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Literary movements are a way to divide literature into categories of similar philosophical, topical, or aesthetic features, as opposed to divisions by genre or period. Like other categorizations, literary movements provide language for comparing and discussing literary works. These terms are helpful for curricula or anthologies.

Some of these movements (such as Dada and Beat) were defined by the members themselves, while other terms (for example, the metaphysical poets) emerged decades or centuries after the periods in question. Further, some movements are well defined and distinct, while others, like expressionism, are nebulous and overlap with other definitions. Because of these differences, literary movements are often a point of contention between scholars.

Table

This is a tablelist of modern literary movements: that is, movements after the Renaissance literature. Ordering is approximate, as there is considerable overlap. Notable authors ordering is predominantly by precedence.

Movement Description Notable authors
Renaissance literature The literature within the general Western movement of the Renaissance united by the spirit of Renaissance humanism, which arose in the 14th-century Italy and continued until the mid-17th century in England Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Baptista Mantuanus, Jacopo Sannazaro, Niccolò Machiavelli, Ludovico Ariosto, François Rabelais, Jorge de Montemor, Miguel de Cervantes, Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Georg Rudolf Weckherlin
Mannerism A 16th-century movement and style that emerged in the later Italian High Renaissance. Mannerism in literature is notable for its elegant, highly florid style and intellectual sophistication Michelangelo, Clément Marot, Giovanni della Casa, Giovanni Battista Guarini, Torquato Tasso, Veronica Franco, Miguel de Cervantes
Petrarchism A 16th-century movement of Petrarch's style followers, partially coincident with Mannerism Pietro Bembo, Michelangelo, Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Vittoria Colonna, Clément Marot, Garcilaso de la Vega, Giovanni della Casa, Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Joachim du Bellay, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney
Baroque A variable 17th-century pan-European art movement that replaced Mannerism and involved several, especially, early 17th-century literary schools. The Baroque characterised by its use of ornamentation, extended metaphor and wordplay Giambattista Marino, Lope de Vega, John Donne, Vincent Voiture, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, John Milton, Andreas Gryphius, Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen
Marinism This 17th-century followed Mannerism Italian Baroque poetic school and techniques of Giambattista Marino and his followers was based on its use of extravagant and excessive extended metaphor and lavish descriptions Giambattista Marino, Cesare Rinaldi, Bartolomeo Tortoletti, Emanuele Tesauro, Francesco Pona, Francesco Maria Santinelli
Conceptismo 17th-century Baroque movement in the Spanish literature, a similar to the Marinism Francisco de Quevedo, Baltasar Gracián
Culteranismo Another 17th-century Spanish Baroque movement, in contrast to Conceptismo, characterized by an ornamental, ostentatious vocabulary and highly latinal syntax Luis de Góngora, Hortensio Félix Paravicino, Conde de Villamediana, Juana Inés de la Cruz
Précieuses The main features of this 17th-century French Baroque movement, similar to the Spanish culteranismoand English euphuism, are the refined prose and poetry language of aristocratic salons, periphrases, hyperbole, and puns on the theme of gallant love. Honoré d'Urfé, Vincent Voiture, Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Charles Cotin, Antoine Godeau, Madeleine de Scudéry, Isaac de Benserade, Paul Pellisson, Madame d'Aulnoy, Henriette-Julie de Murat
Metaphysical poets 17th-century English Baroque school using extended conceit, often (though not always) about religion John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell
Cavalier Poets 17th-century English Baroque royalist poets, writing primarily about courtly love, called Sons of Ben (after Ben Jonson) Richard Lovelace, William Davenant
Euphuism A peculiar mannered style of Baroque English prose, richly decorated with rhetorical questions Thomas Lodge, John Lyly
Classicism A 17th–18th centuries Western cultural movement that partially coexisted with the Baroque, coincided with the Age of Enlightenment and drew inspiration from the qualities of proportion of the major works of classical ancient Greek and Latin literature Pierre Corneille, Molière, Jean Racine, John Dryden, William Wycherley, William Congreve, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Voltaire, Carlo Goldoni
Amatory fiction Romantic fiction popular around 1660 to 1730; notable for preceding the modern novel form and producing several prominent female authors Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley, Aphra Behn
