Skip to Main Content

ENGL 2111 and 2112 World Literature: Authors by Group/Movement

Knickerbockers

A circle of American writers that contributed to the Knickerbocker magazine, a literary magazine of New York City.  

Washington Irving

James Fenimore Cooper

William Cullen Bryant

George Pope Morris

Tomas Dun English

Phoeby Cary

Stephen Collins Foster

Donald Grant Mitchell

John Howard Payne

Samuel Woodworth

James K. Paulding

Nathaniel Parker Willis

Fitz-Greene Halleck

Joseph Rodman Drake

John James Audubon

George William Curtis

Callow, James T. Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807–1855. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1967: 104.

Strouf, Judie.  Literature Lover's Book of Lists: Serious Trivia for the Bibliophile.  Paramus: Prentice Hall, 1998, 250-251.

Beat Writers

"Beat movement, also called Beat Generation,  American social and literary movement originating in the 1950s and centred in the bohemian artist communities of San Francisco’s North Beach, Los Angeles’ Venice West, and New York City’s Greenwich Village. Generally apolitical and indifferent to social problems, they advocated personal release, purification, and illumination through the heightened sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or the disciplines of Zen Buddhism" (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Allen Ginsburg

Gregory Corso

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

William Burroughs

Jack Kerouac

Gary Snyder

Michael McClure

Philip Whalen

John Clellon Holms

Lost Generation

"Lost generation" usually refers specifically to the American expatriate writers associated with 1920s Paris, especially Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and to a lesser extent T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Hemingway used the phrase "You are all a lost generation" as the epigraph to his first novel THE SUN ALSO RISES (1926), and the influential critic Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989) used "lost generation" in various studies of expatriate writers (PBS: The American Novel)

Ezra Pound

Gertrude Stein

T.S. Eliot

e.e. Cummings

Ernest Hemingway

John Dos Passos

William Faulkner

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Transcendentalists

"Particularly influenced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, English Romantic poets, and Unitarianism, the movement began with the publication of Nature in 1836 by Ralph Waldo Emerson and flourished until the Civil War broke out in 1860. Nature is the first expression of American Transcendentalist principles, and the same year the Transcendental Club was founded, its members shaping the movement's development, particularly through its magazine The Dial" (Literary Reference Center).

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Henry David Thoreau

Bronson Alcott

Margaret Fuller

William Ellery Channing

George Ripley

Theodore Parker