Literary Movement
Brief Description
Authors in GALE
Amatory fiction
Romantic fiction written in the 17th century and
18th century, primarily written by women.
Eliza Haywood,
Delarivier Manley
Metaphysical poets
17th century English movement using extended
conceit, often (though not always) about religion.
John Donne, George
Herbert, Andrew Marvell
The English Augustans
An 18th century literary movement based
chiefly on classical ideals, satire and skepticism.
English Romanticism
1800 to 1860 century movement emphasizing
emotion and imagination, rather than logic and
scientific thought. Response to the
Enlightenment.
Lord Byron
Gothic novel
Fiction in which Romantic ideals are combined
with an interest in the supernatural and in
violence.
Ann Radcliffe, Bram
Stoker
A group of Romantic poets from the English
Lake District who wrote about nature and the
sublime.
William Wordsworth,
Samuel Taylor
Cooleridge
American (Dark)
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. 19th century
American movement in reaction to
Transcendentalism. Finds man inherently sinful
and self-destructive and nature a dark,
mysterious force.
Washington Irving,
Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Edgar Allen Poe,
Herman Melville,
George Lippard
Pre-Raphaelitism
19th century, primarily English movement based
ostensibly on undoing innovations by the painter
Raphael. Many were both painters and poets.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Christina Rossetti
American
Transcendentalism
19th century American movement: poetry and
philosophy concerned with self-reliance,
independence from modern technology.
Ralp Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau
Realism
Late-19th century movement based on a
simplification of style and image and an interest
in poverty and everyday concerns.
Leo Tolstoy
American realism was an early 20th century idea
in art, music and literature that showed through
these different types of work, reflections of the
time period. Whether it was a cultural portrayal,
or a scenic view of downtown New York City,
these images and works of literature, music and
painting depicted a contemporary view of what
was happening; an attempt at defining what was
real.
Frances Hodgson
Burnett, Mark Twain,
Willa Cather, Sinclair
Lewis, William Dean
Howells
Lake Poets
American Realism
Jonathan Swift
Literary realism most often refers to the trend,
beginning with certain works of nineteenthcentury French literature and extending to latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors
in various countries, towards depictions of
contemporary life and society "as they were." In
the spirit of general "realism," Realist authors
opted for depictions of everyday and banal
activities and experiences, instead of a
romanticized or similarly stylized presentation.
Gustave Flaubert,
Honore de Balzac, Emile
Zola
Naturalism
Also late 19th century. Proponents of this
movement believe heredity and environment
control people.
Stephen Crane, Jack
London, Ralph Ellison
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.
Stephane Mallarme,
Arthur Rimbaud, Paul
Valery
Stream of consciousness
Early-20th century fiction consisting of literary
representations of quotidian thought, without
authorial presence.
James Joyce, Ezra
Pound, Gertrude Stein
Variegated movement of the early 20th
century, encompassing primitivism, formal
innovation, or reaction to science and
technology.
Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot,
George Orwell, Agatha
Christie, C.S. Lewis
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 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
Hemmingway, Ezra
Pound
Touted by its proponents as anti-art, dada
focused on going against artistic norms and
conventions.
Guillaume Apollinaire,
Kurt Schwitters
First World War Poets
Poets who documented both the idealism and
the horrors of the war and the period in which it
took place.
Siegfried Sassoon,
Rupert Brooke
Imagism
Poetry based on description rather than theme,
and on the motto, "the natural object is always
the adequate symbol."
Ezra Pound, D.H.
Lawrence, Richard
Aldington
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
French Realism
English Modernism
The Lost Generation
Dada
Avant Garde
Avant-garde represents a pushing of the
boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or
the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The
notion of the existence of the avant-garde is
considered by some to be a hallmark
of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism.
Many artists have aligned themselves with the
avant-garde movement and still continue to do
so, tracing a history from Dada through
the Situationists to postmodern artists such as
the Language poets around 1981.
Jean Cocteau
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.
courtney
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
Postwar movement skeptical of absolutes and
embracing diversity, irony, and word play.
Alasdair Gray, John
Fowles, Ken Follett, Dick
Francis, William Golding
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.
Charles Olson, Denise
Levertov
American movement of the 1950s and '60s
concerned with counterculture and youthful
alienation.
Jack Kerouac, Allen
Ginsberg, William S.
Burroughs, Ken Kesey
Confessional poetry
Poetry that, often brutally, exposes the self as
part of an aesthetic of the beauty and power of
human frailty.
Robert Lowell, Sylvia
Plath
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 Garcia
Marquez, Julio Cortazar
English Postmodernism
Black Mountain Poets
Beat poets
German Postwar
Literature
Postcolonialism
Spoken Word
Gunter Grass
A diverse, loosely connected movement of
writers from former colonies of European
countries, whose work is frequently politically
charged.
A postmodern literary movement where writers
use their speaking voice to present fiction, poetry,
monologues, and storytelling arising in the 1980s
in the urban centers of the United States.
Salman Rushdie
Performance Poetry
This is the lasting viral component of Spoken
Word and one of the most popular forms of
poetry in the twenty-first 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.
Instead of books, poets use audio recordings and
digital media along with television spawning Slam
Poetry and Def Poets on television and
Broadway.
Fantasy Fiction
Stories involving magic, paranormal magic and
terrible monsters have existed in spoken forms
before the advent of printed literature. Modern
fantasy....
J.K. Rowling, Terry
Prachett, Neil Gaiman,
Steven Erickson, J.R.R.
Tolkien, Ursula K. LeGuin,
Stephen King, Terry
Brooks, Robert Jordan,
David Eddings
American
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a tendency in contemporary
culture characterized by the rejection
of objective truth and global cultural narrative or
meta-narrative. It emphasizes the role of
language, power relations, and motivations; in
particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications
such as male versus female, straight versus gay,
white versus black, and imperial versus colonial.
Judy Blume, Orson Scott
Card, Betsy Byars,
Madeline L'Engle
Black Aesthetic
Movement
The Black Arts Movement or BAM is the artistic
branch of the Black Power movement. It was
started in Harlem by writer and activist Amiri
Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones).[1] Time
Magazine describes the Black Arts Movement as
the "single most controversial moment in the
history of African-American literature-- possibly in
American literature as a whole."[2] The Black Arts
Repertory Theatre is a key institution of the Black
Arts Movement.
Eldridge Cleaver, Henry
Lewis Gates, Jr., Nikki
Giovanni, Alex Haley