LITERARY

MOVEMENTS

What are they?

Literary movements are marked by

shared traits of style, subject, and literary
genre. While literature predates this list of
movements, literary movements began in
the early modern period, well after the
Renaissance.
 ROMANTICISM
Emphasized the individual,
the subjective, the
irrational, the imaginative,
the personal, the
spontaneous, the
emotional, the visionary,
and the transcendental.
NOTABLE AUTHORS & WORKS
Mary Shelley
John Keats
William Blake
Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe
Alexandre Dumas
Brönte Sisters: Charlotte,
Anne & Emily
Thomas de Quincey
William Wordsworth
Walter Scott
Jane Austen
It deepened appreciation of the
beauties of nature
A general exaltation of emotion over
reason and of the senses over
intellect
A turning in upon the self and a
heightened examination of human
personality and its moods and
mental potentialities
A preoccupation with the genius,
the hero, and the exceptional figure
in general and a focus on his or her
passions and inner struggles
A new view of the artist as a
supremely individual creator, whose
creative spirit is more important
than strict adherence to formal rules
and traditional procedures.
An emphasis upon imagination as a
gateway to transcendent experience
and spiritual truth.
An obsessive interest in folk culture,
national and ethnic cultural origins,
and the medieval era.
A predilection for the exotic, the
remote, the mysterious, the weird,
the occult, the monstrous, the
diseased, and even the satanic.
Frankenstein
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
The Marriage of Hell
and Heaven
The Count of
Montecristo
Songs of Innocence
and of Experience
Pride and Prejudice
Emma
 MODERNISM

Modernism fostered a period of Fueled by industrialization

experimentation in the arts from and urbanization and by
the late 19th to the mid-20th the search for an authentic
century, particularly in the years response to a much-
following World War I. changed world.
In an era characterized by Sense of disillusionment
industrialization, the nearly and fragmentation.
global adoption of capitalism, A sense of disillusionment
rapid social change, and and loss pervades much
advances in science and the American Modernist fiction.
social sciences (e.g., Freudian That sense may be centred
theory), Modernists felt a on specific individuals, or it
growing alienation incompatible may be directed toward
with Victorian morality, American society or toward
optimism, and convention. New civilization generally
ideas in psychology, philosophy,
and political theory kindled a
search for new modes of
expression.

NOTABLE AUTHORS & WORKS

Ulysses
James Joyce
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
The Greath Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Of Mice and Men
Ernest Hemingway
The Sun also Rises
Gertrud Stein
Azul
Rubén Darío
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
A Farewell to Arms
T. S. Elliot
The Waste Land
POSTMODERNISM

Postmodern
literature looks at
the unpredictable Use of paradox,
world surrounding unreliable narrators,
it and simply unrealistic narratives,
parody and dark
decides that there humor.
was no meaning. It rejects the idea of a
single theme or
It celebrates the meaning, choosing
meaninglessness of instead to have many
the world and meanings or forgo
theme entirely.
embraces the
It blurs the line
obscure and the between high and low
nonsensical. It art and genre, as
literary works
blurres the lines
frequently use
between reality intertextuality,
and fiction, and has metafiction and
magical realism.
fun doing it.

NOTABLE AUTHORS & WORKS

Jorge Luis Borges The Library of Babel

Kurt Vonnegut Slaugtherhouse-five
Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook
Julio Cortázar Rayuela (Hopscotch)
Desolación
Gabriela Mistral
 REGIONALISM
Works that describe a distinctive
local geography and culture,
movements that value smaller-
scaled representations of place
over representations of broad
territorial range.
Regionalism emerges from
the perception of modern
geographic plurality;
writers and readers
understand a larger unit of
space (commonly the
national territory) to be
diversified at its periphery
according to topographical
features, economy, history,
dialect, and manners.
NOTABLE AUTHORS
Mark Twain
Flannery O'Connor
Sarah Orne Jewett
Harriet Beecher Stowe
William Faulkner
Regionalism provided access
to female, nonwhite, and
rural writers, who used the
form in innovative and
empowering ways.
It originated in the post-Civil
war era (1865).
In the late 19th century, the
term gets used
interchangeably with “local
color” to designate stories set
in relatively undeveloped
areas, such as coastal New
England, the South, the
Midwest, and California.
AND WORKS
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Uncle Tom's Cabin
The Country of the Pointed Firs
As I lay Dying
Everything that Rises
 NATURALISM

