Literary Periods

Here are some major literary periods and authors in them.

American Literary Periods
Puritan/Colonial 1650-1750
-Bradford's Of Plymoth Plantation, Edward's Sinners in the Hands of Angry Gods
Revolution/Age of Reason 1750-1800
-Franklin The Autobiography, Jefferson, Paine, Henry
Romanticism 1800-1860
-Washington Irving Rip Van Winkle, Dickinson, Whitman
American Renaissance/Trancendentalism 1840-1860
-Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter, Poe
Realism 1855-1900
-Twain, Douglass, Chopin The Awakening
Modern 1900-1950
-Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby, Cummings, Ayn Rand Anthem, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, Hansberry A Rasin in the Sun, Arthur Miller
Harlem Renaissance 1950-present
-W.E.B. Debois, Hughes, Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God
Post Modernism 1970-present
-Plath, Vonnegut, Salinger The Catcher in the Rye, Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Contemporary1970-present
-Angelous, Clancy, Walker The Color Purple, Guest Ordinary people, O'Brein The Things They Carried
http://staff.edmonds.wednet.edu/users/hansonk/LITERARY%20PERIODS%20AND%20
THEIR%20CHARACTERISTICS.htm

British Literary Periods
Anglo-Saxon 449-1066
-Beowolf, Bede, Exterbook
Mideval 1066-1485
-Chaucer The Canterbury Tales, Domesday Book, L'Morte de Arthur
Renaissance 1485-1660
-Shakespeare, Donne, Marlow, Marvel, Metaphysical/Cavalier Poets
Neoclassical/Restoration 1660-1798
-Alexander Pope, Johnathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, John Bunyan
Romanticism 1798-1832
-Austen, Mary Shelly, Wordsworth, Keats, Blake, Percy Shelly, Lord Byron
Moder/Postmoder
1900-19080
-Joyce, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, William Butler Yeats
Contemporary
-Seamus Heaney, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguo, John LeCarre, Ken Follet
http://www.studyguide.org/brit_lit_timeline_contemporary.htm

I realize that this in an incomplete list, but I thought it was a good start to understanding the periods that will be explored in other classes to come.