American Literary Movements
American literary movements refer to the various periods and styles in American literature that have been characterized by specific themes, techniques, and ideologies. These movements include the Colonial and Revolutionary periods, Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism, among others. Each movement reflects the social, political, and cultural influences of its time and has contributed to the rich tapestry of American literary history.
4 Key excerpts on "American Literary Movements"
- Josephine Guy, Ian Small(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...4 Nineteenth-century literary movements Overview The identification of literary movements is a popular way of marking out significant moments in literary culture; it has the consequence of giving literary history shape and direction. A history of literary movements is, by definition, highly selective; and it begs the question of what sorts of literary practices can be said to constitute a movement? This chapter begins by distinguishing between two basic ways of defining literary movements; it also makes a distinction between literary movements and literary schools. It then proceeds to discuss what are generally agreed to be the four main British literary movements of the nineteenth century: Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Decadence and Symbolism. None of these movements was confined solely (nor even principally) to literary culture, and all argued for a strong connection between the literary and visual arts. Moreover, all of them placed a premium on poetry rather than prose, and in this respect they can all be seen, at least in part, as reacting against the taste for popular fiction which, as earlier chapters have observed, had come to dominate literary culture from the 1830s onwards. Defining literary movements Literary movements can be broadly categorised in terms of those which are ‘self-defined’, on the one hand, and those which are the product of definitions or categories devised by later historians, on the other. It is mainly the first kind of movement that will concern us in this chapter; we will concentrate on cases where there is evidence that a particular group of artists and writers publicly identified themselves, or were consistently identified by their contemporaries, as having a distinctive set of literary and artistic ambitions in common...
eBook - ePubThe Challenge of Periodization
Old Paradigms and New Perspectives
- Lawrence Besserman, Lawrence Besserman(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Nonetheless, it continues, for want of any alternative, since temporal generalization is incorrigibly necessary to discussion. Having said all this, I come to my topic, the periodization of Modem American poetry. The common periodization of American literature composes a nationalist story of manifest destiny, as I have said, in which the chains of empire are, after the colonial period, gradually cast off; a genuine indigenous literature in English arises, producing “major authors” in our “American Renaissance,” and swelling to greatness in the twentieth century, when “Modernist” novels and poems take the palm away from the parent tradition, as Eliot revolutionizes poetry and Faulkner places his unforgettable stamp on the novel. (A precisely comparable Irish story shows Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett in these supervening positions of de-colonizing power.) The fact that American literature is commonly described under only three periods (colonial and eighteenth century; the American Renaissance; and Modernism) means that the old form of periodization-by-sovereign familiar to us from English and French nomenclature has never been considered useful in the United States. It is difficult to imagine an anthology with a heading like “Literature in the Age of Millard Fillmore” or even “The Age of F.D.R.” Since we have undergone only three major historical events happening on our own soil—the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression—we really haven’t a sufficient number of historical markers to delineate literary history with any finesse. Nor do we have a clear progression of governing ideas, or genres, though critics have made stabs at using ideas like manifest destiny, transcendentalism, and democracy to organize a narrative of literary production...
eBook - ePub- Jacob Stratman(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
...Chapter 5 The Modernist Period (1910–1945) This period of American history produced two world wars, the addition of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution to give women voting privileges, a stock market crash causing the Great Depression, a growing African-American population, a decline in European immigration, popularity in psychoanalysis and all things Freud, and many advances in science and technology. As historians point out, America was still largely rural and agricultural, which caused a great distrust for progress and urban expansion. Many Americans sought the golden age—a time that was more simple and free. If you remember Nathaniel Hawthorne’s definitions of romance, you understand that these “bygone days” didn’t really exist in the first place. Each era is plagued with societal ills and shortcomings. However, after World War I, whether Americans liked it or not, the nation was entering a period of modernity. This term has very little to do with chronology and more to do with perspective. The modern era is any era that resists its past in a variety of ways. In other words, the writers, thinkers, artists, architects, and many others do not view the present as relatively aligned with its past. Their work is fundamentally different from work done in the past. As you read and explore authors of this period, pay attention to how different they are from American authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. LITERARY MODERNISM One of the driving questions of this literary period was, “What is the function of literature?” For the literary ancestors of modernist writers, the imaginative arts were produced “to teach and to delight” (Sidney 1998, 138). On one hand, literature maintained a didactic nature in which stories, poems, and even novels were written to teach a particular truth, or in the least, to be grounded in a central truth...
eBook - ePub- Mario Klarer(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The evolution of feminist theory into gender theory, with its shifting areas of attention, also shows that the distinction between text-, author-, reader-, or context-oriented approaches at times gets blurred and cannot be more than a crude grid for conceptualizing major trends. What characterizes literary theory in the United States is that it has been closely connected to and influenced by European phenomena from the very beginning. As early as the self-reflections carried out by authors in the colonial period and the Early Republic, theoretical voices from within the United States fashioned their own positions in reaction to British or European literary models. Even when self-contained theoretical texts started to emerge as an independent text type in the periods of realism and modernism, much of the theorizing was carried out by American expatriates or authors who returned to the United States after long stays in Europe. The major theoretical forces within America during the first half of the twentieth century, including psychoanalysis, Marxism, and New Criticism, are greatly indebted to European phenomena that fell on fertile ground in the United States, but in turn influenced the European situation. Similarly, in the second half of the century, German reception aesthetic as well as French deconstruction and poststructuralism fueled related movements across the Atlantic and produced highly innovative areas of research. Conversely, the originally American schools of New Historicism and recent gender studies had a tremendous impact on Europe and the rest of the world. Similar to the overall development of literary production on the North American continent, literary theory in the United States has also evolved in constant friction and mutual exchange with European phenomena in order to produce its own distinct voice....
