| Movement | Description | Notable authors |
|---|
| Renaissance literature | The literature within the general Western movement of theRenaissance united by the spirit ofRenaissance humanism, which arose in the 14th-century Italy and continued until the mid-17th century in England[2][3] | Petrarch,Giovanni Boccaccio,Baptista Mantuanus,Jacopo Sannazaro,Niccolò Machiavelli,Ludovico Ariosto,François Rabelais,Jorge de Montemor,Miguel de Cervantes,Thomas Wyatt,Edmund Spenser,William Shakespeare,Georg Rudolf Weckherlin |
| Mannerism | A 16th-century movement and style that emerged in the later ItalianHigh Renaissance. Mannerism in literature is notable for its elegant, highly florid style and intellectual sophistication[2][4][5] | Michelangelo,Clément Marot,Giovanni della Casa,Giovanni Battista Guarini,Torquato Tasso,Veronica Franco,Miguel de Cervantes |
| Petrarchism | A 16th-century movement ofPetrarch's style followers, partially coincident with Mannerism[6][7] | Pietro Bembo,Michelangelo,Mellin de Saint-Gelais,Vittoria Colonna,Clément Marot,Garcilaso de la Vega,Giovanni della Casa,Thomas Wyatt,Henry Howard,Joachim du Bellay,Edmund Spenser,Philip Sidney |
| Baroque | A variable 17th-century pan-European art movement that replacedMannerism and involved several, especially, early 17th-century literary schools. The Baroque characterised by its use of ornamentation,extended metaphor and wordplay[2][8][9][10] | Giambattista Marino,Lope de Vega,John Donne,Vincent Voiture,Pedro Calderón de la Barca,Georges andMadeleine de Scudéry,Georg Philipp Harsdörffer,John Milton,Andreas Gryphius,Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau,Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen |
| Marinism | This 17th-century followedMannerism Italian Baroque poetic school and techniques ofGiambattista Marino and his followers was based on its use of extravagant and excessive extended metaphor and lavish descriptions[11][12] | Giambattista Marino,Cesare Rinaldi,Bartolomeo Tortoletti,Emanuele Tesauro,Francesco Pona,Francesco Maria Santinelli |
| Conceptismo | A 17th-century Baroque movement in theSpanish literature, a similar to the Marinism[13][14] | Francisco de Quevedo,Baltasar Gracián |
| Culteranismo | Another 17th-century Spanish Baroque movement, in contrast toConceptismo, characterized by an ornamental, ostentatious vocabulary and highly latinate syntax[15][16] | Luis de Góngora,Hortensio Félix Paravicino,Conde de Villamediana,Juana Inés de la Cruz |
| Précieuses | The main features of this 17th-century French Baroque movement, similar to the Spanishculteranismo and Englisheuphuism, are the refined prose and poetry language of aristocratic salons,periphrases,hyperbole, andpuns on the theme of gallant love.[17] | Honoré d'Urfé,Vincent Voiture,Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac,Charles Cotin,Antoine Godeau,Madeleine de Scudéry,Isaac de Benserade,Paul Pellisson,Madame d'Aulnoy,Henriette-Julie de Murat |
| Metaphysical poets | A 17th-centuryEnglish Baroque school using extended conceit, often (though not always) about religion[18][19] | John Donne,George Herbert,Andrew Marvell |
| Cavalier Poets | 17th-century English Baroqueroyalist poets, writing primarily aboutcourtly love, calledSons of Ben (afterBen Jonson)[20] | Richard Lovelace,William Davenant |
| Euphuism | A peculiar mannered style of Baroque English prose, richly decorated withrhetorical questions[21] | Thomas Lodge,John Lyly |
| Classicism | A 17th–18th centuries Western cultural movement that partially coexisted with the Baroque, coincided with theAge of Enlightenment and drew inspiration from the qualities of proportion of the major works of classicalancient Greek andLatin literature[22] | Pierre Corneille,Molière,Jean Racine,John Dryden,William Wycherley,William Congreve,Jonathan Swift,Joseph Addison,Alexander Pope,Voltaire,Carlo Goldoni |
| Amatory fiction | Romantic fiction popular around 1660 to 1730; notable for preceding the modern novel form and producing several prominent female authors[23] | Eliza Haywood,Delarivier Manley,Aphra Behn |
| The Augustans | An 18th-century literary movement based chiefly onclassical ideals,satire andskepticism[24] | Alexander Pope,Jonathan Swift |
| Rococo | Also known as Late Baroque, the final expression of the Baroque movement that began in France in the 1730s and characterized by a cheerful lightness and intimacy of tone, and an elegant playfulness in eroticlight poetry and principally small literary forms[25][26] | Anne Claude de Caylus,Alexandre Masson de Pezay,Évariste de Parny,Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray,Paolo Rolli,Pietro Metastasio,Friedrich von Hagedorn,Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim,Johann Uz,Johann Nikolaus Götz,Christoph Martin Wieland |
| Sentimentalism | Literary sentimentalism arose during the 18th century, partly as a response tosentimentalism in philosophy. In 18th-century England, thesentimental novel was a major literary genre. The movement was one of roots of Romanticism[27][28][29] | Edward Young,James Thomson,Laurence Sterne,Thomas Gray,Jean-Jacques Rousseau,Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock,Christian Heinrich Spiess |
