American Literary Movements timeline project

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    Enlightenment

    This period was titled the enlightement period because of science and logic. This is marked in US literature by political writtings. Genres included political documents, speeches, and letters.
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    The Age of Faith

    During the Age of Reason, the Revolutionary War was going on and much of the writings were political documents as a result of the war.
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    Johnathan Edwards - The Age of Faith

    "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741)
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    The Age of Reason

    During the Age of Faith, the subject matter and writing styles were unusual. Puritans wrote about their religion in letters, journals, diaries, and sermons.
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    Benjamin Franklin - The Age of Reason

    The Autobiography
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    Romanticism

    Romanticism was a literary and artistic movement of the nineteenth century that arose in reaction against eighteenth-century Neoclassicism and placed a premium on fancy, imagination, emotion, nature, individuality, and exotica.
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    Edgar Allen Poe - Romanticism

    "The Raven"
  • Walt Whitman

    "Oh Captain my Captain"
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    The Transcendentalists

    Transcendentalism was an American literary and philosophical movement of the nineteenth century. The Transcendentalists, who were based in New England, believed that intuition and the individual conscience “transcend” experience and thus are better guides to truth than are the senses and logical reason.
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    Ralph Waldo Emerson - The Transcedentalists

    Essays: Spiritual laws
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    Naturalism

    An outgrowth of Realism, Naturalism was a literary movement among novelists at the end of the nineteenth century and during the early decades of the twentieth century. The Naturalists tended to view people as hapless victims of immutable natural laws.
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    Realism

    Realism is the presentation in art of the details of actual life. Realism was also a literary movement that began during the nineteenth century and stressed the actual as opposed to the imagined or the fanciful.
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    Harriet Beecher Stowe - Realism

    "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852).
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    Jack London- Naturalism

    "The God of His Fathers and Other Stories" (1901).
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    Modernism

    An age of disillusionment and confusion. The authors during this period raised all the great questions of life.
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    E.E.Cummings- Modernism

    Tulips and Chimneys (1923)
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    The Harlem Renaissance

    Was a time of African American artistic creativity centered in Harlem, in New York City
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    Langston Hughes

    Shakespeare in Harlem.
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    Contemporary Literature

    Great stuff, but not a clear philosophy
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    J.D. Saligner

    The Catcher and The Rye