Source: Literalism
Literature constantly evolves as new movements emerge to speak to the concerns of different groups of people and historical periods.
- Middle English (c.1066-1500): The transitional period between Anqlo-Saxon and modern Enqlish. The cuitural upheaval that followed the Norman Conquest of England, in 1066, saw a flowering of secufar literature, including ballads, chivalric romances, allegorical poems and a variety of religious plays. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is the most cetebrated work ot this period.
- Commedia dell’arte (1500s-1700s): Improvisational comedy first developed in Renaissance Italy that involved stock characters and centered around a set scenario. The elements of farce and buffoonery in commedia dell’arte, as well as its standard characters and plot intriques. have had a tremendous influence on Western comedy and can still be seen in contemporary drama and television sitcoms.
- Elizabethan era (c. 1558-1603): A flourishing period in Enqlish literature, particularly drama, that coincided with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and included writers such as Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser.
- Metaphysical poets (c. 1633-1680): A group of 17th-century poets who combined direct languaqe with ingenious images, paradoxes and conceits. John Donne and and Andrew Karvea are the best known poets of this school.
- Enlightenment (c. 1660-1790): An intelectual movement in France and other parts of Europe that emphasized the importance of reason, progress, and liberty. The Enlightenment, sometimes called the Age of Reason, is primarily associated wïth nonaction writing, such as essays and philosophical treatises. Major Enlightenment writers include Thomas Hoobes, John Locke, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, René Descartes.
- Neoclassicism (c. 1660-1798): A literary movement, inspired by the rediscovery of classical works of ancient Greece and Rome that emphasized balance, restraint and order. Neoclassicism roughly coincided with the Enlightenrnent, which espoused reason over passion. Notable neoclassical writers include Edmund Burke, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift.
- Gothic fiction (c. 1764-1820): A genre of late-18th-century literature that featured brooding, mysterious settings and plots and set the stage for what we now call “horror stories.” Horace Walpoie’s Castle of Otranto, set inside a medieval castle, was the first major Gothic novel. Later, the term “Gothic” grew to include any work that attempted to create an atmosphere of terror or the unknown, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s short stones.
- Sturm und Drang (1770s): German for “storm and stress”, this brief German literary movement advocated passionate individuality in the face of Neoclassical rationalism and restraint. Goethe‘s The Sorrows of Young Werther is the enduring work of the movement, which greatly influenced the Romantic movement.
- Romanticism (c. 1798-1832): A literayand artistic movement that reacted against the restraint and universalism of the Enlightment. The Romantics celebrated spontaneity, imagination, subjectivity and the purity of nature. Notable English Romantic writers include Jane Austen, William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Colerdige, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Sheltey and William Wordsworth. Prominent figures in the American Romantc movement include Nathaniel Hawthorn, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant and John Greenleaf Whittier.
- Realism (c. 1830-1930): A loose term that can refer to any work that aims at honest portrayal over sensationalism, exaggeration or melodrama. Technically, realism refers to a late-19th-century literary movement—primarily French, English and American— that aimed at accurate detailed portrayal of ordinary, contemporary life. Many ot the 19th century’s greatest novelists, such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Georqe Eliot, Gustave Flaubert and Leo Tolstoy, are classfied as realists. Naturalism can be seen as an intensification of realism.
- Victorian era (c. 1832-1901): The penod of English history between the passsage of the First Reform Bill (1832) and the death ot Queen Victoria (reigned 1837-1901). Though remembered for strict social, political and sexual conservatism and frequent clashes between religion and science, the period also saw profilic literary activitv and significant social reform and critlcism. Notable victorian noveltsts include the Brontë sisters. Charles Dickens, Georqe Eliot. William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy, while prominent poets include Matthew Arnold: Robert Browning; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Gerard Manley Hopkins and Chrtsrina Rossetti. Notable victorian nonfictlon writers include Walter Pater, John Ruskin and Charles Darwin, who penned the famous On the Orign of Species (1859).• Transcedentalism (c. 1835-1860): A north-american philosophical and spiritual movement, based in New England, tnat focused on the primacy of the individual conscience and rejected materiailsm in favor of closer communion with nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Seif-Reliance and Henry Davic Thoreau’s Walden are famoos transcencentaiist wortes.
- Aesthetictsm (c. 1835-1910): A late-19th- century movement that beleived in art as an end in itself. Aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater rejected the view that art had to posses a higher moral or political value and beiieved instead in “art for art’s sake.”
