| A | B |
|---|
| classicism | the principles and styles admired in the classics of Greek and Roman literature, such as objectivity, sensibility, restraint, and formality |
| naturalism (1865–1900) | a literary movement that grew out of realism in France, the US, and England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; portrays humans as having no free will, driven by forces of heredity, environment, animalistic urges |
| regionalism | : an element in literature that conveys a realistic portrayal of a specific geographic locale and its influences as a major part of the plot |
| romanticism (1798–1832) | literary, artistic, philosophical movement that began in 18th century as reaction against neoclassicism; focal points of movement are imagination, emotion, freedom, stressing subjectivity, individuality, love, worship of nature, fascination with past |
| aestheticism (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.” |
| 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 (1660–1790) | 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; John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
| Elizabethan era (1558–1603) | 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 (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 |
| Harmlem Renaissance (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 |
| Magic Realism (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 (1633–1680) | 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 (1066–1500) | transitional period between Anglo-Saxon and modern English; a time of cultural upheaval; a flowering of secular literature, including ballads, chivalric romances, allegorical poems, and a variety of religious plays. Chaucer, "The Canterbury Tales" |
| modernism (1890s–1940s) | literary and artistic movement that provided a radical breaks with traditional modes of Western art, thought, religion, social conventions, and morality; attack on notions of hierarchy; experimentation in new forms of narrative, such as stream of consciousness; doubt about the existence of knowable, objective reality |
| neoclassicism (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; Edmund Burke, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift |
| postcolonial literature (1950s–present) | Literature by and about people from former European colonies, primarily in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean; challenges Eurocentric assumptions about literature, especially through examination of questions of otherness, identity, and race; Chinua Achebe’s "Things Fall Apart" |
| postmodernism (1945–present) | postmodernism can be seen as a response to the elitism of high modernism as well as to the horrors of World War II; disjointed, fragmented pastiche of high and low culture that reflects the absence of tradition and structure in a world driven by technology and consumerism; Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut |
| realism (1830–1900) | loose term that can refer to any work that aims at honest portrayal over sensationalism, exaggeration, or melodrama; refers to a late-19th-century literary movement—primarily French, English, and American—that aimed at accurate detailed portrayal of ordinary, contemporary life; Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy |
| surrealism (1920s–1930s) | 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; Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, René Magritte |
| transcendentalism | 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 "Self-Reliance" and Henry David Thoreau "Walden" |
| Victorian era (1832–1901) | 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; novelists: Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy; poets: Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti |
