Three main periods and their characteristics of American Literature
The development of American literature can be divided into: I the Early American Literature; II the Age of American Romanticism and Transcendentalism; III the Age of Realism and Naturalism; IV Twentieth-century Literature---Modernism and Postmodernism. The following are the three main periods and their characteristics of American literature.
1. The Age of American Romanticism
The period 1820s-1865 in American Literature is commonly identified as the Romantic Period in America. After the establishment of the Federal Government of 1789, American entered a new age. Its population was considerably added to by the influx of immigration. The American pioneers pushed the frontier further west beyond the Mississippi. Before 1860, the United States began to change into an industrial and urban society. The rapid growth of population, the westward expansion and the spread of industrialism produced something of an economic boom and a tremendous n of optimism and hope among the people. The writers of this period produced works of originality and excellence th
怎样做pptat helped shape the ideas, ideals, and literary aims of many American writers.化妆品的保质期 Writers of the American Romantic Period include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman.
Romantic Period is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature. It was an age of westward expansion, of the increasing gravity of the slavery question, of an intensification of the spirit of embattled ctionalism in the South, and of a powerful impul to reform in the North. In literature it was America’s first great creative period, a full flowering of the romantic impul on American soil.
The characteristics of American Romanticism
Although greatly influenced by their English counterparts, the American romantic writers revealed unique characteristics of their own in their works and they grew on the native lands. For examp1e，the American national experience of "pioneering into the west" proved to be a rich source of material for American writers to draw upon. The
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y celebrated America's landscape with its virgin forests, meadows, groves, endless prairies, streams, and vast oceans. The wilderness came to function almost as a dramatic character that symbolized moral 1aw. The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became a permanent convention of American literature. Such a desire is particularly evident in Cooper’s Leather Stocking Tales, in Thoreau's Walden and， later, in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. With the growth of American national consciousness, American character types speaking local dialects appeared in poetry and fiction with increasing frequency. (4)Then the American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values and American Romanticism. One of the manifestations is the fact that American romantic writers tended more to moralize than their English and European counterparts.甄妮 Besides, a preoccupation with the Calvinistic view of origina1 sin and the mystery of evil marked the works of Hawthorne, Melville and a host of lesr writers.
Later，American literature came to Transcendentalism Period which emphasized indivi
dualism, lf-reliance, and rejection of tradition authority. It was actually greatly influenced by romanticism. 老豆腐炖白菜American Romanticism culminated around the 1840s in what has come to be known as “New England Transcendentalism” or “American Renaissance” (1836-1855). The Transcendentalist movement, embodied by essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, was a reaction against 18th century Rationalism, and cloly linked to the Romantic Movement.
In general, Transcendentalism was a liberal philosophy favoring nature over formal religious structure, individual insight over dogma, and humane instinct over social convention. American Transcendental Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers—then or later —often saw themlves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. There was a trust in the individual, democracy, possibility of continued change for the better, a need to e beyond what is before our eyes, and to e a deeper significance, a transcendent reality. Nature conceived of not as a machine but as an organism, symbol and analogue of the mind. For the Romantic American writer, nothing was a given. Literary and social conventions, f
ar from being helpful, were dangerous. There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice.
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The romantic period of American literature stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. The Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The age of Realism came into existence.
2. The age of Realism
If you study American literature, you’d better learn more about Realism. The period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as the Age of Realism in the history of Unite States, which is actually a movement or tendency that dominated the spirit of American literature, especially American fiction from the 1850s onwards. In art and literature, Realism refers to an attempt to describe human behavior and surroundings or to reprent figures exactly as they act or appear in life. Realism entered American literature after the Civil War, when the American society provided rich soil for the ri and development of Realism. William Dean Howells defined realism as “nothing
合肥钓鱼论坛more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material”. Realists arched for the social and human nature more directly. In part, Realism was a reaction against the Romantic emphasis on the strange, idealistic, and long-ago and far-away. It has been chiefly concerned with the commonplaces of everyday life among the middle and lower class where character is a product of social factors and environment is the integral element in the dramatic complications.
Literature Features in Realism Period
The major form of literature produced in this era was realistic fiction. Unlike romantic fiction, realistic fiction aims to reprent life as it really is and make the reader believe that the characters actually might exist and the situations might actually happen. In order to have this effect on the reader, realistic fiction focus on the ordinary and commonplace. The major writers of the Realistic Period include William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Bret Harte, and Kate Chopin.
The American authors lumped together as “realists” em to have some features in com
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mon: “verisimilitude of detail derived from obrvation,” the effort to approach the norm of experience—a reliance on the reprentative in plot, tting, and character, and to offer an objective rather than an idealized view of human nature and experience. They insisted on accurate documentation, sociological insight, and avoidance of poetic diction and idealization. Local colorism as a trend first made its prence felt in the late 1860s and early 70s. Local colorist concerned themlves with prenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. The tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life.
