*Absurd, literature of the (c. 1930–1970):*
A movement,
primarily in the theater, that responded to the seeming illogicality and
purposelessness of human life in works marked by a lack of clear narrative,
understandable psychological motives, or emotional catharsis. Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot is one of the most celebrated works in the theater of the
absurd.
*Aestheticism (c. 1835–1910):*
A late-19th- century movement
that believed in art as an end in itself. Aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and
Walter Pater rejected the view that art had to posses a higher moral or
political value and believed instead in “art for art’s sake.”
*Angry Young Men (1950s–1980s):*
A group of male British writers
who created visceral plays and fiction at odds with the political establishment
and a self-satisfied middle class. John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger
(1957) is one of the seminal works of this movement.
*Beat Generation (1950s–1960s):*
A group of American writers in
the 1950s and 1960s who sought release and illumination though a bohemian
counterculture of sex, drugs, and Zen Buddhism. Beat writers such as Jack
Kerouac (On The Road) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl) gained fame by giving readings
in coffeehouses, often accompanied by jazz music.
*Bloomsbury Group (c. 1906–1930s):*
An informal group of friends
and lovers, including Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey,
Virginia Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes, who lived in the Bloomsbury section of
London in the early 20th century and who had a considerable liberalizing
influence on British culture.
*Commedia dell’arte (1500s–1700s):*
Improvisational comedy first
developed in Renaissance Italy that involved stock characters and centered
around a set scenario. The elements of farce and buffoonery in commedia
dell’arte, as well as its standard characters and plot intrigues, have had a
tremendous influence on Western comedy, and can still be seen in contemporary
drama and television sitcoms.
*Dadaism (1916–1922):*
An avant-garde movement that began in
response to the devastation of World War I. Based in Paris and led by the poet
Tristan Tzara, the Dadaists produced nihilistic and antilogical prose, poetry,
and art, and rejected the traditions, rules, and ideals of prewar Europe.
*Enlightenment (c. 1660–1790):* An intellectual movement in
France and other parts of Europe that emphasized the importance of reason,
progress, and liberty. The Enlightenment, sometimes called the Age of Reason,
is primarily associated with nonfiction writing, such as essays and
philosophical treatises. Major Enlightenment writers include Thomas Hobbes,
John Locke, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, René Descartes.
*Elizabethan era (c. 1558–1603):*
A flourishing period in
English literature, particularly drama, that coincided with the reign of Queen
Elizabeth I and included writers such as Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Christopher
Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser.
*Gothic fiction (c. 1764–1820):*
A genre of late-18th-century
literature that featured brooding, mysterious settings and plots and set the
stage for what we now call “horror stories.” Horace Walpole’s Castle of
Otranto, set inside a medieval castle, was the first major Gothic novel. Later,
the term “Gothic” grew to include any work that attempted to create an
atmosphere of terror or the unknown, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories.
*Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918–1930):*
A flowering of
African-American literature, art, and music during the 1920s in New York City.
W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk anticipated the movement, which
included Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro, Zora Neale Hurston’s novel
Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the poetry of Langston Hughes and Countee
Cullen.
*Lost Generation (c. 1918–1930s):*
A term used to describe the
generation of writers, many of them soldiers that came to maturity during World
War I. Notable members of this group include F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos
Passos, and Ernest Hemingway, whose novel The Sun Also Rises embodies the Lost
Generation’s sense of disillusionment.
*Magic realism (c. 1935–present):*
A style of writing,
popularized by Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, and
others, that combines realism with moments of dream-like fantasy within a
single prose narrative.
*Metaphysical poets (c. 1633–1680):* A group of 17th-century
poets who combined direct language with ingenious images, paradoxes, and
conceits. John Donne and Andrew Marvell are the best known poets of this
school.
*Middle English (c. 1066–1500):*
The transitional period between
Anglo-Saxon and modern English. The cultural upheaval that followed the Norman
Conquest of England, in 1066, saw a flowering of secular literature, including
ballads, chivalric romances, allegorical poems, and a variety of religious
plays. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is the most celebrated work of this
period.
*Modernism (1890s–1940s):*
A literary and artistic movement that
provided a radical breaks with traditional modes of Western art, thought,
religion, social conventions, and morality. Major themes of this period include
the attack on notions of hierarchy; experimentation in new forms of narrative,
such as stream of consciousness; doubt about the existence of knowable,
objective reality; attention to alternative viewpoints and modes of thinking;
and self-referentiality as a means of drawing attention to the relationships
between artist and audience, and form and content. •
*High modernism (1920s):*
Generally considered the golden age of
modernist literature, this period saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses,
T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Marcel
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
*Naturalism (c. 1865–1900):*
A literary movement that used
detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment
had inescapable force in shaping human character. Leading writers in the
movement include Émile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane.
