Movements in American Literature Flashcards
Major Colonial Writers
John Edwards
Anne Bradstreet
John Smith
John Edwards
Puritan Preacher about life and faith. “Sinners in the hands of an angry God.”
Anne Bradstreet
Too focused on material goods “Here follow some versus upon the burning of our house”
John Smith
First leader of Jamestown. Book explains difficult life for settlers and their descendants
“The General History of Virginia, New England and Summer Isles”
American Romantics and Transcendentalists
1820-1865
Romantic Writers
Celebration of the individual, human psychological state and the sublime
Romantic writers studied death and macabre
Characters usually out of the ordinary, unusual personalities or alternate lifestyles
Edgar Allen Poe
The Raven, Tell Tale Heart
Washington Irving
Rip-Van Winkle
Nathaniele Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
Herman Melville
Moby Dick
Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death
I heard a fly Buzz
Fireside Poets
William Cullen Bryant
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
James Russell Lowell
John Greenleaf Whittier
Transcendentalists
Focused more on nature and the individual’s relationship with it. Key term: self-reliance. Believed that an ideal spiritual state existed once one transcended the physical empirical world
Transcendentalists
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Self Reliant”
Henry David Thoreau
“Walden”
Walt Whitman
“Song to Myself”
Realism
Literary characters are ordinary people representative of the time and region in which the authors were writing
Writers use the vernacular to give a more realistic feel
Writers aim to “tell it like it is” and resist the urge to follow their imaginations