The Augustans 18th-century literary movement based chiefly on classical ideals, satire and skepticism Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift
Sentimentalism Literary sentimentalism arose during the 18th century, partly as a response to sentimentalism in philosophy. In 18th-century England, the sentimental novel was a major literary genre. The movement was one of roots of Romanticism Edward Young, James Thomson, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Gray, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Christian Heinrich Spiess
Gothic fiction Horror fiction existed from 1760s in which the atmosphere is typically claustrophobic, and common plot elements include vengeful persecution, imprisonment, and murder with interest in the supernatural and in violence Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, Harper Lee, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Christian Heinrich Spiess
Sturm und Drang From 1767 till 1785, a precursor to the Romanticism, it is named for a play by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger. Its literature often features a protagonist which is driven by emotion, impulse and other motives that run counter to the enlightenment rationalism. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Heinrich Leopold Wagner
Weimar Classicism In contrast with the contemporaneous German Romanticism, the practitioners of Weimar Classicism (1788–1805) established the synthesis of ideas from pre-Romanticism of Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, and Classicism Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Caroline von Wolzogen
Romanticism 19th-century (ca. 1800 to 1860) movement emphasizing emotion and imagination, rather than logic and scientific thought. Response to the Enlightenment Jean Paul, Novalis, Washington Irving, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Alexander Pushkin, Victor Hugo, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Camilo Castelo Branco, Adam Mickiewicz, José de Alencar
Dark romanticism A style within Romanticism. Finds man inherently sinful and self-destructive and nature a dark, mysterious force E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edwin Arlington Robinson
Lake Poets A group of Romantic poets from the English Lake District who wrote about nature and the sublime William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey
Pre-Raphaelites Founded in 1848, primarily English movement based ostensibly on undoing innovations by the painter Raphael. Many were both painters and poets Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti
Transcendentalism From the mid-19th-century American movement: poetry and philosophy concerned with self-reliance, independence from modern technology Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau
Realism The mid-19th-century movement based on a simplification of style and image and an interest in poverty and everyday concerns Gustave Flaubert, William Dean Howells, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Frank Norris, Machado de Assis, Eça de Queiroz
Naturalism Late 19th century. Proponents of this movement believe heredity and environment control people Émile Zola, Stephen Crane, Guy de Maupassant, Henrik Ibsen, Aluísio Azevedo
Verismo Verismo is a derivative of naturalism and realism that began in post-unification Italy. Verismo literature uses detailed character development based on psychology, in Giovanni Verga's words 'the science of the human heart.' Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, Matilde Serao, Grazia Deledda
Social realism A type of realism, not to be confused with socialist realism, which depicted the socio-political problems and domestic situations of working class. Some its movements include:
  • Proletarian literature
  • Angry young men (Kitchen sink realism)
Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Maxim Gorky, Theodore Dreiser, Jaroslav Hašek, Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Yoshiki Hayama, Kenneth Fearing, John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, Stan Barstow
Socialist realism Socialist realism is a subset of realist art which focuses on communist values and realist depiction. It developed in the Soviet Union and was imposed as state policy by Joseph Stalin in 1934, though authors in other socialist countries and members of the communist party in non-socialist counties also partook in the movement Maxim Gorky, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Mikhail Sholokhov, Lu Xun, Takiji Kobayashi, Mike Gold
American Realism A national variety of Realism often having the character of protecting the American type of development and way of life Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Margaret Deland, Jack London, J. D. Salinger
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 Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, Günter Grass, Julio Cortázar, Sadegh Hedayat, Mo Yan, Olga Tokarczuk
