociological forces.
1914-1939. The era between the two world wars, marked also by the trauma of the
great economic depression beginning in 1929, was that of the emergence of what is
still known as "modern literature," which in America reached an eminence rivaling
that of the American Renaissance of the midnineteenth century; unlike most of the
authors of that earlier period, however, the American modernists also achieved
widespread international recognition and influence.
Many prominent American writers of the decade following the end of World War I,
disillusioned by their war experiences and alienated by what they perceived as the
crassness of American culture and its "puritanical" repressions, are often tagged (in a
term first applied by Gertrude Stein to young Frenchmen of the time) as the Lost
Generation.
1939 to the Present, the contemporary period. World War II, and especially the
disillusionment with Soviet Communism consequent upon the Moscow trials for
alleged treason and Stalin's signing of the Russo-German pact with Hitler in 1939,
largely ended the literary radicalism of the 1930s.
The 1950s, while often regarded in retrospect as a period of cultural conformity and
complacency, was marked by the emergence of vigorous antiestablishment and anti-
traditional literary movements: the Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack
Kerouac; the American exemplars of the literature of the absurd; the Black Mountain
Poets, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan; and the New York Poets
Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery.
