CAMPUS SALAMANCA

SEDE YURIRIA

Applied Literature:
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM –
TRANSCENDENTALISM – NATURALISM AND
REALISM
INTRODUCTION
• Romantic Period, 1828-1865
• The Romantic period covers the period between
Jacksonian democracy to the end of the Civil War.

This period was the first major explosion of a

distinctly American body of literature; for this
reason, this period is also referred to as the
American Renaissance.

Many of American literature's most well-known

writers emerged during this time.
• Readership increased significantly and the 1850s
saw a number of immensely popular novels.

• Issues and subjects addressed in the literature of

this time ranged from the American identity, to the
slavery debate, to historical narratives, to poems
and narratives inspired by romanticism, to prose
works examining national unity
 Major writers and works
• Poetry:
• A group of New England writers associated with Harvard and
Cambridge, Massachusetts--the Brahmins, as they came to
be called--at an opposite extreme. Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes.
• Lydia Sigourney, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman's Leaves of
Grass, Emily Dickinson.
• Prose:
Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Rebecca Harding Davis, William Lloyd Garrison.
• Narratives:
Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl.
 Major writers and works
• Novels:
James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Catharine Maria Sedgwick,
Herman Melville, Susan Warner, Maria
Susanna Cummins' The Lamplighter, Harriet
Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin,
William Wells Brown, Harriet E. Wilson.
• Drama:
George Aiken's play, Uncle Tom's Cabin,
based on Stowe's novel
 The Age of Transcendentalism, 1836-1860

The Age of Transcendentalism, 1836-1860

Concord, Massachusetts, a village not far from Cambridge, was
the home of leaders of another important New England group:
the transcendentalists.
Characteristics
• Transcendentalism, though varied, investigated the relationship
between nature, humanity, society, and the divine.
Major Writers or Works
• Prose:
Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Nature," "Self-Reliance," and "The
American Scholar," Margaret Fuller's "Woman in the Nineteenth
Century," Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Bronson Alcott.
 Realism, 1865 - 1900
Characteristics
• The post-Civil War period was an era of increased industrialization and
urbanization as the nation attempted to recover emotionally, culturally, and
politically from the aftermath of the war. Though there were still elements of
romanticism, this period was considered realistic in its emphasis on unidealized
and truthful depictions
Major Writers or Works
• Poetry:
Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Emily Dickinson's poems published
posthumously.
• Prose:
Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Zitkala-Sa, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin.
• Novels:
Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, William Dean Howells, Bret
Harte, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Henry James, Helen Hunt
Jackson's Ramona, Frances E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy.
Naturalism, 1900 - 1914
Naturalism, 1900 - 1914
Characteristics
• An offshoot of realism, naturalism claimed to give an even more
realistic and unflinching depiction of contemporary life.

Naturalism was characterized by a pessimistic view of humanity

and human existence.
Major Writers or Works
• Prose:
Frank Norris, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland.
• Novels:
Frank Norris' McTeague, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Jack
London's The Sea-Wolf, Stephen Crane's Maggie: a Girl of the
Streets.
Great Novels during the nineteenth
century
• The last of the Mohicans
• The sacarlet letter
• Moby Dick
• Sleepy Hollow
• Uncle Tom´s cabin
• The American
• Huckleberry Finn
• White Fang
• The call of the wild
• A hazard of new fortunes
• The red Badge of Courage