List of literary movements
Encyclopedia
This is a list of modern literary movements: that is, movements after the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

. These terms, helpful for curricula
Curriculum
See also Syllabus.In formal education, a curriculum is the set of courses, and their content, offered at a school or university. As an idea, curriculum stems from the Latin word for race course, referring to the course of deeds and experiences through which children grow to become mature adults...

 or anthologies
Anthology
An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...

, evolved over time to group writers who are often loosely related. Some of these movements (such as Dada and Beat) were defined by the members themselves, while other terms (the metaphysical poets, for example) emerged decades or centuries after the periods in question. Ordering is approximate, as there is considerable overlap.

These are movements either drawn from or influential for literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

 in the English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

.

Amatory fiction
Amatory fiction
Amatory fiction is a genre of British literature popular during the late 17th century and 18th century. Amatory fiction predates, and in some ways predicts, the invention of the novel. Amatory fiction was written by women and for women. As its name implies, amatory fiction is preoccupied with...

  • Romantic fiction written in the 18th century and 19th century.
    • Notable authors: Eliza Haywood
      Eliza Haywood
      Eliza Haywood , born Elizabeth Fowler, was an English writer, actress and publisher. Since the 1980s, Eliza Haywood’s literary works have been gaining in recognition and interest...

      , Delarivier Manley
      Delarivier Manley
      Delarivier Manley was an English novelist of amatory fiction, playwright, and political pamphleteer...



Cavalier Poets
Cavalier poet
Cavalier poets is a broad description of a school of English poets of the 17th century, who came from the classes that supported King Charles I during the English Civil War. Much of their poetry is light in style, and generally secular in subject...

  • 17th century English royalist
    Monarchism
    Monarchism is the advocacy of the establishment, preservation, or restoration of a monarchy as a form of government in a nation. A monarchist is an individual who supports this form of government out of principle, independent from the person, the Monarch.In this system, the Monarch may be the...

     poets, writing primarily about courtly love
    Courtly love
    Courtly love was a medieval European conception of nobly and chivalrously expressing love and admiration. Generally, courtly love was secret and between members of the nobility. It was also generally not practiced between husband and wife....

    , called Sons of Ben
    Sons of Ben
    The phrase Sons of Ben is a mildly problematic term applied to followers of Ben Jonson in English poetry and drama in the first half of the seventeenth century....

     (after Ben Jonson
    Ben Jonson
    Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...

    ).
    • Notable authors: Richard Lovelace
      Richard Lovelace
      Richard Lovelace was an English poet in the seventeenth century. He was a cavalier poet who fought on behalf of the king during the Civil war. His best known works are To Althea, from Prison, and To Lucasta, Going to the Warres....

      , William Davenant
      William Davenant
      Sir William Davenant , also spelled D'Avenant, was an English poet and playwright. Along with Thomas Killigrew, Davenant was one of the rare figures in English Renaissance theatre whose career spanned both the Caroline and Restoration eras and who was active both before and after the English Civil...



Metaphysical poets
Metaphysical poets
The metaphysical poets is a term coined by the poet and critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, who shared an interest in metaphysical concerns and a common way of investigating them, and whose work was characterized by inventiveness of metaphor...

  • 17th century English movement using extended conceit
    Conceit
    In literature, a conceit is an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem. By juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison...

    , often (though not always) about religion.
    • Notable authors: John Donne
      John Donne
      John Donne 31 March 1631), English poet, satirist, lawyer, and priest, is now considered the preeminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are notable for their strong and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs,...

      , George Herbert
      George Herbert
      George Herbert was a Welsh born English poet, orator and Anglican priest.Being born into an artistic and wealthy family, he received a good education that led to his holding prominent positions at Cambridge University and Parliament. As a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Herbert excelled in...

      , Andrew Marvell
      Andrew Marvell
      Andrew Marvell was an English metaphysical poet, Parliamentarian, and the son of a Church of England clergyman . As a metaphysical poet, he is associated with John Donne and George Herbert...



The Augustans
Augustan literature
Augustan literature is a style of English literature produced during the reigns of Queen Anne, King George I, and George II on the 1740s with the deaths of Pope and Swift...

  • An 18th century literary movement based chiefly on classical ideals
    Classicism
    Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...

