List of literary movements
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This is a list of modern literary movements: that is, movements after the Renaissance. These terms, helpful for curricula or anthologies, evolved over time to group writers who are often loosely related. Some of these movements (such as Dada and Beat) were defined by the members themselves, while other terms (the metaphysical poets, for example) emerged decades or centuries after the periods in question. Ordering is approximate, as there is considerable overlap.
These are movements either drawn from or influential for literature in the English language.
Cavalier Poets
- 17th century English royalist poets, writing primarily about courtly love, called Sons of Ben (after Ben Jonson).
- *Notable authors: Richard Lovelace, William Davenant
- 17th century English movement using extended conceit, often (though not always) about religion.
- *Notable authors: John Donne, George Herbert
- An 18th century literary movement based chiefly on classical ideals, satire and skepticism.
- *Notable authors: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift
- 18th to 19th century movement emphasizing emotion and imagination, rather than logic and scientific thought. Response to the Enlightenment.
- *Notable authors: Victor Hugo, Lord Byron
- Fiction in which Romantic ideals are combined with an interest in the supernatural and in violence.
- *Notable authors: Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker
- A group of Romantic poets from the English Lake District who wrote about nature and the sublime.
- *Notable authors: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- 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.
- *Notable authors: Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne
- 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
- 19th century American movement: poetry and philosophy concerned with self-reliance, independence from modern technology.
- *Notable authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau
- Late-19th century movement based on a simplification of style and image and an interest in poverty and everyday concerns.
- *Notable authors: Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, Frank Norris
- Also late 19th century. Proponents of this movement believe heredity and environment control people.
- *Notable authors: Émile Zola, Stephen Crane
- 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.
- *Notable authors: Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry
- Early-20th century fiction consisting of literary representations of quotidian thought, without authorial presence.
- *Notable authors: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce
- Variegated movement of the early 20th century, encompassing primitivism, formal innovation, or reaction to science and technology.
- *Notable authors: T.S. Eliot, H.D.
- Touted by its proponents as anti-art, dada focused on going against artistic norms and conventions.
- *Notable authors: Guillaume Apollinaire, Kurt Schwitters
- Poets who documented both the idealism and the horrors of the war and the period in which it took place.
- *Notable authors: Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke
- Poetry based on description rather than theme, and on the motto, "the natural object is always the adequate symbol."
- *Notable authors: Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington
- 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.
- *Notable authors: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston
- 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.
- *Notable authors: Jean Cocteau, Dylan Thomas
- 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.
- *Notable authors: John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren
- Mid-20th century poetry and prose based on seemingly arbitrary rules for the sake of added challenge.
- *Notable authors: Raymond Queneau, Walter Abish
- Postwar movement skeptical of absolutes and embracing diversity, irony, and word play.
- *Notable authors: Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon
- 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.
- *Notable authors: Charles Olson, Denise Levertov
- American movement of the 1950s and '60s concerned with counterculture and youthful alienation.
- *Notable authors: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey
- 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
- Urban, gay or gay-friendly, leftist poets, writers, and painters of the 1960s.
- *Notable authors: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery
- 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
- 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
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