*Neoclassicism (c. 1660–1798):*
A literary movement, inspired by
the rediscovery of classical works of ancient Greece and Rome that emphasized
balance, restraint, and order. Neoclassicism roughly coincided with the
Enlightenment, which espoused reason over passion. Notable neoclassical writers
include Edmund Burke, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan
Swift.
*Nouveau Roman (“New Novel”) (c. 1955–1970):*
A French movement,
led by Alain Robbe-Grillet, that dispensed with traditional elements of the
novel, such as plot and character, in favor of neutrally recording the
experience of sensations and things.
*Postcolonial literature (c. 1950s–present):*
Literature by and
about people from former European colonies, primarily in Africa, Asia, South
America, and the Caribbean. This literature aims both to expand the traditional
canon of Western literature and to challenge Eurocentric assumptions about
literature, especially through examination of questions of otherness, identity,
and race. Prominent postcolonial works include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart, V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) provided an important theoretical
basis for understanding postcolonial literature.
*Postmodernism (c. 1945–present):*
A notoriously ambiguous term,
especially as it refers to literature, postmodernism can be seen as a response
to the elitism of high modernism as well as to the horrors of World War II.
Postmodern literature is characterized by a disjointed, fragmented pastiche of
high and low culture that reflects the absence of tradition and structure in a
world driven by technology and consumerism. Julian Barnes, Don DeLillo, Toni
Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, and Kurt Vonnegut
are among many who are considered postmodern authors.
*Pre-Raphaelites (c. 1848–1870):*
The literary arm of an
artistic movement that drew inspiration from Italian artists working before
Raphael (1483–1520). The Pre-Raphaelites combined sensuousness and religiosity
through archaic poetic forms and medieval settings. William Morris, Christina
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Charles Swinburne were leading poets in
the movement.
*Realism (c. 1830–1900):* A loose term that can refer to any
work that aims at honest portrayal over sensationalism, exaggeration, or
melodrama. Technically, realism refers to a late-19th-centu ry literary
movement—primarily French, English, and American—that aimed at accurate
detailed portrayal of ordinary, contemporary life. Many of the 19th century’s
greatest novelists, such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, George Eliot,
Gustave Flaubert, and Leo Tolstoy, are classified as realists. Naturalism ( see
above ) can be seen as an intensification of realism.
*Romanticism (c. 1798–1832):*
A literary and artistic movement
that reacted against the restraint and universalism of the Enlightenment. The
Romantics celebrated spontaneity, imagination, subjectivity, and the purity of
nature. Notable English Romantic writers include Jane Austen, William Blake,
Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
William Wordsworth. Prominent figures in the American Romantic movement include
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant,
and John Greenleaf Whittier.
*Sturm und Drang (1770s):*
German for “storm and stress,” this
brief German literary movement advocated passionate individuality in the face
of Neoclassical rationalism and restraint. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young
Werther is the most enduring work of this movement, which greatly influenced
the Romantic movement (see above).
*Surrealism (1920s–1930s):*
An avant-garde movement, based
primarily in France, that sought to break down the boundaries between rational
and irrational, conscious and unconscious, through a variety of literary and
artistic experiments. The surrealist poets, such as André Breton and Paul
Eluard, were not as successful as their artist counterparts, who included
Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and René Magritte.
*Symbolists (1870s–1890s):*
A group of French poets who reacted
against realism with a poetry of suggestion based on private symbols, and
experimented with new poetic forms such as free verse and the prose poem. The
symbolists—Stép hane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine are the most
well known—were influenced by Charles Baudelaire. In turn, they had a seminal
influence on the modernist poetry of the early 20th century.
*Transcendentalism (c. 1835–1860):*
An American philosophical
and spiritual movement, based in New England, that focused on the primacy of
the individual conscience and rejected materialism in favor of closer communion
with nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and Henry David Thoreau’s
Walden are famous transcendentalist works.
*Victorian era (c. 1832–1901):*
The period of English history
between the passage of the first Reform Bill (1832) and the death of Queen
Victoria (reigned 1837–1901). Though remembered for strict social, political,
and sexual conservatism and frequent clashes between religion and science, the
period also saw prolific literary activity and significant social reform and
criticism. Notable Victorian novelists include the Brontë sisters, Charles
Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and
Thomas Hardy, while prominent poets include Matthew Arnold; Robert Browning;
Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and
Christina Rossetti. Notable Victorian nonfiction writers include Walter Pater,
John Ruskin, and Charles Darwin, who penned the famous On the Origin of Species
(1859). Literary theory and literary criticism are interpretive tools that help
us think more deeply and insightfully about the literature that we read. Over
time, different schools of literary criticism have developed, each with its own
approaches to the act of reading.