    , satire
    Satire
    Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

     and skepticism
    Skepticism
    Skepticism has many definitions, but generally refers to any questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere...

    .
    • Notable authors: Alexander Pope
      Alexander Pope
      Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

      , Jonathan Swift
      Jonathan Swift
      Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...



Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

  • 1800 to 1860 century movement emphasizing emotion and imagination, rather than logic and scientific thought. Response to the Enlightenment
    Age of Enlightenment
    The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

    .
    • Notable authors: Victor Hugo
      Victor Hugo
      Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....

      , Lord Byron and Camilo Castelo Branco
      Camilo Castelo Branco
      Camilo Ferreira Botelho Castelo-Branco,1st Viscount de Correia Botelho , was a prolific Portuguese writer of the 19th century, having authored over 260 books . His writing is, overall, considered original in that it combines the dramatic and sentimental spirit of Romanticism with a highly personal...



Gothic novel
  • Fiction in which Romantic ideals are combined with an interest in the supernatural
    Supernatural
    The supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...

     and in violence.
    • Notable authors: Ann Radcliffe
      Ann Radcliffe
      Anne Radcliffe was an English author, and considered the pioneer of the gothic novel . Her style is romantic in its vivid descriptions of landscapes, and long travel scenes, yet the Gothic element is obvious through her use of the supernatural...

      , Bram Stoker
      Bram Stoker
      Abraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula...



Lake Poets
Lake Poets
The Lake Poets are a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known, although their works were uniformly disparaged by the Edinburgh Review...

  • A group of Romantic poets from the English Lake District
    Lake District
    The Lake District, also commonly known as The Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous not only for its lakes and its mountains but also for its associations with the early 19th century poetry and writings of William Wordsworth...

     who wrote about nature
    Nature
    Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...

     and the sublime
    Sublime (philosophy)
    In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic...

    .
    • Notable authors: William Wordsworth
      William Wordsworth
      William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....

      , Samuel Taylor Coleridge
      Samuel Taylor Coleridge
      Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...



American Romanticism
  • Distinct from European Romanticism, the American form emerged somewhat later, was based more in fiction than in poetry, and incorporated a (sometimes almost suffocating) awareness of history
    History
    History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

    , particularly the darkest aspects of American history.
    • Notable authors: Washington Irving
      Washington Irving
      Washington Irving was an American author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century. He was best known for his short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle", both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works...

      , Nathaniel Hawthorne
      Nathaniel Hawthorne
      Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...

      ,


Pre-Raphaelitism
  • 19th century, primarily English
    British literature
    British Literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. By far the largest part of British literature is written in the English language, but there are bodies of written works in Latin, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Cornish, Manx, Jèrriais,...

     movement based ostensibly on undoing innovations by the painter Raphael
    Raphael
    Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

    . Many were both painters and poets.
    • Notable authors: Dante Gabriel Rossetti
      Dante Gabriel Rossetti
      Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

      , Christina Rossetti
      Christina Rossetti
      Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems...



Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the New England region of the United States as a protest against the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian...

  • 19th century American movement: poetry and philosophy
    Philosophy
    Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

     concerned with self-reliance
    Self-Reliance
    Self-Reliance is an essay written by American Transcendentalist philosopher and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's repeating themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts...

    , independence from modern technology.
    • Notable authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson
      Ralph Waldo Emerson
      Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...

      , Henry David Thoreau
      Henry David Thoreau
      Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...



Dark romanticism
Dark romanticism
Dark Romanticism is a literary subgenre. It has been suggested that Dark Romantics present individuals as prone to sin and self-destruction, not as inherently possessing divinity and wisdom. G. R...

  • 19th century American movement in reaction to Transcendentalism. Finds man inherently sinful and self-destructive and nature a dark, mysterious force.
    • Notable authors: Edgar Allan Poe
      Edgar Allan Poe
      Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

      , Nathaniel Hawthorne
      Nathaniel Hawthorne
      Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...

      , Herman Melville
      Herman Melville
      Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....

      , George Lippard
      George Lippard
      George Lippard was a 19th-century American novelist, journalist, playwright, social activist, and labor organizer. Nearly forgotten today, he was one of the most widely-read authors in antebellum America. A friend of Edgar Allan Poe, Lippard advocated a socialist political philosophy and sought...



