ENGL 205G American Literature I & ENGL 255G American Literature II: Civil War to Present (American Literature II)

The End of the Romantic Period (1830 - 1870)

Trends & Events: experiences of individuals across segments of society, emotional intensity and experiences, frankness in subject matter and tone, natur and the natural world order

Authors: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, others

Realism and Naturalism (1870 to 1910)

Trends & Events: documenting reality and truth, lives of the middle and working classes, human behavior, The Civil War and it's after effects, Reconstruction, the Age of Industrialism

Authors: Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, Bret Harte, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, others 

The Modernist Period (1910 - 1945)

Trends & Events: disillusionment, loss, nihilism, hope for change and progress, World War I, the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance, the Lost Generation, the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II

Authors: Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, Hilda (H.D.) Doolittle, Ezra Pound, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Harriet Monroe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, Eugene O'Neill, Thornton Wilder, W.E.B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, others

The Contemporary Period (1945 - Present)

Trends & Events: themes and subjects become broad and varied, The Beat Generation, The Cold War, Civil Rights Movement, Women's Movement

Authors: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, August Wilson, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, John Updike, John Cheever, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gloria Anzaldua, Eudora Welty, Maxine Hong Kingston, Robert Penn Warren, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou, Ha Jin, Sandra Cisneros, David Mamet, Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sherman Alexie, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, Tony Kushner, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Joyce Carol Oates, Junot Diaz, Colson Whitehead, others

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