A glossary of literary terms by Abrams M. H. (Meyer Howard) 1912-

Author:Abrams, M. H. (Meyer Howard), 1912-
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Criticism, Literature, English language, Literary form, Littérature, Literature - Encyclopaedias
Publisher: New York : Holt, Rinehart, and Winston
Published: 1988-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

ample, the speech of King Lear when he is briefly reunited with Cordeha (IV. vii. 59ff.), beginning

Pray, do not mock me. I am a very foolish fond old man,

or Wordsworth's terse summation of the grief of the old man in Michael (1800), n. 464-66:

Many and many a day he thither went, And never lifted up a single stone.

Periods of American Literature. The division of American literature into convenient historical segments, or "periods, " lacks the relatively clear consensus that we find for English literature; the many college syllabi of surveys of American literature reprinted in Reconstructing American Literature (ed. Paul Lauter, 1983) demonstrate how variable are the divisions, especially since the recent efforts to do greater justice to literature written by women and by ethnic minorities. A number of recent historians, anthologists, and teachers of American literature now divide their survey simply into dated segments, without affixing period names. A clear tendency, however, is to recognize the importance of major wars in marking significant changes in literature; as a scholar of American culture. Gushing Strout, has remarked, this tendency "suggests that there is an order in American political history more visible and compelling than that indicated by specifically literary or intellectual categories. " The following temporal divisions recognize the importance assigned by literary historians to the Revolutionary War (1775-81), the Civil War (1861-65), World War I (1914-18), and World War II (1939-45); under these broad divisions are listed some of the more widely used terms for periods and subperiods of American literature. These terms, it will be noted, are diverse in kind; some name a time span or a form of political organization, others a prominent intellectual or imaginative mode, and others still a predominant form of literature.

1607-1775. This era, from the founding of the first settlement at Jamestown to the outbreak of the Revolution, is often called the Colonial Period. Writings were for the most part religious, practical, or historical. Notable among the seventeenth-century writers of journals and narratives concerning the founding and early history of some of the colonies were William Rradford, John Winthrop, and the theologian Cotton Mather. In the following century Jonathan Edwards was a major philosopher as well as theologian, and Renjamin Franklin an early American master of lucid and cogent prose. Not until Edward Taylor's writings were first published from manuscript in 1937 was he discovered to have been an able religious poet in the metaphysical style of the English devotional poets Herbert and Crashaw; Anne Rradstreet was the chief poet of secular and domestic as well as religious subjects. The publication in 1773 o( Poems on Various Subjects by Phillis Wheatley, then a nineteen-year-old slave who had been born in Africa, inaugurated the long, but until recently neglected, line of Black

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