The term naturalism describes a Naturalistic writers believed that

type of literature that attempts the laws behind the forces that
to apply scientific principles of govern human lives might be
objectivity and detachment to studied and understood
its study of human beings.
They studied human beings
governed by their instincts and
There are many defining
passions as well as the ways in
characteristics of literary
which the characters' lives
naturalism:
were governed by forces of
heredity and environment.
Determinism
Objectivism
Pessimism
Surprissing twist
Ill-educated or lower-class
Some of the themes that naturalism characters whose lives are
covers are: governed by the forces of
heredity, instinct, and passion.
The "brute within" each individual,
composed of strong and often Their attempts at exercising
warring emotions: passions, such as free will or choice are
lust, greed, or the desire for hamstrung by forces beyond
dominance or pleasure; and the fight
their control
for survival in an amoral, indifferent
universe. The conflict in naturalistic
novels is often "man against nature"
or "man against himself" as
characters struggle to retain a
"veneer of civilization" despite
NOTABLE AUTHORS
external pressures that threaten to
release the "brute within."
Nature as an indifferent force acting
on the lives of human beings.
The forces of heredity and
environment as they affect--and
afflict--individual lives.
EDITH WARTHON
An indifferent, deterministic
universe. Naturalistic texts often JOHN DOS PASOS
describe the futile attempts of JOHN STEINBECK
human beings to exercise free will,
often ironically presented, in this JOYCE CAROL OATES
universe that reveals free will as an ERNEST HEMINGWAY
illusion.
CORMAC McCARTHY
WORKS WILLIAM FAULKNER

The House of Mirth (1905)

The USA Trilogy (1938)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Them (1969)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
 REALISM
"the faithful representation
of reality" or
"verisimilitude"
Although strictly speaking,
realism is a technique, it also
denotes a particular kind of
subject matter, especially the
representation of middle-class
life.
A reaction against
romanticism, an interest in
scientific method, the
systematizing of the study of
documentary history, and the
influence of rational
philosophy all affected the rise
of realism.
In American literature, the term
"realism" encompasses the period of
time from the Civil War to the turn
of the century.
NOTABLE AUTHORS
Mark Twain
William Dean Howells
Rebecca Harding Davis
John W. DeForest
Joseph Kirkland
E. W. Howe
Hamlin Garland
Henry James
Renders reality closely and in
comprehensive detail. Selective
presentation of reality with an
emphasis on verisimilitude, even at
the expense of a well-made plot.
Character is more important than
action and plot; complex ethical
choices are often the subject.
Characters appear in their real
complexity of temperament and
motive; they are in explicable relation
to nature, to each other, to their
social class, to their own past.
Class is important; the novel has
traditionally served the interests and
aspirations of an insurgent middle
class.
Events will usually be plausible.
Realistic novels avoid the sensational,
dramatic elements of naturalistic
novels and romances.
Diction is natural vernacular, not
heightened or poetic; tone may be
comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.
Objectivity in presentation becomes
increasingly important.
Interior or psychological realism a
variant form.
& WORKS
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
George Eliot, Adam Bede, Middlemarch
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome
Émile Zola, Germinal

 References

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Campbell, Donna M (2015=. "Realism in American Literature, 1860-1890." Literary Movements. Dept. of English, Washington State University

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https://www.atomic-ranch.com/home-decor/postmodern-literature/

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