- Pre-Raphaelites (c. 1848-1870): The literary arm of an artistic movement that drew inspiration from Itaiian artists working before Rapnael (1483-1520). The Pre-Raphaelites combined sensuousness and religiosity through archaïc poetic forms and medieval settinqs. Williams Morris, Chirstina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Chartes Swinburne were leading poets in the movement.
- Naturalism (c. 1865-1900): A literary movement that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. Leading writers in the movement include Émile Zola, Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane.
- Symbolists (1870s- 1890s): A group ot French poets who reacted aqainst realism wth a poetry ot suggstion based on private symbols and experimented wtith new poetic forms such as free verse and the prose poem. The symbolists — Stép hane Mallarmé, Artnur Rinbaud and Paul Verlaine are the most well known —were inftuenced by Charles Baudelaire. In turn, they had a seminal influence on the modernist poetry ot the early 20th Century.
- Bloomsbury Group (c. 1906-1930s): An informal group of friends and lovers, including Cllve Bell, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes, who lived in the Bloomsbury section of London in the early 20th century and who had a considerable liberalizing influence on Bntish culture.
- Modernism (1890s-1940s): A literary and artistic movement that provided a radical break with traditional modes of western art, thought, religion, social conventions and morality. Major themes of this period include the attack on notions of hierarchy; experimentation in new forms of narrative, such as stream of consciousness; doubt about the existence of knowable, objective reality; attention to alternative viewponts and modes of thinking; and self‑referentiality as a means of drawinq attention to the relationships between artist and audience, and form and content.
- Dadaism (1916-1922): An avant-qarde movement that began in response to the devastation of World War I. Based in Paris and led by the poet Tristan Tzara, the Dadaists produced nihilistic and antilogical prose, poetry, and art. and rejected the traditions, rules and ideals of prewar Europe.
- Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918-1930): A flowearing of African-American literature, art, and music during the 1920s in New York City. W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk anticipated the movement, which included Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro, Zora Neate Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the poetry of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.
- Lost Generation (c. 1918-1930s): A term used to describe the qeneration of writers. many of them soldiers that came to maturity during World War I. Notable members of this group include F. Scott F.trgerald, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, whose novel The Sun Also Rises embodies the Lost Generation’s sense of disillusionment.
- High modernism (1920s): Generally considered the golden age of modemist literature, this period saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eiot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
- Surrealism (1920s- 1930s): An avant-qarde movement. based primarly in France, that sought to break down the boundaries between rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, through a variety ot literary and artistic expenments. The surreallst poets, such as André Breton and Paul Eluard, were not as successtul as their artist counterparts, who included Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and and René Magritte.
- Absurd, Literature of The (c. 1930-1970): A movement, primarly in the theater, that responded to the seeming illogicalty and purposelessness of human Iife in works marked by a lack of cear narrative, understandable psychological motives, or emotional catharsis. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is one of the most celebrated works in the theater of the absurd.
- Magic Realism (c. 1935-present): A style of writing, populanred by Jorqe Luis Borqes, Gabriel Garcia Marques, Günter Grass and others, that combines realism with moments of dream-like fantasy withinn a sinqle prose narrative.
- Postmodernism (c. 1945-present): A notoriously mabiguous term, especially as it refers to literature, postmodernism can be seen as a response to the elitism of high modemism as well as to the horrors of Wortd War II. Postmodern literature is characterized by a disjointed, fragmented pastiche ot high and low culture that reflects the absence ot tradition and structure in a world driven by technoloqy and consumerism. Julian Barnes, Don DeLilo, Toni Morrison. Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon. Salman Rushdie and Kurt Vonnegut are among many who are considered postmodern authors.
- Beat Generation ( 1950s-1960s): A group of American writers in the 1950s and 1960s who sought release and illumination though a bohemian counterculture of sex, drugs and Zen Buddhism. Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac (On The Road) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl) gained fame by giving readings in coffee houses, often accompanied by jazz music.
- Angry Young Men ( 1950s-1980s): A group of male British writers who created visceral plays and fiction at odds with the political establishment and a self-satisfied middle cass. John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1957) is one of the seminal works of this movement.
- Postcolonial Literature (c. 1950s-present): Literature by and about people from former European colonies, primarily in Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. This lterature aims both to expand the traditonal canon of Western Iterature and to challenge Eurocentnc assumptions about literature, especially through examination of questions of otherness, identity and race. Prominent postcolonial works include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Edward Sati’s Orientalism (1978) provided an important theoretical basis for understanding postcolonial literature.
- Nouveau Roman (“New Novel”) (c. 1955-1970): A french movement, led by Alain Robbe-Grillet, that dispensed with traditiona elements of the novel, such as plot and character, in favor of neutrally recording the experience of sensations and things.
