LITERARY MOVEMENTS AND PERIODS

• Absurd, literature of the (c. 1930‒1970):

  • A movement in the theater that responded to the illogicality and purposelessness of human life
  • Works marked by a lack of clear narrative, understandable psychological motives, or emotional catharsis
  • Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a celebrated work in this movement
• Aestheticism (c. 1835‒1910):

  • Believed in art as an end in itself
  • Aesthetes like Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater rejected the idea that art had to possess higher moral or political value
  • Believed in “art for art’s sake”
• Angry Young Men (1950s‒1980s):

  • Group of male British writers who created visceral plays and fiction
  • At odds with the political establishment and self-satisfied middle class
  • John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger is a seminal work in this movement
• Beat Generation (1950s‒1960s):

  • American writers seeking release and illumination through a bohemian counterculture
  • Embraced sex, drugs, and Zen Buddhism
  • Writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg gained fame through readings in coffeehouses
• Bloomsbury Group (c. 1906‒1930s):

  • Informal group of friends and lovers in Bloomsbury section of London
  • Included influential figures like Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes
  • Had a considerable liberalizing influence on British culture
• Commedia dell’arte (1500s‒1700s):

  • Improvisational comedy developed in Renaissance Italy
  • Involves stock characters and set scenarios
  • Elements of farce and buffoonery in commedia dell’arte have influenced Western comedy
• Dadaism (1916‒1922):

  • Avant-garde movement in response to World War I
  • Produced nihilistic and antilogical prose, poetry, and art
  • Led by poet Tristan Tzara in Paris
• Enlightenment (c. 1660‒1790):

  • Emphasized reason, progress, and liberty
  • Associated with nonfiction writing like essays and philosophical treatises
  • Major Enlightenment writers include Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, René Descartes
• Elizabethan era (c. 1558‒1603):

  • Flourishing period in English literature, particularly drama
  • Coincided with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I
  • Included writers like William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe
• Gothic fiction (c. 1764‒1820):

  • Genre of late-18th-century literature featuring brooding, mysterious settings and plots
  • Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto was the first major Gothic novel
  • Term “Gothic” grew to include works creating an atmosphere of terror or the unknown
• Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918‒1930):

  • Flowering of African-American literature, art, and music in 1920s New York City
  • Included works by W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen
• Lost Generation (c. 1918‒1930s):

  • Generation of writers who came to maturity during World War I
  • Notable members include F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway
  • Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises embodies the Lost Generation’s sense of disillusionment
• Magic realism (c. 1935‒present):

  • Style of writing combining realism with moments of dream-like fantasy
  • Popularized by writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez
• Metaphysical poets (c. 1633‒1680):

  • 17th-century poets who combined direct language with ingenious images, paradoxes, and conceits
  • John Donne and Andrew Marvell are well-known poets of this school
• Middle English (c. 1066‒1500):

  • Transitional period between Anglo-Saxon and modern English
  • Saw a flowering of secular literature post Norman Conquest of England
  • Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a celebrated work of this period
• Modernism (1890s‒1940s):

  • Literary and artistic movement breaking with traditional modes of Western art
  • Themes include attack on hierarchy, experimentation in narrative forms, and doubt about objective reality
  • High modernism period saw works like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
• Naturalism (c. 1865‒1900):

  • Literary movement using detailed realism to show social conditions shaping human character
  • Leading writers include Émile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane
• Neoclassicism (c. 1660‒1798):

  • Literary movement inspired by classical works of ancient Greece and Rome
  • Emphasized balance, restraint, and order
  • Notable neoclassical writers include John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift
• Nouveau Roman (“New Novel”) (c. 1955‒1970):

  • French movement dispensing with traditional novel elements like plot and character
  • Focused on neutrally recording sensations and things
• Postcolonial literature (c. 1950s‒present):

  • Literature by and about people from former European colonies
  • Aims to expand Western literature canon and challenge Eurocentric assumptions
  • Works include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
• Postmodernism (c. 1945‒present):

  • Response to high modernism and World War II
  • Characterized by disjointed, fragmented pastiche of high and low culture
  • Authors like Salman Rushdie and Kurt Vonnegut are considered postmodern
• Pre-Raphaelites (c. 1848‒1870):

  • Literary arm of an artistic movement inspired by Italian artists before Raphael
  • Combined sensuousness and religiosity through archaic poetic forms and medieval settings
• Realism (c. 1830‒1900):

  • Refers to works aiming at honest portrayal over sensationalism
  • Late-19th-century literary movement portraying ordinary, contemporary life accurately
  • Novelists like Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy are classified as realists
• Romanticism (c. 1798‒1832):

  • Literary and artistic movement reacting against Enlightenment
  • Celebrated spontaneity, imagination, subjectivity, and nature
  • Notable writers include William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Edgar Allan Poe
• Sturm und Drang (1770s):

  • German literary movement advocating passionate individuality against Neoclassical rationalism
  • Influenced the Romantic movement
• Surrealism (1920s‒1930s):

  • Avant-garde movement breaking boundaries between rational and irrational
  • André Breton and Paul Eluard were prominent surrealist poets
• Symbolists (1870s‒1890s):

  • French poets reacting against realism with a poetry of suggestion based on private symbols
  • Influenced modernist poetry of the early 20th century
• Transcendentalism (c. 1835‒1860):

  • American philosophical and spiritual movement focusing on individual conscience and nature
  • Works like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden are famous transcendentalist works
• Victorian era (c. 1832‒1901):

  • Period of English history between the first Reform Bill and Queen Victoria’s death
  • Remembered for social conservatism and prolific literary activity
  • Notable Victorian novelists include Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy