American Literature

Question 1

Columbus and DeVaca

Answer 1

1400s-1600s

Spanish exploration in America

Question 2

Puritan literature

Answer 2

–Time Frame: 1600s-1700s

–Features: each individual church had its own power, pilgrims, interest in a simple dress, the belief that’s god can be found in everyday occurrences, Christian and religious literature: sermons and poetry

–Authors: John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather

Question 3

Enlightenment

Answer 3

–Time Frame: 1700s-1800s

–Features: religion become less important and science to became important, questioning dictatorship, declaration of independence was written, focus on equality and freedom for White men, period of the American Revolution and French Revolution, the movement away from monarchy, beginning of democracy

–Authors: Phillis Wheatley

Question 4

NeoClassicism

Answer 4

–Time frame 1700s-1800s

–Features: imitating Greeks and Romans, art, literature and clothing, heroic couplets, not experimental with their writing, rhyming and meter poetry

–Authors: Phillis Wheatley

Question 5

American Romanticism

Answer 5

• -Features: search for self in nature, supernatural, *nature
• -Time Frame: 1800s
• -Authors: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Margret Fuller

Question 6

Transcendentalism

Answer 6

–Features: (part of romanticism) Nature is where you find yourself and god, pleasant, less violence, happy place, self-reliance

–Authors: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Margret Fuller

–Time frame: 1800s

Question 7

Gothic

Answer 7

• • Features: (part of romanticism) terror, sublime, mystery, supernatural
• • Time frame: late 1800s
• • Authors: Egar Allen Poe

Question 8

Slave Narritive

Answer 8

–Features: first literary form, activist text to try and help with the fight against slavery, personal experiences in slavery

–Time frame: 1800s

–Authors: Fredrick Douglass

Question 9

Free Verse Poetry

Answer 9

No rules or meters

This gives the freedom of choosing words and conveying the meaning to the audience

Walt Whitman

Question 10

Discuss the significance of slavery and the tension leading up to the Civil War on American literature

Answer 10

The significance of slavery on the civil war was that white authors didn’t want to speak out about it and avoided the topic in their writing up until after the war, where slaves wrote about their experiences and feeling about the war and slavery

Question 11

date of the civil war

Answer 11

1861-1865

Question 12

reconstruction

Answer 12

• -1865-1880
• -During the reconstruction there was an improvement for the formerly enslaved
• -Jim crow laws become enforced after 1880
• —-KKK formed
• —-Lynching

Question 13

Features of trickster and trickster stories

Answer 13

• -Coyote, spiders, ravens most common animal characters that have human traits
• -trick others to get what they want
• • arrogant
• -Hypersexual
• -lessons from their foolishness
• • stories have humor
• • oral story-telling
• • sacred and powerful

Question 14

Describe the notion of a “city on a hill,” its origin, and its implications

Answer 14

• -John Winthrop
• -Introduces the idea of American exceptionalism that is still used in modern times
• —-Obama, Clinton, Ragan, Kennedy
• -“you’re on a hill that everyone is looking at, needs to be a model of success and overcoming the failure”
• • Biblical origin

Question 15

The Fourteener

Answer 15

fourteen syllables over two lines of poetry, Anne Bradstreet

Question 16

Enjambment

Answer 16

jamming two lines together

Question 17

Moderninsm

Answer 17

• -Features: Industrialization growth in cities, technology, stream of consciousness, alienation, experimental
• • Time frame: 1910-1930s
• • Authors: Faulkner, E.E Cummings, T.S Elliot, W.C Williams

Question 18

Naturalism

Answer 18

• -Features: a subcategory of Realism, the idea that human decisions aren’t entirely their own, derived by their instincts or social situation
• • Time frame: second half of 1800s to early 1900s
• -Authors: London, Hemmingway

Question 19

Realism

Answer 19

• -Features: post-civil war, pre-world war I, represents life as it really is
• -Time frame: second half of the 1800s to early 1900s
• -Authors: Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Booker T Washington

Question 20

Regionalism

Answer 20

• -Features: a form of realism, focused on how people from different regions talk and act, the culture of different groups, dialect, double consciousness
• • Time frame: 1800s-1900s
• • Authors: Mark Twain, W.E.B Dubois

Question 21

W.E.B Dubois

Answer 21

work really hard and pay your dues to become successful, focus on trade schools for native Americans, founder of a school, more in aggressive protests

Question 22

Booker T Washington

Answer 22

change the structure of society, interested in building successful higher academic achievement, trying to make friends, and generous

Question 23

The Gilded Age

Answer 23

• -1880
• -Industrial revolution, conflict between old money that is inherited and new money that comes out of industrial wealth
• -Child labor, abuses of labor
• -Split between rich and poor

Question 24

Harlem Renaissance

Answer 24

• -Authors: Nella Larson, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen
• -Poems: Harlem
• -definition: an awareness of Black life in America, its assertion of an independent African American identity, and its innovation in form and structure

Question 25

Imagism

Answer 25

–Focus on imagery of the poems subject, sparse use of words, common language

Question 26

World War I dates

Answer 26

1914-1918

Question 27

World War II

Answer 27

1939-1945

Question 28

Post-Modernism

Answer 28

• -Authors: Hansberry, Siegelman
• -Books: Maus and Raisin in the Sun
• -Time Frame: Post-World War II
• -Features: Complicated, has a breakdown of high and low art, loss of truth: searching of truth and wanting to find it, the idea of loss of sensitive truth, collage (pastiche) two things that we wouldn’t connect together but putting them together.