Realism
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...

  • Late-19th century movement based on a simplification of style and image and an interest in poverty and everyday concerns.
    • Notable authors: Gustave Flaubert
      Gustave Flaubert
      Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...

      , William Dean Howells
      William Dean Howells
      William Dean Howells was an American realist author and literary critic. Nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters", he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own writings, including the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day" and the novel The Rise of...

      , Stendhal
      Stendhal
      Marie-Henri Beyle , better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism in his two novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme...

      , Honoré de Balzac
      Honoré de Balzac
      Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....

      , Leo Tolstoy
      Leo Tolstoy
      Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

      , Frank Norris
      Frank Norris
      Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. was an American novelist, during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague , The Octopus: A Story of California , and The Pit .-Life:Frank Norris was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1870...

       and Eça de Queiroz


Naturalism
Naturalism (literature)
Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...

  • Also late 19th century. Proponents of this movement believe heredity
    Heredity
    Heredity is the passing of traits to offspring . This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause some species to evolve...

     and environment
    Nature versus nurture
    The nature versus nurture debate concerns the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities versus personal experiences The nature versus nurture debate concerns the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities ("nature," i.e. nativism, or innatism) versus personal experiences...

     control people.
    • Notable authors: Émile Zola
      Émile Zola
      Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...

      , Stephen Crane
      Stephen Crane
      Stephen Crane was an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism...



Symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...

  • Principally French
    French literature
    French literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than French. Literature written in French language, by citizens...

     movement of the fin de siècle
    Fin de siècle
    Fin de siècle is French for "end of the century". The term sometimes encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning...

     based on the structure of thought rather than poetic form or image; influential for English language poets from Edgar Allan Poe
    Edgar Allan Poe
    Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

     to James Merrill
    James Merrill
    James Ingram Merrill was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Divine Comedies...

    .
    • Notable authors: Stéphane Mallarmé
      Stéphane Mallarmé
      Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...

      , Arthur Rimbaud
      Arthur Rimbaud
      Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...

      , Paul Valéry
      Paul Valéry
      Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...



Stream of consciousness
  • Early-20th century fiction consisting of literary representations of quotidian thought, without authorial presence.
    • Notable authors: Virginia Woolf
      Virginia Woolf
      Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

      , James Joyce
      James Joyce
      James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...



Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

  • Variegated movement of the early 20th century, encompassing primitivism
    Primitivism
    Primitivism is a Western art movement that borrows visual forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples, such as Paul Gauguin's inclusion of Tahitian motifs in paintings and ceramics...

    , formal innovation, or reaction to science
    Science
    Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

     and technology
    Technology
    Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...

    .
    • Notable authors: Ezra Pound
      Ezra Pound
      Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

      , T. S. Eliot
      T. S. Eliot
      Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

      , H.D.
      H.D.
      H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...

      , James Joyce
      James Joyce
      James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

      , Gertrude Stein
      Gertrude Stein
      Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...

       and Fernando Pessoa
      Fernando Pessoa
      Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa , was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic and translator described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.-Early years in Durban:On 13 July...



The Lost Generation
Lost Generation
The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...

  • It was traditionally attributed to Gertrude Stein
    Gertrude Stein
    Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...

     and was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway
    Ernest Hemingway
    Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

     in the epigraph
    Epigraph (literature)
    In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document or component. The epigraph may serve as a preface, as a summary, as a counter-example, or to link the work to a wider literary canon, either to invite comparison or to enlist a conventional...

     to his novel The Sun Also Rises
    The Sun Also Rises
    The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel written by American author Ernest Hemingway about a group of American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early and enduring modernist novel, it received...

    , and his memoir A Moveable Feast
    A Moveable Feast
    A Moveable Feast is a set of memoirs by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years in Paris as part of the American expatriate circle of writers in the 1920s. The book describes Hemingway's apprenticeship as a young writer in Europe during the 1920s with his first wife, Hadley...

    . It refers to a group of American
    United States
    The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

     literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts of Europe
    Europe
    Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

     from the time period which saw the end of World War I
    World War I
    World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

     to the beginning of the Great Depression
    Great Depression
    The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

    .
    • Notable Authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald
      F. Scott Fitzgerald
      Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...

