List of literary movements facts for kids
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Literary movements are like big groups that help us sort books and stories. They put together writings that share similar ideas, styles, or themes. This is different from sorting by type of story (like fiction or poetry) or by time period. These groups give us a way to talk about and compare different books. They are also useful for school lessons or collections of writings.
Some movements, like Dada or Beat, were named by the writers themselves. Others, like the Metaphysical poets, got their names much later. Some movements are very clear and distinct. Others, like Expressionism, can be a bit fuzzy and mix with other styles. Because of these differences, experts sometimes disagree about literary movements.
Literary Movements Through Time
This section lists many literary movements from the modern age, starting after the Renaissance literature. The order is mostly by when they began, but many movements overlapped. The authors are listed roughly by when they became famous.
| Movement | What it's about | Famous Authors |
|---|---|---|
| Renaissance literature | This movement happened across Europe from the 14th to mid-17th centuries. It was inspired by Renaissance humanism, which focused on human values and achievements. | William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Edmund Spenser |
| Mannerism | A 16th-century style from Italy, following the High Renaissance. It featured elegant, fancy writing and smart ideas. | Michelangelo, Torquato Tasso, Miguel de Cervantes |
| Petrarchism | In the 16th century, writers copied the style of the poet Petrarch. This often overlapped with Mannerism. | Pietro Bembo, Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney |
| Baroque | A European art movement in the 17th century. It used lots of decoration, long comparisons, and wordplay. | John Milton, John Donne, Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca |
| Marinism | An Italian poetic style from the 17th century, part of the Baroque movement. It used very fancy and over-the-top comparisons and descriptions. | Giambattista Marino, Cesare Rinaldi |
| Conceptismo | A 17th-century Baroque movement in Spanish literature. It focused on clever ideas and witty language, similar to Marinism. | Francisco de Quevedo, Baltasar Gracián |
| Culteranismo | Another 17th-century Spanish Baroque movement. This style used very fancy words and complex sentence structures. | Luis de Góngora, Juana Inés de la Cruz |
| Précieuses | A 17th-century French Baroque movement. It featured refined language, long descriptions, and puns about courtly love. | Madeleine de Scudéry, Vincent Voiture, Honoré d'Urfé |
| Metaphysical poets | 17th-century English poets who used extended comparisons, often about religion. | John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell |
| Cavalier Poets | 17th-century English poets who supported the king. They wrote mainly about courtly love and were called "Sons of Ben" after Ben Jonson. | Richard Lovelace, William Davenant |
| Euphuism | A very ornate and formal style of English prose from the Baroque period. It was full of rhetorical questions. | Thomas Lodge, John Lyly |
| Classicism | A 17th–18th century European movement that valued balance and order. It was inspired by ancient Greek and Roman writings and happened during the Age of Enlightenment. | Molière, Jean Racine, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Voltaire |
| Amatory fiction | Romantic stories popular from about 1660 to 1730. These stories were important because they came before the modern novel. | Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley |
| The Augustans | An 18th-century literary movement based on classical ideas. It often used satire (making fun of things) and skepticism (doubting things). | Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift |
| Sentimentalism | This movement in the 18th century focused on strong emotions and feelings. The sentimental novel was a popular type of book. It helped lead to Romanticism. | Laurence Sterne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edward Young |
| Gothic fiction | Horror stories from the 1760s onwards. They often have a scary, closed-in feeling and include ghosts, imprisonment, and murder. | Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe |
| Sturm und Drang | From 1767 to 1785, this German movement was a step towards Romanticism. Its stories often featured characters driven by strong emotions, not just logic. | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger |
| Weimar Classicism | From 1788 to 1805, this German movement combined ideas from Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, and Classicism. | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller |
| Romanticism | A 19th-century movement (around 1800 to 1860) that focused on emotion and imagination. It was a reaction to the earlier Enlightenment's focus on logic. | Victor Hugo, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Alexander Pushkin, Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| Dark romanticism | A style within Romanticism that saw humans as naturally flawed and nature as a mysterious, dark force. | Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville |
| Lake Poets | A group of Romantic poets from the English Lake District. They wrote about nature and the feeling of awe inspired by grand things. | William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey |
| Pre-Raphaelites | Founded in 1848, this English movement aimed to go back to art styles before the painter Raphael. Many members were both painters and poets. | Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti |
| Transcendentalism | A mid-19th-century American movement. Its poetry and philosophy focused on being self-reliant and independent from new technology. | Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau |
| Realism | A mid-19th-century movement that used a simpler style. It focused on everyday life and the struggles of ordinary people. | Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov |
| Naturalism | Late 19th century. Writers in this movement believed that a person's heredity (what they inherit) and environment (where they grow up) control their lives. | Émile Zola, Stephen Crane, Guy de Maupassant |
| Verismo | A style from Italy after its unification, similar to naturalism and realism. It focused on detailed characters and the "science of the human heart." | Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana |
| Social realism | A type of realism that showed the social and political problems of the working class. This includes Proletarian literature and the Angry young men movement. | Maxim Gorky, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw |
| Socialist realism | A style of art that focused on communist values and realistic depictions. It was made official in the Soviet Union in 1934. | Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov, Nikolai Ostrovsky |
| American Realism | A type of Realism in America that often aimed to protect the American way of life. | Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Jack London, J. D. Salinger |
| Magical realism | A literary style where magical things happen in otherwise realistic settings. It's often linked to 20th-century Latin American literature. | Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Haruki Murakami, Olga Tokarczuk |
| Neo-romanticism | From around 1850, this term describes writers who went against realism or modernism. They brought back elements from the Romantic era. | Jules Verne, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Knut Hamsun |
| Decadent movement | In the mid-19th century, this movement in France reacted to earlier styles. It explored characters who sought pleasure and used complex language to hide truth. | Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans |
| Parnassianism | A French group of anti-Romantic poets from the 1860s–1890s. They focused on perfect and flawless writing. | Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme |
| Symbolism | Mainly a French movement from the late 1800s. It focused on the structure of thought rather than just poetic form. It influenced poets like Edgar Allan Poe. | Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire |
| Russian symbolism | This movement developed separately from Western European symbolism. It focused on mysticism and making familiar things seem strange. | Alexander Blok, Valery Bryusov, Andrei Bely |
| Modernism | A varied movement starting in the late 19th century. It included new forms, reactions to science and technology, and a focus on breaking old rules. | James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann |
| Mahjar | The "émigré school" was a neo-romantic movement of Arabic-language writers in the Americas around 1900. | Kahlil Gibran, Ameen Rihani, Mikhail Naimy |
| Futurism | An avant-garde (new and experimental) movement, mostly Italian and Russian, started in 1909. Futurists tried to create a new language without normal grammar or punctuation. | Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov |
| Cubo-Futurism | A movement within Russian Futurism that used experimental visual and sound poetry. | Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky |
| Ego-Futurism | A Russian Futurist school that focused on the writer's own personality. | Igor Severyanin, Vasilisk Gnedov |
| Acmeism | A Russian modernist poetic style from around 1911. Instead of symbols, it preferred clear expression through exact images. | Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Nikolay Gumilev |
| New Culture Movement | A Chinese movement in the 1910s and 1920s. It went against old Confucian ideas and promoted a new culture, including using everyday Chinese language in writing. | Lu Xun, Hu Shih, Chen Duxiu |
| Stream of consciousness | Early 20th-century fiction that showed a character's thoughts as they happen, without the author stepping in. | Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson |
| Impressionism | Influenced by the European Impressionist art movement. It describes literature that uses a few details to show the feelings or impressions of a scene. | Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane |
| Expressionism | An avant-garde movement from Germany that rejected realism. It aimed to show strong emotions and inner thoughts instead of reality. | Franz Kafka, Alfred Döblin, Oskar Kokoschka |
| First World War Poets | British poets who wrote about the hopes and terrible realities of World War I. | Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke |
| Imagism | An English-language modernist group started in 1914. Their poetry focused on clear descriptions, using the idea that "the natural object is always the adequate symbol." | Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington |
| Dada | An avant-garde movement that its supporters called "anti-art." Dada focused on going against all normal art rules. | Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Kurt Schwitters |
| Imaginism | An avant-garde poetic movement after the Russian Revolution of 1917. It created poetry using striking and unusual images. | Sergei Yesenin, Anatoly Marienhof |
| The Lost Generation | A term for American writers who lived in Paris and Europe after World War I until the Great Depression. Ernest Hemingway helped make the term famous. | Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound |
| Stridentism | A Mexican avant-garde art movement. They celebrated modern city life and social change. | Manuel Maples Arce, Arqueles Vela |
| Harlem Renaissance | African American poets, novelists, and thinkers in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s. They often used elements of blues music and folklore. | Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston |
| Jindyworobak movement | This movement started in Adelaide, South Australia during the Great Depression. It aimed to protect unique Australian culture by using Australian aboriginal languages and mythology. | Rex Ingamells, Xavier Herbert |