Neo-romanticism The term has been applied to writers, who rejected, abandoned, or opposed realism, naturalism, or avant-garde modernism at various points in time from circa 1850 and incorporated elements from the era of Romanticism Thomas Mayne Reid, Mór Jókai, Jules Verne, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rafael Sabatini, Knut Hamsun, Alexander Grin, Kahlil Gibran, Jaishankar Prasad
Decadent movement In the mid 19th century, decadence came to refer to moral decay, and was attributed as the cause of the fall of great civilizations, like the Roman empire. The decadent movement was a response to the perceived decadence within the earlier Romantic, naturalist and realist movements in France at this time. The decadent movement takes decadence in literature to an extreme, with characters who debase themselves for pleasure, and the use of metaphor, symbolism and language as tools to obfuscate the truth rather than expose it Joris-Karl Huysmans, Gustav Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde
Parnassianism The French-origing group of the anti-Romantic poets, mainly occurring prior to symbolism during the 1860s–1890s that strove for exact and faultless workmanship Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Felicjan Medard Faleński, Sully Prudhomme, José-Maria de Heredia, Alberto de Oliveira, Olavo Bilac
Symbolism Principally French movement of the fin de siècle, symbolism is codified by the Symbolist Manifesto in 1886, and focused on the structure of thought rather than poetic form or image; influential for English language poets from Edgar Allan Poe to James Merrill Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Maurice Maeterlinck, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Alexandru Macedonski, Cruz e Sousa
Russian symbolism It arose enough separately from West European symbolism, emphasizing mysticism of Sophiology and defamiliarization Alexander Blok, Valery Bryusov, Andrei Bely
Modernism Variegated movement, including modernist poetry, origined in the late 19th century, encompassing primitivism, formal innovation, or reaction to science and technology Joseph Conrad, Knut Hamsun, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.D., T. S. Eliot, Fernando Pessoa, Karel Čapek, Peter Weiss, Mário de Andrade, João Guimarães Rosa, Rabindranath Tagore
Mahjar The "émigré school" was a neo-romantic movement within Arabic-language writers in the Americas that appeared at the turn of the 20th century Ameen Rihani, Kahlil Gibran, Nasib Arida, Mikhail Naimy, Elia Abu Madi, Nadra and Abd al-Masih Haddad
Futurism An avant-garde, largely Italian and Russian, movement codified in 1909 by the Manifesto of Futurism. Futurists managed to create a new language free of syntax punctuation, and metrics that allowed for free expression Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giovanni Papini, Mina Loy, Aldo Palazzeschi, Velimir Khlebnikov, Almada Negreiros, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Stanisław Młodożeniec, Jaroslav Seifert
Cubo-Futurism Movement within Russian Futurism with practice of zaum, the experimental visual and sound poetry Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchyonykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky
Ego-Futurism A school within Russian Futurism based on a personality cult Igor Severyanin, Vasilisk Gnedov
Acmeism A Russian modernist poetic school, which emerged ca. 1911 and to symbols preferred direct expression through exact images Nikolay Gumilev, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Kuzmin, Anna Akhmatova, Georgiy Ivanov
New Culture Movement A Chinese movement together with the May Fourth Movement as its part during the 1910s and 1920s that opposed Confusian culture and proclaimed a new culture, including the use of written vernacular Chinese. It clustered in the New Youth literary magazine and Peking University Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Li Dazhao, Chen Hengzhe, Hu Shih, Yu Pingbo
Stream of consciousness Early-20th-century fiction consisting of literary representations of quotidian thought, without authorial presence Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce
Impressionism It influenced by the European Impressionist art movement and subsumed into several other categories. The term is used to describe not some movement, but a work of literature characterized by the selection of a few details to convey the sense impressions left by an incident or scene Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf
Expressionism Part of the larger expressionist movement, literary and theatrical expressionism is an avant-garde movement originating in Germany, which rejects realism in order to depict emotions and subjective thoughts Franz Kafka, Alfred Döblin, Gottfried Benn, Heinrich Mann, Oskar Kokoschka
First World War Poets British poets who documented both the idealism and the horrors of the war and the period in which it took place Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen
Imagism An English-language modernist group founded in 1914 that poetry based on description rather than theme, and on the motto, "the natural object is always the adequate symbol" Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington
Dada Touted by its proponents as anti-art, the Dada avant-garde focused on going against artistic norms and conventions Jean Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Tristan Tzara
Imaginism Avant-garde post-Russian Revolution of 1917 poetic movement that created poetry based on sequences of arresting and uncommon images Sergei Yesenin, Anatoly Marienhof, Rurik Ivnev
The Lost Generation The term 'Lost Generation' is 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 of Europe from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Waldo Pierce, John Dos Passos
Stridentism Mexican artistic avant-garde movement. They exalted modern urban life and social revolution Manuel Maples Arce, Arqueles Vela, Germán List Arzubide
Harlem Renaissance African American poets, novelists, and thinkers, often employing elements of blues and folklore, based in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston
Jindyworobak movement The Jindyworobak movement originated in Adelaide, South Australia during the great depression. It sought to preserve uniquely Australian culture from external influence by incorporating Australian aboriginal languages and mythology and unique Australian settings Rex Ingamells, Xavier Herbert
Surrealism Originally a French movement, which developed in the 1920s from Dadaism by André Breton with Philippe Soupault and influenced by surrealist painting, that uses surprising images and transitions to play off of formal expectations and depict the unconscious rather than conscious mind (surrealist automatism) André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Jean Cocteau, José María Hinojosa Lasarte, Sadegh Hedayat, Mário Cesariny, Haruki Murakami
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 to 1931 Xavier Villaurrutia, Salvador Novo
Villa Seurat Network A group of left and anarchist writers living in Paris in the 1930s, largely influenced by Surrealism Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Anaïs Nin, Alfred Perles
Objectivism A loose-knit modernist mainly American group from the 1930s. Objectivists treated the poem as an object; they emphasised sincerity, intelligence, and the clarity of the poet's vision Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting
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 John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren
Postcolonialism A diverse, loosely connected movement within the contemporary literature, writers from former colonies of European countries, whose work is frequently politically charged Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Giannina Braschi, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe
Black Mountain poets A self-identified avant-garde group of poets, originally, from the 1950, based at Black Mountain College, who eschewed patterned form in favor of the rhythms and inflections of the human voice Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley
Absurdism The absurdist movement is derived in the 1950s from absurdist philosophy, which argues that life is inherently purposeless and questions truth and value. As such, absurdist literature and theatre of the absurd often includes dark humor, satire, and incongruity Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Imre Kertész, Gao Xingjian
The Movement A 1950s group of English anti-romantic and rational writers Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Donald Alfred Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Robert Conquest
Nouveau roman The "new novelists", appeared in French literature in the 1950s, generally rejected the traditional use of chronology, plot and character in novel, as well as the omniscient narrator, and focused on the vision of thins Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Robert Pinget, Marguerite Duras, Jean Ricardou
Concrete poetry The Concrete poetry was an avant-garde movement started in Brazil during the 1950s, characterized for extinguishing the general conception of poetry, creating a new language called ''verbivocovisual'' Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari
Beats American movement of the 1950s and 1960s concerned with counterculture and youthful alienation Its British variety were the 1960s Liverpool poets Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Gregory Corso
Confessional poetry American poetry that emerged in the late 1950s, often brutally, exposes the self as part of an aesthetic of the beauty and power of human frailty Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Alicia Ostriker