      , Ernest Hemingway
      Ernest Hemingway
      Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

      , Ezra Pound
      Ezra Pound
      Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

      , Waldo Pierce


Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...

  • Touted by its proponents as anti-art, dada focused on going against artistic norms and conventions.
    • Notable authors: Guillaume Apollinaire
      Guillaume Apollinaire
      Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....

      , Kurt Schwitters
      Kurt Schwitters
      Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painter who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as...



First World War
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 Poets
  • Poets who documented both the idealism and the horrors of the war and the period in which it took place.
    • Notable authors: Siegfried Sassoon
      Siegfried Sassoon
      Siegfried Loraine Sassoon CBE MC was an English poet, author and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's...

      , Rupert Brooke
      Rupert Brooke
      Rupert Chawner Brooke was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially The Soldier...



Stridentism
Stridentism
Stridentism was an artistic and multidisciplinary avant-garde movement, founded in Mexico City by Manuel Maples Arce at the end of 1921 but formally developed in Xalapa where all the founders moved after the University of Veracruz granted its support for the movement...

  • Mexican artistic avant-garde
    Avant-garde
    Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

     movement. They exalted modern urban life and social revolution.
    • Notable authors: Manuel Maples Arce
      Manuel Maples Arce
      Manuel Maples Arce was a Mexican poet, lawyer, diplomat and writer, founder of the Stridentism movement in 1921....

      , Arqueles Vela
      Arqueles Vela
      Arqueles Vela was a Mexican writer, journalist and teacher, of Guatemalan origin. He was one of the major members of Stridentism movement and author of La señorita Etcétera , one of the earliest avant-garde narrative works.- Poetry and narrative:*El sendero gris y otros poemas inútiles *La...

      , Germán List Arzubide
      Germán List Arzubide
      Germán List Arzubide was a Mexican poet and revolutionary.Born in Puebla, he was an active participant in the Revolution, fighting alongside Emiliano Zapata as well as extolling him and other revolutionary leaders in his poetry...



Los Contemporáneos
Los Contemporáneos
Los Contemporáneos can refer to a Mexican modernist group, active in the late twenties and early thirties, as well as to the literary magazine which served as the group's mouthpiece and artistic vehicle from 1928 to 1931...

  • A Mexican
    Mexican people
    Mexican people refers to all persons from Mexico, a multiethnic country in North America, and/or who identify with the Mexican cultural and/or national identity....

     vanguardist group, active in the late twenties and early thirties; published an eponym
    Eponym
    An eponym is the name of a person or thing, whether real or fictitious, after which a particular place, tribe, era, discovery, or other item is named or thought to be named...

    ous literary magazine
    Literary magazine
    A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...

     which served as the group's mouthpiece and artistic vehicle from 1928-31.
    • Notable authors: Xavier Villaurrutia
      Xavier Villaurrutia
      Xavier Villaurrutia y González was a Mexican poet and playwright, whose most famous works are the short theatrical dramas, called Autos profanos, compiled in the work Poesía y teatro completos published in 1953....

      , Salvador Novo
      Salvador Novo
      Salvador Novo López was a Mexican writer, poet, playwright, translator, television presenter, entrepreneur, and the official chronicler of Mexico City, his birthplace and home. As a noted intellectual, he influenced popular perceptions of politics, media, the arts, and Mexican society in general...



Imagism
Imagism
Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...

  • Poetry based on description rather than theme
    Theme (literature)
    A theme is a broad, message, or moral of a story. The message may be about life, society, or human nature. Themes often explore timeless and universal ideas and are almost always implied rather than stated explicitly. Along with plot, character,...

    , and on the motto, "the natural object is always the adequate symbol."
    • Notable authors: Ezra Pound
      Ezra Pound
      Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

      , H.D.
      H.D.
      H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...

      , Richard Aldington
      Richard Aldington
      Richard Aldington , born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet.Aldington was best known for his World War I poetry, the 1929 novel, Death of a Hero, and the controversy arising from his 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry...



Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...

