Literary Time Periods and Movements

A comprehensive collection of vocabulary flashcards detailing major movements, time periods, definitions, and associated figures in English and world literature.

The Elizabethan Era (1500-1650)

A flourishing period in English literature, particularly drama, coinciding with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Key writers include Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser.

The Metaphysical Poets (1633-1680)

A group of 17th-century poets who combined direct language with ingenious images, paradoxes, and conceits (extended metaphors). John Donne and Andrew Marvell are the best-known poets of this school.

The Enlightenment (1660-1790)

An intellectual movement in France and other parts of Europe (also called the Age of Reason) that emphasized reason, progress, and liberty through nonfiction writing like essays and philosophical treatises. Major writers include Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and René Descartes.

Neoclassicism (1660-1798)

A literary movement inspired by the rediscovery of classical works of ancient Greece and Rome that emphasized balance, restraint, and order, espousing reason over passion. Notable writers include Edmund Burke, John Dryden, Samuel Johmon, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift.

Gothic Fiction (1764-1820)

A genre of late-18th-century literature featuring brooding, mysterious settings and plots that set the stage for horror stories. Initiated by Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto and grew to include terror-inducing works like Edgar Allan Poe's short stories.

Romanticism (1798-1832)

A literary and artistic movement reacting against Enlightenment restraint that celebrated spontaneity, imagination, subjectivity, and the purity of nature. English writers include Jane Austen, William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth; American writers include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, and John Greenleaf Whittler.

Realism (1830-1900)

A late-19th-century French, English, and American literary movement aiming at accurate, detailed portrayal of ordinary contemporary life over sensationalism, exaggeration, or melodrama. Classifies novelists such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Leo Tolstoy.

Victorian Era (1832-1901)

A period of English history between the passage of the first form Dill (1832) and the death of Queen Victoria (reigned 1837-1901). Marked by social, political, and sexual conservatism, clashes between religion and science, social reform, and prolific literary activity by novelists like the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope, and Hardy, and poets like Arnold, the Brownings, Hopkin, Tennyson, and Rossetti.

Transcendentalism (1835-1860)

An American philosophical and spiritual movement based in New England that focused on the primacy of individual conscience and rejected materialism in favor of closer communion with nature. Famous works include Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Salf-Reliance" and Henry David Thaneau's Walden.

Aestheticism (1835-1910)

A late 19th-century movement believing in "art for art's sake" and treating art as an end in itself, rejecting the view that art had to possess a higher moral or political value. Led by aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater.

The Pre-Raphaelites (1848-1870)

The literary arm of an artistic movement drawing inspiration from Italian artists working before Raphael (1483-1520), combining sensuousness and religiosity through archaic poetic forms and medieval settings. Leading poets include William Morris, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Charles Swinburne.

Naturalism (1865-1900)

An offshoot and intensification of realism that used detailed realism to suggest social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. Leading writers include Émile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane.

Modernism (1890s-1940s)

A movement providing a radical break with traditional modes of Western art, thought, religion, social convention, and morality. Themes include attacking hierarchy, stream-of-consciousness narrative experimentation, doubt of objective reality, alternative viewpoints, and self-referentiality.

The Bloomsbury Group (1906-1930s)

An informal group of friends and lovers in the early 20th century living in the Bloomsbury section of London who had a considerable liberalizing influence on British culture. Includes Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Mirginia Woolf, and John Maynard Kemes.

The Harlem Renaissance (1918-1930)

A flowering of African-American literature, art, and music during the 1920s in New York City. Anticipated by W. E. B. Dubois's The Souls of Mack Folk, it featured Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and poetry by Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.

The Lost Generation (1918-1930s)

A term describing the generation of writers coming to maturity during World War I, many of whom were soldiers. Embodied a sense of disillusionment in works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises).

High Modernism (1920s)

Considered the golden age of modernist literature, featuring the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Surrealism (1920s-1930s)

An avant-garde movement based primarily in France that sought to break down boundaries between the rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious. Featured poets André Breton and Paul Eluard, and visual artists Salvador Dali, Joan Miró, and René Magritte.

The Theater of the Absurd (1930-1970)

A movement in theater responding to the apparent illogicality and purposelessness of human life with works lacking clear narrative, understandable psychological motives, or emotional catharsis. Exemplified by Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Magical Realism (1935-present)

A style of writing combining realism with moments of dream-like fantasy within a single prose narrative, popularized by Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Günter Grass, and others.

Postmodernism (1945-present)

An ambiguous literary term representing a response to High Modernism's elitism and World War II horrors. Characterized by a disjointed, fragmented mash-up of high and low culture reflecting an absence of tradition in a technology- and consumerism-driven world. Authors include Julian Barnes, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Selman Rushdie, Alan Moore, and Kurt Vonnegut.

The Beat Generation (1950s-1960s)

A group of American writers in the 1950s and 1960s seeking release and illumination through a bohemian counterculture of sex, drugs, and Zen Buddhism. Authors like Jack Kerouac (On the Rood) and Allen Ginsberg ("Howl") gave readings in coffeehouses accompanied by jazz music.

Postcolonial Literature (1950s-present)

Literature by and about people from former European colonies in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. Aims to expand the Western canon and challenge Eurocentric assumptions regarding otherness, identity, and race. Includes Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, V. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and theoretical work by Edward Sald (Orientalism, 1978).