Literary Movements

List of Literary Movements

Pre-Raphaelitism
 19th century, primarily English movement based ostensibly on undoing innovations by the painter Raphael. Many were both painters and poets.
 Notable authors: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti
 Notable authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau
 Notable authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, George Lippard
 Notable authors: Gustave Flaubert, William Dean Howells, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, Frank Norris and Eça de Queiroz
 Notable authors: Émile Zola, Stephen Crane
 Notable authors: Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry
 Notable authors: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce
 Notable authors: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D., James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Fernando Pessoa
 Notable Authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Waldo Pierce
 Notable authors: Guillaume Apollinaire, Kurt Schwitters
 Notable authors: Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke
 Notable authors: Manuel Maples Arce, Arqueles Vela, Germán List Arzubide
 Notable authors: Xavier Villaurrutia, Salvador Novo
 Notable authors: Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington
 Notable authors: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston
 Notable authors: Jean Cocteau, Dylan Thomas
 Notable authors: John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren
 Notable authors: Raymond Queneau, Walter Abish
 Notable authors: Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Alasdair Gray
 Notable authors: Charles Olson, Denise Levertov
 Notable authors: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey
 Notable poets:Shakti Chattahoochee, Malay Roy Choudhury, Binoy Majumdar, Samir Roychoudhury
New York School
 Notable authors: Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley
 Notable authors: Richard Lovelace, William Davenant
 Notable authors: John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell
 Notable authors: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift
 Notable authors: Victor Hugo, Lord Byron and Camilo Castelo Branco
 Notable authors: Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker
 Notable authors: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 Notable authors: Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Transcendentalism
 19th century American movement: poetry and philosophy concerned with self-reliance, independence from modern technology.
Dark romanticism
 19th century American movement in reaction to Transcendentalism. Finds man inherently sinful and self-destructive and nature a dark, mysterious force.
Realism
 Late-19th century movement based on a simplification of style and image and an interest in poverty and everyday concerns.
Naturalism
 Also late 19th century. Proponents of this movement believe heredity and environment control people.
Symbolism
 Principally French movement of the fin de siècle based on the structure of thought rather than poetic form or image; influential for English language poets from Edgar Allan Poe to James Merrill.
Stream of consciousness
 Early-20th century fiction consisting of literary representations of quotidian thought, without authorial presence.
Modernism
 Variegated movement of the early 20th century, encompassing primitivism, formal innovation, or reaction to science and technology.
The Lost Generation
 It was traditionally attributed to Gertrude Stein and was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises, and his memoir A Moveable Feast. It refers to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts ofEurope from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression.
Dada
 Touted by its proponents as anti-art, dada focused on going against artistic norms and conventions.
First World War Poets
 Poets who documented both the idealism and the horrors of the war and the period in which it took place.
Stridentism
 Mexican artistic avant-garde movement. They exalted modern urban life and social revolution.
Los Contemporáneos
 A Mexican vanguardist group, active in the late 1920s and early 1930s; published an eponymous literary magazine which served as the group's mouthpiece and artistic vehicle from 1928-1931.
Imagism
 Poetry based on description rather than theme, and on the motto, "the natural object is always the adequate symbol."
Harlem Renaissance
 African American poets, novelists, and thinkers, often employing elements of blues and folklore, based in the Harlem neighborhood ofNew York City in the 1920s.
Surrealism
 Originally a French movement, influenced by Surrealist painting, that uses surprising images and transitions to play off of formal expectations and depict the unconscious rather than conscious mind.
Southern Agrarians
 A group of Southern American poets, based originally at Vanderbilt University, who expressly repudiated many modernist developments in favor of metrical verse and narrative. Some Southern Agrarians were also associated with the New Criticism.
Oulipo
 Mid-20th century poetry and prose based on seemingly arbitrary rules for the sake of added challenge.
Postmodernism
 Postwar movement skeptical of absolutes and embracing diversity, irony, and word play.
Black Mountain Poets
 A self-identified group of poets, originally based at Black Mountain College, who eschewed patterned form in favor of the rhythms and inflections of the human voice.
Beat poets
 American movement of the 1950s and 1960s concerned with counterculture and youthful alienation.
Hungryalist Poets
 A literary movement in postcolonial India (Kolkata) during 1961-65 as a counter-discourse to Colonial Bengali poetry.
Confessional poetry
 Poetry that, often brutally, exposes the self as part of an aesthetic of the beauty and power of human frailty.
 Notable authors: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Alicia Ostriker
 Urban, gay or gay-friendly, leftist poets, writers, and painters of the 1960s.
 Notable authors: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery
Magical Realism
 Literary movement in which magical elements appear in otherwise realistic circumstances. Most often associated with the Latin American literary boom of the 20th century.
 Notable authors: Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, Günter Grass, Julio Cortázar
Post-colonialism
 A diverse, loosely connected movement of writers from former colonies of European countries, whose work is frequently politically charged.
 Notable authors: Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Giannina Braschi, Wole Soyinka.
Amatory fiction
 Romantic fiction written in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Cavalier Poets
 17th century English royalist poets, writing primarily about courtly love, called Sons of Ben (after Ben Jonson).
Metaphysical poets
 17th century English movement using extended conceit, often (though not always) about religion.
The Augustans
 An 18th century literary movement based chiefly on classical ideals, satire and skepticism.
Romanticism
 1800 to 1860 century movement emphasizing emotion and imagination, rather than logic and scientific thought. Response to theEnlightenment.
Gothic novel
 Fiction in which Romantic ideals are combined with an interest in the supernatural and in violence.
Lake Poets
 A group of Romantic poets from the English Lake District who wrote about nature and the sublime.
American Romanticism
 Distinct from European Romanticism, the American form emerged somewhat later, was based more in fiction than in poetry, and incorporated a (sometimes almost suffocating) awareness of history, particularly the darkest aspects of American history.