  • African American
    African American literature
    African-American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. The genre traces its origins to the works of such late 18th century writers as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, reaching early high points with slave narratives and the Harlem...

     poets, novelists, and thinkers, often employing elements of blues
    Blues
    Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

     and folklore
    Folklore
    Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

    , based in the Harlem
    Harlem
    Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands...

     neighborhood of New York City
    New York City
    New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

     in the 1920s.
    • Notable authors: Langston Hughes
      Langston Hughes
      James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...

      , Zora Neale Hurston
      Zora Neale Hurston
      Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance...



Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

  • Originally a French movement, influenced by Surrealist painting, that uses surprising images and transitions to play off of formal expectations and depict the unconscious
    Unconscious mind
    The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...

     rather than conscious mind.
    • Notable authors: Jean Cocteau
      Jean Cocteau
      Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...

      , Dylan Thomas
      Dylan Thomas
      Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...



Southern Agrarians
Southern Agrarians
The Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a...

  • A group of Southern American poets, based originally at Vanderbilt University
    Vanderbilt University
    Vanderbilt University is a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the...

    , who expressly repudiated many modernist developments in favor of metrical verse
    Accentual verse
    Accentual verse has a fixed number of stresses per line or stanza regardless of the number of syllables that are present. It is common in languages that are stress-timed, such as English—as opposed to syllabic verse, which is common in syllable-timed languages, such as French.- Children's poetry...

     and narrative
    Narrative
    A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...

    . Some Southern Agrarians were also associated with the New Criticism
    New Criticism
    New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...

    .
    • Notable authors: John Crowe Ransom
      John Crowe Ransom
      John Crowe Ransom was an American poet, essayist, magazine editor, and professor.-Life:...

      , Robert Penn Warren
      Robert Penn Warren
      Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...



Oulipo
Oulipo
Oulipo is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais...

  • Mid-20th century poetry and prose based on seemingly arbitrary rules for the sake of added challenge.
    • Notable authors: Raymond Queneau
      Raymond Queneau
      Raymond Queneau was a French poet and novelist and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle .-Biography:Born in Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, Queneau was the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot...

      , Walter Abish
      Walter Abish
      Walter Abish is an Austrian-American author of experimental novels and short stories.-Biography:Abish was born in Vienna, Austria to Adolph and Frieda . At a young age, his family fled from the Nazis, traveling first to Italy and Nice before settling in Shanghai from 1940 to 1949...



Postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...

  • Postwar
    Contemporary literature
    Contemporary literature is literature with its setting generally after World War II. Subgenres of contemporary literature include contemporary romance.-History:This table lists literary movements by decade. It should not be assumed to be comprehensive....

     movement skeptical of absolutes and embracing diversity, irony
    Irony
    Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...

    , and word play.
    • Notable authors: Jorge Luis Borges
      Jorge Luis Borges
      Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

      , Thomas Pynchon
      Thomas Pynchon
      Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...

      , Alasdair Gray
      Alasdair Gray
      Alasdair Gray is a Scottish writer and artist. His most acclaimed work is his first novel Lanark, published in 1981 and written over a period of almost 30 years...



Black Mountain Poets
Black Mountain poets
The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.-Background:...

  • A self-identified group of poets, originally based at Black Mountain College
    Black Mountain College
    Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role...

    , who eschewed patterned form in favor of the rhythms and inflections of the human voice.
    • Notable authors: Charles Olson
      Charles Olson
      Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...

      , Denise Levertov
      Denise Levertov
      -Early life and influences:Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales...



Beat poets
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...

  • American movement of the 1950s and '60s
    1960s
    The 1960s was the decade that started on January 1, 1960, and ended on December 31, 1969. It was the seventh decade of the 20th century.The 1960s term also refers to an era more often called The Sixties, denoting the complex of inter-related cultural and political trends across the globe...

     concerned with counterculture
    Counterculture
    Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...

     and youthful alienation.
    • Notable authors: Jack Kerouac
      Jack Kerouac
      Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...

      , Allen Ginsberg
      Allen Ginsberg
      Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

      , William S. Burroughs
      William S. Burroughs
      William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...

      , Ken Kesey
      Ken Kesey
      Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a...



Hungryalist Poets
Hungry generation
The Hungry Generation was a literary movement in the Bengali language launched by what is known today as the Hungryalist quartet i.e. Shakti Chattopadhyay, Malay Roy Choudhury, Samir Roychoudhury and Debi Roy alias Haradhon Dhara, during the 1960s in Kolkata, India...