Soviet nonconformism A dissident, stylistically diverse art "movement" in the post-Stalin era Soviet Union from 1950s to 1980s in opposition to official socialist realism Varlam Shalamov, Viktor Nekrasov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Igor Kholin, Naum Korzhavin, Andrei Sinyavsky, Genrikh Sapgir, Georgi Vladimov, Vasily Aksyonov, Vladimir Voinovich, Igor Sinyavin, Venedikt Yerofeyev, Joseph Brodsky
Oulipo Founded in 1960 French poetry and prose group based on seemingly arbitrary rules for the sake of added challenge Raymond Queneau, Walter Abish, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino
Postmodernism Contemporary movement, emerged strongly in the 1960s US, skeptical of absolutes and embracing diversity, irony, and word play Kathy Acker, John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, William Gaddis, Alasdair Gray, Subimal Mishra, Thomas Pynchon, Samir Roychoudhury, Kurt Vonnegut, Yukio Mishima, Bret Easton Ellis
Hungry generation A literary movement in postcolonial India (Kolkata) during 1961–65 as a counter-discourse to Colonial Bengali poetry Shakti Chattopadhyay, Malay Roy Choudhury, Binoy Majumdar, Samir Roychoudhury, Debi Roy, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Subimal Basak
New York School Urban, gay or gay-friendly, leftist poets, writers, and painters of the 1960s Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery
New Wave The New Wave is a movement in science fiction produced in the 1960s and 1970s and characterized by a high degree of experimentation, both in form and in content, a "literary" or artistic sensibility, and a focus on "soft" as opposed to hard science. New Wave writers often saw themselves as part of the modernist tradition and sometimes mocked the traditions of pulp science fiction, which some of them regarded as stodgy, adolescent and poorly written. John Brunner, M. John Harrison, Norman Spinrad, Barrington J. Bayley, Thomas M. Disch
British Poetry Revival A loose wide-reaching collection of groupings and subgroupings during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a modernist reaction to the conservative The Movement J. H. Prynne, Eric Mottram, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley, Lee Harwood
Language poets An avant-garde group or tendency in American poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the poem as a construction in and of language itself Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein
Spiralism A literary movement founded in the late 1960s by René Philoctète, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and Frankétienne. Spiralism defines life at the level of relations (colors, odors, sounds, signs, words) and historical connections René Philoctète, Jean-Claude Fignolé, Frankétienne
Misty Poets The Misty Poets were Chinese poets who resisted state artistic restrictions imposed during the Cultural Revolution from 1970s. They made use of metaphors and hermetic imagery and avoided objective facts Bei Dao, Duo Duo, Shu Ting, Yang Lian, Gu Cheng, Hai Zi
Spoken Word A postmodern literary movement srarted ca. 1970, where writers use their speaking voice to present fiction, poetry, monologues, and storytelling arising from Beat poetry, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights movement in the urban centers of the United States. The textual origins differ and may have been written for print initially then read aloud for audiences Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Hedwig Gorski, Pedro Pietri, Piri Thomas, Giannina Braschi, Taalam Acey
Performance poetry This is the lasting viral component of Spoken Word and one of the most popular forms of poetry in the 21st century. It is a new oral poetry originating in the 1980s in Austin, Texas, using the speaking voice and other theatrical elements. Practitioners write for the speaking voice instead of writing poetry for the silent printed page. The major figure is American Hedwig Gorski who began broadcasting live radio poetry with East of Eden Band during the early 1980s. Gorski, considered a post-Beat, created the term "Performance Poetry" to define and distinguish what she and the band did from performance art. Instead of books, poets use audio recordings and digital media along with television spawning Slam Poetry and Def Poets on television and Broadway Beau Sia, Hedwig Gorski, Bob Holman, Marc Smith, David Antin, Taalam Acey
New Formalism The late-20th and early 21st century movement in American poetry advocating a return to traditional accentual-syllabic verse Dana Gioia, X.J. Kennedy, Brad Leithauser, Molly Peacock, Mary Jo Salter, Timothy Steele
Sastra wangi A label for the movement of Indonesian literature started circa 2000 and written by young, urban Indonesian women who take on controversial issues such as politics or religion Ayu Utami, Djenar Maesa Ayu, Dewi "Dee" Lestari, Fira Basuki, Nova Riyanti Yusuf
Empathism The Empathic Movement is literary, artistic, philosophical movement started in southern Italy in 2020 Menotti Lerro, Franco Loi, Giampiero Neri, Valerio Magrelli

See also

  • List of poetry groups and movements
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