AO4

• Modernism: The Wasteland- the Valley of Ashes lived in by the Wilsons is a clear reference to this (TS Eliot), Les Desmoisells d’Avignon (Picasso), The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky) and Ulysses (Joyce)
• American Romanticism followed on the heals of its European counterpart and was characterised by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. Hawthorne defined a romance as “where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other”
• Transcendentalism: the philosophy that God is immanent in nature and man and that the truth of intuition can help transcend physical senses
• Realism: Concerns itself with the plight of the Everyman.