  • A literary movement in postcolonial India (Kolkata
    Kolkata
    Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...

    ) during 1961-65 as a counter-discourse to Colonial Bengali poetry.
    • Notable poets:Shakti Chattopadhyay
      Shakti Chattopadhyay
      Shakti Chattopadhay was a Bengali poet and writer, widely regarded as one of the greatest poet of 20th century Bengali literature. -External links:...

      , Malay Roy Choudhury
      Malay Roy Choudhury
      Malay Roy Choudhury is a Bengali poet and novelist who founded the "Hungryalist Movement" in the 1960s. His literary works have been reviewed by sixty critics in HAOWA 49, a quarterly magazine which devoted its January 2001 special issue to Roy Choudhury's life and works...

      , Binoy Majumdar
      Binoy Majumdar
      Binoy Majumdar was a Bengali poet. Binoy received the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 2005.-Biography:Late Binoy Majumdar was born in Myanmar on the 17th of September 1934. His family later moved to what is now West Bengal in India. Binoy loved mathematics from his early youth...

      , Samir Roychoudhury
      Samir Roychoudhury
      Samir Roychowdhury , one of the founding fathers of the Hungry Generation 1961-1965 ,was born at Panihati, West Bengal, India in a family of artists, sculptors, photographers and musicians...



Confessional poet
Confessional poet
Confessional poetry emphasizes the intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poet's personal life, such as in poems about mental illness, sexuality, and despondence. The confessionalist label was applied to a number of poets of the 1950s and 1960s...

ry
  • Poetry that, often brutally, exposes the self as part of an aesthetic of the beauty and power of human frailty.
    • Notable authors: Robert Lowell
      Robert Lowell
      Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...

      , Sylvia Plath
      Sylvia Plath
      Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer...

      , Alicia Ostriker
      Alicia Ostriker
      Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry.Alicia is married to the noted astronomer Jeremiah Ostriker who taught at Princeton University...



New York School
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...

  • Urban
    Urban culture
    Urban culture is the culture of towns and cities. In the United States, Urban culture may also sometimes be used as a euphemistic reference to contemporary African American culture.- African American culture :...

    , gay or gay-friendly, leftist poets, writers, and painters of the 1960s.
    • Notable authors: Frank O'Hara
      Frank O'Hara
      Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. He was a member of the New York School of poetry.-Life:...

      , John Ashbery
      John Ashbery
      John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...



Magical Realism
  • Literary movement in which magical elements appear in otherwise realistic circumstances. Most often associated with the Latin America
    Latin America
    Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

    n literary boom of the 20th century.
    • Notable authors: Gabriel García Márquez
      Gabriel García Márquez
      Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...

      , Octavio Paz
      Octavio Paz
      Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.-Early life and writings:...

      , Günter Grass
      Günter Grass
      Günter Wilhelm Grass is a Nobel Prize-winning German author, poet, playwright, sculptor and artist.He was born in the Free City of Danzig...

      , Julio Cortázar
      Julio Cortázar
      Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...



Postcolonialism
Postcolonialism
Post-colonialism is a specifically post-modern intellectual discourse that consists of reactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy of colonialism...

  • A diverse, loosely connected movement of writers from former colonies of European countries, whose work is frequently politically charged.
    • Notable authors: Jamaica Kincaid
      Jamaica Kincaid
      Jamaica Kincaid is a Caribbean novelist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in the city of St. John's on the island of Antigua in the nation of Antigua and Barbuda...

      , V. S. Naipaul
      V. S. Naipaul
      Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad "V. S." Naipaul, TC is a Nobel prize-winning Indo-Trinidadian-British writer who is known for his novels focusing on the legacy of the British Empire's colonialism...

      , Derek Walcott
      Derek Walcott
      Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC is a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2011 for White Egrets. His works include the Homeric epic Omeros...

      , Salman Rushdie, Giannina Braschi
      Giannina Braschi
      Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel YO-YO BOING! and the poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams , which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States...

      , Wole Soyinka
      Wole Soyinka
      Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, where he was recognised as a man "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence", and became the first African in Africa and...