| Surrealism | A French movement from the 1920s, growing from Dada. It used surprising images and ideas to show the unconscious mind, not just conscious thoughts. | André Breton, Haruki Murakami, Salvador Dalí (though primarily a painter, his influence is strong) |
| Los Contemporáneos | A Mexican vanguardist group active in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They had their own literary magazine. | Xavier Villaurrutia, Salvador Novo |
| Villa Seurat Network | A group of left-leaning and anarchist writers living in Paris in the 1930s. They were largely influenced by Surrealism. | Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell |
| Objectivism | A loose group of American modernists from the 1930s. They saw the poem as an object itself, focusing on honesty and clear vision. | Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff |
| Southern Agrarians | A group of Southern American poets from Vanderbilt University. They preferred traditional metered poetry and storytelling over many modernist styles. | Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom |
| Postcolonialism | A diverse movement of writers from former colonies of European countries. Their work often deals with political themes and the effects of colonialism. | Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid |
| Black Mountain poets | An avant-garde group of poets from the 1950s, based at Black Mountain College. They avoided strict forms, focusing on the natural rhythms of the human voice. | Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley |
| Absurdism | This movement from the 1950s came from absurdist philosophy, which questions life's purpose. Absurdist literature often uses dark humor, satire, and strange situations. | Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre |
| The Movement | A 1950s group of English writers who were against romanticism and favored clear, logical writing. | Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, John Wain |
| Nouveau roman | The "new novelists" appeared in French literature in the 1950s. They often rejected traditional story elements like plot and characters, focusing on how things were seen. | Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras |
| Concrete poetry | An avant-garde movement started in Brazil in the 1950s. It created a new kind of poetry that focused on how words looked and sounded, not just their meaning. | Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos |
| Beats | An American movement from the 1950s and 1960s. It focused on counterculture (going against mainstream society) and young people feeling disconnected. | Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs |
| Confessional poetry | American poetry from the late 1950s that openly shared personal and often painful experiences. It showed the beauty in human weaknesses. | Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Alicia Ostriker |
| Soviet nonconformism | A group of writers in the Soviet Union from the 1950s to 1980s. They went against the official socialist realism style. | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Varlam Shalamov |
| Oulipo | A French poetry and prose group founded in 1960. They created works based on seemingly random rules to make writing more challenging. | Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau |
| Postmodernism | A contemporary movement, strong in the US in the 1960s. It questioned absolute truths and embraced variety, irony, and wordplay. | Kurt Vonnegut, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick |
| Hungry generation | A literary movement in Kolkata, India, from 1961–65. It was a reaction against older Bengali poetry. | Malay Roy Choudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay |
| New York School | Poets, writers, and painters from New York City in the 1960s. They were often connected to urban and leftist ideas. | Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery |
| New Wave | A movement in science fiction from the 1960s and 1970s. It was very experimental in form and content, focusing on "soft" science (like sociology) rather than hard science. | John Brunner, Thomas M. Disch |
| British Poetry Revival | A collection of groups in the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a modernist reaction to the more traditional The Movement. | J. H. Prynne, Tom Raworth |
| Language poets | An avant-garde group in American poetry from the late 1960s and early 1970s. They saw the poem as a structure made of language itself. | Charles Bernstein, Bernadette Mayer |
| Spiralism | A literary movement founded in the late 1960s in Haiti. It defined life through connections between colors, sounds, signs, and historical events. | Frankétienne, René Philoctète |
| Misty Poets | Chinese poets who resisted government art rules during the Cultural Revolution from the 1970s. They used metaphors and hidden meanings. | Bei Dao, Shu Ting, Gu Cheng |
| Spoken Word | A postmodern movement from around 1970 where writers perform their fiction, poetry, and stories aloud. It grew from Beat poetry and the Harlem Renaissance. | Hedwig Gorski, Spalding Gray, Pedro Pietri |
| Performance poetry | A popular form of poetry in the 21st century, growing from Spoken Word. It started in the 1980s in Austin, Texas, and uses the speaking voice and other theatrical elements. Poets write for performance, not just for print. | Hedwig Gorski, Marc Smith, Bob Holman |
| New Formalism | A late 20th and early 21st-century movement in American poetry. It supported going back to traditional metered poetry. | Dana Gioia, Molly Peacock, Timothy Steele |
| Sastra wangi | A movement in Indonesian literature started around 2000. It's written by young, urban Indonesian women who discuss difficult topics like politics or religion. | Ayu Utami, Dewi "Dee" Lestari |
| Empathism | A literary, artistic, and philosophical movement that began in southern Italy in 2020. | Menotti Lerro, Franco Loi |
See also
- List of poetry groups and movements
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