Major American Literature Movements

The dates for this period are unclear because we have absolutely no idea when they began. A lot of the literature of this movement was myths, but, the Native Americans still write today. Most of what our text calls Native American myths were written long before Europeans settled.

Most of this literature is either utilitarian, very personal, or religious. We call it Puritan because the majority of the writers during this period were strongly influenced by Puritan values.

Called the Enlightenment period due to the influence of science and logic, this period is marked in US literature by political writings. Genres included political documents, speeches, and letters. There was not a complete separation from the Bible but an expanding of the truths found.

Romanticism was a literary and artistic movement of the nineteenth century that arose in reaction against eighteenth-century Neoclassicism. There’s a movement here from personal and political documents to entertaining ones.

Transcendentalism was an American literary movement of the nineteenth century. The Transcendentalists, believed that experience and thus are better guides to truth than are the senses and logical reason. Influenced by Romanticism, the Transcendentalists respected the individual spirit and the natural world.

Realism is the presentation 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 fantacy. They reacted against Romanticism, rejecting heroic, adventurous, unusual, or unfamiliar subjects.

An age of confusion. This period brought us perhaps our best writers. The authors during this period raised all the great questions of life but had no suggested answers.