Prakalpana Movement
Prakalpana Movement
The Prakalpana Movement of Kolkata was sparked off in the Bengali language on September 6, 1969, by Vattacharja Chandan with the assistance of Dilip Gupta and Asish Deb. They later declared the day as "Prakalpana Day" because to them "the earth stood still" on the natal day of the movement...

  • This ongoing movement launched in 1969 based in Calcutta, by the Prakalpana group of Indian writers in Bengali literature
    Bengali literature
    Bengali literature is literary works written in Bengali language particularly from Bangladesh and the Indian provinces of West Bengal and Tripura. The history of Bengali literature traces back hundreds of years while it is impossible to separate the literary trends of the two Bengals during the...

    , who created new forms of Prakalpana fiction, Sarbangin poetry and the philosophy of Chetanavyasism, later spreads world wide.
    • Notable authors: Vattacharja Chandan
      Vattacharja Chandan
      Vattacharja Chandan , is a bilingual writer, poet, composer and mail artist. He was born in 1944 in the small town of Tamluk , which was the ancient Indian port of Tamralipta in West Bengal. Chandan came to Kolkata after finishing his high-school studies at Tamluk Hamilton High School...

      , Dilip Gupta.


Spiralism
  • A literary movement founded in the late 1960s by René Philoctète, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and Frankétienne centered around the idea that the universe is interconnected, unpredictable, and governed by chaos.
    • Notable authors: Frankétienne
      Frankétienne
      Frankétienne is an author, poet, playwright, musician and painter. He has written in both French and Haitian creole...



Spoken Word
Spoken word
Spoken word is a form of poetry that often uses alliterated prose or verse and occasionally uses metered verse to express social commentary. Traditionally it is in the first person, is from the poet’s point of view and is themed in current events....

  • A postmodern literary movement where writers use their speaking voice to present fiction, poetry, monologues, and storytelling arising in the 1980s in the urban centers of the United States.
    • Notable authors: Spalding Gray
      Spalding Gray
      Spalding Rockwell Gray was an American actor, playwright, screenwriter, performance artist and monologuist...

      , Laurie Anderson
      Laurie Anderson
      Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s...

      , Pedro Pietri
      Pedro Pietri
      Pedro Pietri , was a Nuyorican poet and playwright who co-founded the Nuyorican Poets Café. He was the poet laureate of the Nuyorican Movement.-Early years :...

      , Piri Thomas
      Piri Thomas
      Piri Thomas was a writer and poet whose autobiography Down These Mean Streets became a best-seller.-Early years:...

      , Giannina Braschi
      Giannina Braschi
      Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel YO-YO BOING! and the poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams , which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States...

      .


Performance Poetry
Performance poetry
Performance poetry is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution.-History:...

  • This is the lasting viral component of Spoken Word
    Spoken word
    Spoken word is a form of poetry that often uses alliterated prose or verse and occasionally uses metered verse to express social commentary. Traditionally it is in the first person, is from the poet’s point of view and is themed in current events....

     and one of the most popular forms of poetry in the twenty-first century. It is a new oral poetry originating in the 1980s in Austin, Texas, using the speaking voice and other theatrical elements. Practitioners write for the speaking voice instead of writing poetry for the silent printed page. The major figure is American Hedwig Gorski
    Hedwig Gorski
    Dr. Hedwig Gorski is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as American Futurism...

     who began broadcasting live radio poetry with East of Eden Band during the early 1980s. Gorski, considered a post-Beat, created the term Performance Poetry to define and distinguish what she and the band did. Instead of books, poets use audio recordings and digital media along with television spawning Slam Poetry
    Slam poetry
    A poetry slam is a competition at which poets read or recite original work. These performances are then judged on a numeric scale by previously selected members of the audience.-History:...

     and Def Poets on television and Broadway.
    • Notable authors: Hedwig Gorski
      Hedwig Gorski
      Dr. Hedwig Gorski is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as American Futurism...

      , Bob Holman
      Bob Holman
      Bob Holman is a poet and poetry activist in the United States.- Career :After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, Bob Holman founded, with Sara Miles and Susie Timmons, the NYC Poetry Calendar, a free monthly publication with all the readings and poets "on the same page"...

      , Marc Smith.
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