Of Plymouth Plantation, by William Bradford (17th century), a travel narrative, analyzing events and

searching for God’s providence (predestination), proofs that they were elected as a part of a divine
plan. Puritans – wanted to purify the church of England, Mayflower Compact as a first document,
captivity narrative.

The Great Awakening (1740s, 50s)– awakening the individual, personification of religion, the
Enlightment (18th century), sermon – Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, by Jonathan Edwards,
metaphysical poetry (also Anne Bradstreet and her conflict between a woman writer and as a
Puritan), conceits.

Spiritual autobiography (18th century) – Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography; self-made man, from
poverty to success, embodiment of American Dream, Deism, hard-work, quite different attitude in
contrast to J. Edwards, predictable pattern: sinful youth, gradual awakening, anxiety about soul.

American Gothic (18th century) – haunted mind, psychological dimension, unreliable narrator, E.A.
Poe’s poetry (1st half of the 19th century): The Raven, Annabel Lee, Lenore, Eldorado. Philosophy of
Composition – an essay about the art of writing; beauty as a highest value, melancholy as the best
mood, rhythm and melody, story is best to be short, methodical and analytical writing, unity of
affect. Poe’s prose: The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher. Unreliable
narrator, haunted mind, fantastic element as an objective phenomena.

The Murder in the Rue Morgue as the first detective story – insolvable mystery, brilliant but eccentric
detective, who’s a complete outsider, earnest but inept police investigator, reader participates in the
investigation.

American Romanticism – (around the Civil War, 1830’s – 1865), calls for national literature,
individualism, nationalism, folklore, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy, Washington Irwing’s Rip van
Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Romantic nature.

Romantic fiction (19th century) – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter, Young Goodman
Brown. Wrote about Puritans, nature’s sinful, symbolism, the role of nature, moralizing. Themes:
alienation, allegory, guilt, pride, individual vs. society, fate vs. free will, disbelief to science.

Transcendentalism (1st half of the 19th century) – Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, Self-Reliance.
Reaction to a 18th century rationalism, the concept of the Over-Soul, unity between mortals and God,
power of intuition, importance of individualism, divinity of people, symbolism.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) – well-educated, never married, ahead of her times, didn’t care for her
readers, major themes: love, nature, death, solitude. No names for her poems, sometimes numbers,
unconventional and experimental poems (dashes, capital letters), wrote in simple language, using
common words. She was a metaphysical poet, heavily influenced by transcendentalism, used irony
and paradoxes, she was interested in immortality.
American Realism (19th century, after the Civil War) – national literature, description of life as it was,
no idealization, novel as a mirror of life, opposition to romantics – limiting the boundaries of human
knowledge and experience to pragmatic (practical) limits, the man within the network of social
relationships, moral decisions, suspicious towards allegory and symbolism. Mark Twain’s The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). The picaresque novel, nature vs. civilization, the pre-war
south, the self vs. the society, the river culture. Henry James’ Daisy Miller (1879). The United States
(innocence) vs. The Europe (experience), an international novel.

Southern Gothic – Charlotte Perkins Gilmore’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). A feminist novel,
treatment of madness and powerlessness, role of psyche, fear, unreliable narrator, sense of mystery,
symbolism – room as a prison.

American hero – Huck: free, independent, young, curious, individualism, conflict with society, search
for American Dream. Daisy Miller: young, naïve, innocent, free, independent, liberal, doesn’t care
about society, breaking rules.

Naturalism – pessimistic realism, survival of the fittest, no free will, people are determined by the
external and internal forces, man is insignificant in the world, nature is immoral and brutal, Stephen
Crane’s Open Boat (1897). Irony/absurd – looking for a rescue but there is none, potential for tragedy
– no free will, no awareness of the situation. Impressionism – colors, sounds, catching impressions,
moments (Virginia Wolf). Symbolism: boat – life as a journey, waves – difficulties, tower – serenity,
indifference of the nature.

Modernism (1920’s) – impact of the Great War, the Lost Generation (Gertrude Stein) – emigration to
Paris, innocence turned into experience, nihilism, surrealism, imagism. E. Hemingway’s The Sun Also
Rises. Objectivity, simplicity of language and style, anti-adjectival prose, elements of nature as
objective correlative. The effects of war, hero and anti-hero, love, impotence, emasculation,
bullfighting, intertextuality (T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland). F. S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1929).
Reworks the American myth, flappers, the destructive power of money, romantic hero who fails,
Daisy as a symbol for American Dream.

The Novel of 1930’s – sociorealism, influence of the Great Depression, social anger and criticism.
John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937). Naturalistic characters, driven by internal and external
forces, like fear, hunger, sex. Symbolism, American Dream, naturalism, racial issues (Crooks),
intertextuality (Robert Burnes’ To a Mouse).

Harlem Renaissance (1920’s-1930’s) – race identity of the Black people, proud acceptance of being
black, jazz, covers the subject of the experience of black people in white society. Alain Locke’s The
New Negro, Langston Hughes’ Harlem, Countee Cullen, McKay’s If we must die.

Southern Renaissance (1920’s-1930’s) – modernism and the southern history (defeat at the Civil War,
the abolition of slavery). William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily. “We” as the narrator, southern gothic –
grotesque, mystery, isolation, haunted mind, symbolism. Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad
Café. No ordinary characters, love ain’t easy, crossing genders, lovers are active, beloveds are
passive, mystery, isolation, psychologically damaged characters, grotesque.
The Beat Generation (1950’s) – rebellion against feeling of entrapment and sterility and everything
that inhibited somebody’s energy and appetite for experience, consumerism, neo-romantics,
aggressive, vulgar language, drugs as a way to go beyond situations limited to human senses, Allen
Ginsberg’s The Howl. J.D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye.

Postmodernism (started in 1960’s) – relativity, anti-realism, elements of play and game, John Barth’s
The Literature of Exhaustion, Night Sea Journey, Lost in the Funhouse. Intertextuality, lack of
originality, parody, pastiche. Historiographic metafiction – kind of a postmodernism novel, projecting
present beliefs onto the past, past events existed but our historical knowledge of is is semiotically
transmitted. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5.

Modernist poetry – Ezra Pound’s In a station of the Metro. Williams’ The Red-Wheelbarrow. Imagism
– direct treating of the subject or object, precise, short, no word that doesn’t contribute to the
presentation, poet should create new rhymes, use of the free verse, creativity.