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 table list 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.
MovementDescriptionNotable authorsRenaissance literatureThe 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 EnglandPetrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Janus Pannonius, Baptista Mantuanus, Jacopo Sannazaro, Niccolò Machiavelli, Ludovico Ariosto, François Rabelais, Jorge de Montemor, Miguel de Cervantes, Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Georg Rudolf WeckherlinThe Makars or Scottish ChauceriansThe term has been specifically used to refer to a movement of number of court poets of the 15th and 16th century Scots-language literature in the period of the Northern Renaissance. Figures such as William Drummond who wrote in English might loosely be seen as forming a continuation into the 17th centuryRobert Henryson, Walter Kennedy, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, David Lyndsay, Alexander MontgomerieMannerismA 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 sophisticationMichelangelo, Clément Marot, Giovanni della Casa, Giovanni Battista Guarini, Torquato Tasso, Veronica Franco, Miguel de CervantesPetrarchismA 16th-century movement of Petrarch's style followers, partially coincident with MannerismPietro 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, Bálint BalassiGrobianismA particular movement in 16th-century German literature that parodied moralizing works and ridiculed in the most extreme caricatures the imitation of Romanesque fashions by gentle circles. The Grobianus Tischzucht (1538) and Friedrich Dedekind's Grobianus (1549) works give their name to GrobianismFriedrich Dedekind, Johann FischartCastalian BandA Scottish Renaissance grouping of court poets, or makars, and musicians headed by the King at the end of the 16th century. Their proficient use of sometimes highly mannered verce forms makes them forerunners to Scottish and English BaroqueAlexander Montgomerie, William Fowler, John Stewart, William AlexanderBaroqueA 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 wordplayGiambattista 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 GrimmelshausenMarinismThis 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 descriptionsGiambattista Marino, Cesare Rinaldi, Bartolomeo Tortoletti, Emanuele Tesauro, Francesco Pona, Francesco Maria SantinelliA 17th-century Baroque movement in the Spanish literature, a similar to the MarinismFrancisco de Quevedo, Baltasar GraciánAnother 17th-century Spanish Baroque movement, in contrast to Conceptismo, characterized by an ornamental, ostentatious vocabulary and highly latinate syntaxLuis de Góngora, Hortensio Félix Paravicino, Conde de Villamediana, Juana Inés de la CruzPrécieusesThe main features of this 17th-century French Baroque movement, similar to the Spanish culteranismo and English euphuism, are the refined prose and poetry language of aristocratic salons, periphrases, hyperbole, and puns on the theme of gallant loveHonoré 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 MuratMetaphysical poetsA 17th-century English Baroque school using extended conceit, often (though not always) about religionJohn Donne, George Herbert, Andrew MarvellCavalier Poets17th-century English Baroque royalist poets, writing primarily about courtly love, called Sons of Ben (after Ben Jonson)Richard Lovelace, William DavenantEuphuismA peculiar mannered style of Baroque English prose, richly decorated with rhetorical questionsThomas Lodge, John LylyClassicism or NeoclassicismA 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 literaturePierre Corneille, Molière, Jean Racine, John Dryden, William Wycherley, William Congreve, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Voltaire, Carlo Goldoni, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Gotthold Ephraim LessingAmatory fictionRomantic fiction popular around 1660 to 1730; notable for preceding the modern novel form and producing several prominent female authorsEliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley, Aphra BehnThe AugustansAn 18th-century literary movement based chiefly on classical ideals, satire and skepticismAlexander Pope, Jonathan SwiftRococoAlso known as Late Baroque, the final expression of the Baroque movement that began in France in the 1730s and characterized by a cheerful lightness and intimacy of tone, and an elegant playfulness in erotic light poetry and principally small literary formsAnne Claude de Caylus, Alexandre Masson de Pezay, Évariste de Parny, Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray, Paolo Rolli, Pietro Metastasio, Friedrich von Hagedorn, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Johann Uz, Johann Nikolaus Götz, Christoph Martin WielandSentimentalismLiterary 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 RomanticismBrissenden, R.F. (1974). Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade. London: Macmillan.Mullan, John (1988). Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Edward Young, James Thomson, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Gray, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Christian Heinrich SpiessGothic fictionHorror 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 violenceHorace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Christian Heinrich SpiessFrom 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.Leidner, Alan C. Sturm Und Drang: The German Library. 14. New York: The Continuum Publ., 1992Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Heinrich Leopold WagnerWeimar ClassicismIn 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 ClassicismJohann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Caroline von WolzogenPyreneanismA 19th century sporting, artistic, and literary movement centered around exploring the Pyrenees in order to create works inspired by the experience, whether for contemplative, artistic, or scientific purposes. The term was coined in 1898 by the scholar Henri Beraldi in his book (), where he described a specific way of engaging with the Pyrenean mountains.Louis Ramond de Carbonnières, Anne Lister, Charles Packe, Henry Russell, Eugène Trutat, Franz Schrader, Henri LefebvreRomanticismA 19th-century (ca. 1800 to 1860) movement emphasizing emotion and imagination, rather than logic and scientific thought. Response to the EnlightenmentJean Paul, Novalis, Washington Irving, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Alexander Pushkin, Victor Hugo, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Camilo Castelo Branco, Adam Mickiewicz, José de AlencarDark romanticismA style within Romanticism. Finds man inherently sinful and self-destructive and nature a dark, mysterious forceE. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edwin Arlington RobinsonLake PoetsA group of Romantic poets from the English Lake District who wrote about nature and the sublimeWilliam Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey or Arab RenaissanceBeginning in the 19th century cultural and literary movement of some primarily Egyptian, Lebanese and Syrian Arabic writers and poets believed that writing must be renewed towards modern style and themes Rifa'a at-Tahtawi, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Butrus al-Bustani, Francis MarrashPre-RaphaelitesFounded in 1848, primarily English movement based ostensibly on undoing innovations by the painter Raphael. Many were both painters and poetsDante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina RossettiTranscendentalismFrom the mid-19th-century American movement: poetry and philosophy concerned with self-reliance, independence from modern technologyRalph Waldo Emerson, Henry David ThoreauRealismThe mid-19th-century movement based on a simplification of style and image and an interest in poverty and everyday concernsGustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, Honoré de Balzac, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, William Dean Howells, Anton Chekhov, Frank Norris, Machado de Assis, Eça de QueirozNaturalismThe late 19th century proponents of this movement believe heredity and environment control peopleÉmile Zola, Stephen Crane, Guy de Maupassant, Henrik Ibsen, Aluísio Azevedo is a derivative of naturalism and realism that began in post-unification Italy. literature uses detailed character development based on psychology, in Giovanni Verga's words 'the science of the human heart.'Giosuè Carducci, Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, Matilde Serao, Cesare Pascarella, Grazia DeleddaSocial realismA 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: Natural school Proletarian literature