Literary Time Periods

For the test this Friday!

The Elizabethan Era

1500-1650: Flourishing period of English literature, particularly drama. Writers include: Francis Bacon, and William Shakespeare

The Metaphysical Poets

1633-1680: Poets who combined language with ingenious images, paradoxes, and conceits.

Writers include: John Donne, and Andrew Marvell

The Enlightenment

1660-1790: Intellectual movement in Europe that emphasized the importance of reason, progress and liberty. (Nonfiction writing)

Writer include: John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Neoclassicism

1660-1798: Inspired by the rediscovery of classical works of ancient Greece and Rome that emphasized balance, restraint, and order. Reason over Passion.

Writers include: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson

Gothic Fiction

1764-1820: featured brooding, mysterious settings and plots, setting the stage for “horror stories”. Grew to include any work that attempted to create an atmosphere of terror of the unknown.

Writers include: Horace Walpole (Castle of Otranto) and Edgar Allen Poe

Romanticism

1798-1832: Reacted against the restraint and universalism of the Enlightenment. Celebrated spontaneity, imagination, subjectivity, and the purity of nature.

Writers include: Jane Austen and William Blake (English), Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allen Poe (American)

Realism

1830-1900: Refers to any work that aims at honest portrayal over sensationalism, exaggeration, or melodrama. Accurate detailed portrayal of ordinary, contemporary life.

Writers include: Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy

Victorian Era

1832-1901: Significant social reform and criticism.

Writers include: Bronte Sisters, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (Novelists), Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning (Poets)

Transcendentalism

1835-1860: American philosophical and spiritual movement, focused on primacy of individual conscience and rejected materialism for nature.

Writers include: Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Self-Reliance”), and Henry David Thoreau (Walden)

Aestheticism

1835-1910: Art as an end in itself. Rejected view that art had to possess a higher moral or political value, instead “art for art’s sake”

Writers include: Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater

The Pre-Raphaelites

1848-1870: drew inspiration from Italian artists. Combined sensuousness and religiosity through archaic poetic forms and medieval settings.

Writers Include: William Morris and Christina Rossetti

Naturalism

1865-1900: Used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character.

Writers include: Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane

Modernism

1890s-1940s: Provided a radical break with traditional modes of Western art, thought, religion, social conventions, and morality. Attack on notions of hierarchy, experimentation in new forms of narrative, doubt about the existence of knowable, objective reality; attention to alternative viewpoints and modes of thinking; and self-referentiality. Relationships between artist and audience, form and content.

Writers include: none provided

The Bloomsbury Group

1906-1930s: group of friends and lovers living in Bloomsbury, London. Had considerable liberalizing influence on British Culture.

People: Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry

The Harlem Renaissance

1918-1930: Flowering of African-American literature, art, and music.

Writers include: W.E.B Dubois (The Souls of Black Folk), and Zora Neale Hurtson (Their Eyes were Watching God)

The Lost Generation

1918-1930s: Generation of writers, many being soldiers that came to maturity during WW1.

Writers include: F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)

High Modernism

1920s: Golden Age of modernist literature

Writers include: James Joyce (Ulysses), T.S. Elliot (The Waste Land), and Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

Surrealism

1920s-1930s: Sought to break down boundaries between the rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious.

People include: Andre Breton and Paul Eluard (Poets), Salvador Dali and Joan Miro (Artists)

The Theater of Absurd

1930-1970: Movement in theater, responded to the apparent illogicality and purposelessness of human life in works marked by lack of clear narrative, understandable psychological motives, or emotional catharsis

Playwright: Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot)

Magical Realism

1935-Present: Combines realism with moments of dream-like fantasy within a single prose narrative

Writers include: Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jorge Luis Borges

Postmodernism

1945-Present: Ambiguous, can be seen as a response to the elitism of high modernism as well as to the horror of WW2. Characterized by disjointed, fragmented mash-up of high and low culture that reflects the absence of tradition and structure in a world driven by technology and consumerism.

Writers include: Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, and Julian Barnes

The Beat Generation

1950s-1960s: group of American writers who sought release and illumination through a bohemian counterculture of s*x, dr*gs, and Zen Buddhism

Writers include: Jack Kerouac (On the Road) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl)

Postcolonial Literature

1950s-Present: About people from former European Colonies in Africa, Asia, South A, and the Caribbean. Aims to expand the traditional canon of Western literature and to challenge Eurocentric assumptions about literature through examination of questions of otherness, identity and race.

Writers include: Edward Saids (Orientalism), and Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children)