| Gothic fiction | Horror fiction existed from 1760s in which the atmosphere is typicallyclaustrophobic, and common plot elements include vengeful persecution, imprisonment, and murder with interest in thesupernatural and in violence[30][31] | Horace Walpole,Clara Reeve,Ann Radcliffe,Bram Stoker,Edgar Allan Poe,Mary Shelley,Christian Heinrich Spiess |
| Sturm und Drang | From 1767 till 1785, a precursor to the Romanticism, it is named for aplay byFriedrich Maximilian Klinger. Its literature often features a protagonist which is driven by emotion, impulse and other motives that run counter to the enlightenment rationalism.[32][33][34] | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,Friedrich Schiller,Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger,Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz,Heinrich Leopold Wagner |
| Weimar Classicism | In contrast with the contemporaneousGerman Romanticism, the practitioners of Weimar Classicism (1788–1805) established the synthesis of ideas from pre-Romanticism ofSturm und Drang, Romanticism, and Classicism[35] | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,Friedrich Schiller,Caroline von Wolzogen |
| Romanticism | A 19th-century (ca. 1800 to 1860) movement emphasizing emotion and imagination, rather than logic and scientific thought. Response to the Enlightenment[36] | Jean Paul,Novalis,Washington Irving,Lord Byron,Mary Shelley,Alexander Pushkin,Victor Hugo,Nathaniel Hawthorne,Camilo Castelo Branco,Adam Mickiewicz,José de Alencar |
| Dark romanticism | A style within Romanticism. Finds man inherently sinful and self-destructive and nature a dark, mysterious force | E. T. A. Hoffmann,Ludwig Tieck,Edgar Allan Poe,Nathaniel Hawthorne,Herman Melville,Edwin Arlington Robinson |
| Lake Poets | A group of Romantic poets from the EnglishLake District who wrote aboutnature and thesublime[37] | William Wordsworth,Samuel Taylor Coleridge,Robert Southey |
| Pre-Raphaelites | Founded in 1848, primarilyEnglish movement based ostensibly on undoing innovations by the painterRaphael. Many were both painters and poets[38] | Dante Gabriel Rossetti,Christina Rossetti |
| Transcendentalism | From the mid-19th-century American movement: poetry and philosophy concerned withself-reliance, independence from modern technology[39] | Ralph Waldo Emerson,Henry David Thoreau |
| Realism | The mid-19th-century movement based on a simplification of style and image and an interest in poverty and everyday concerns[40] | Gustave Flaubert,William Dean Howells,Stendhal,Honoré de Balzac,Nikolai Gogol,Leo Tolstoy,Fyodor Dostoevsky,Anton Chekhov,Frank Norris,Machado de Assis,Eça de Queiroz |
| Naturalism | The late 19th century proponents of this movement believeheredity andenvironment control people[41] | Émile Zola,Stephen Crane,Guy de Maupassant,Henrik Ibsen,Aluísio Azevedo |
| Verismo | Verismo is a derivative of naturalism and realism that began inpost-unification Italy.Verismo literature uses detailed character development based on psychology, in Giovanni Verga's words 'the science of the human heart.[42][43]' | Giovanni Verga,Luigi Capuana,Matilde Serao,Grazia Deledda |
| Social realism | A type of realism, not to be confused withsocialist realism, which depicted the socio-political problems and domestic situations ofworking class. Some its movements include: | Ivan Turgenev,Bernard Shaw,H. G. Wells,Maxim Gorky,Theodore Dreiser,Jaroslav Hašek,Lu Xun,Guo Moruo,Yoshiki Hayama,Kenneth Fearing,John Osborne,Kingsley Amis,Stan Barstow |
| Socialist realism | Socialist realism is a subset of realist art which focuses on communist values and realist depiction.[44] It developed in theSoviet Union and was imposed as state policy byJoseph Stalin in 1934,[45][46] though authors in other socialist countries and members of the communist party in non-socialist countries also partook in the movement | Maxim Gorky,Valentin Kataev,Leonid Leonov,Alexander Fadeyev,Nikolai Ostrovsky,Mikhail Sholokhov,Lu Xun,Takiji Kobayashi,Mike Gold,Rasul Gamzatov |
| American realism | A national variety of realism often having the character of protecting the American type of development andway of life[47] | Mark Twain,William Dean Howells,Ambrose Bierce,Stephen Crane,Theodore Dreiser,Margaret Deland,Jack London,J. D. Salinger |
| Dirty realism | In the 1980s North America emerged, a related toMinimalism movement that said to depict the seamier or moremundane aspects of ordinary life of unemployed cowboys, waitresses in roadside cafes, deserted husbands and such in spare, unadorned language[48][49] | Charles Bukowski,Carson McCullers,Raymond Carver,Frederick Barthelme,Richard Ford,Tobias Wolff,Pedro Juan Gutiérrez,Larry Brown,Jayne Anne Phillips |
| Magical realism | A literary style and movement in which magical elements appear in otherwise realistic circumstances. Most often associated with theLatin American literary boom of the 20th century[50] | Gabriel García Márquez,Octavio Paz,Günter Grass,Julio Cortázar,Sadegh Hedayat,Nina Sadur,Mo Yan,Olga Tokarczuk |
| Neo-Romanticism | The term has been applied to writers, who rejected, abandoned, or opposed realism, naturalism, or avant-garde modernism at various points in time from circa 1850 and incorporated elements from the era of Romanticism[51] | Thomas Mayne Reid,Mór Jókai,Jules Verne,Rudyard Kipling,Robert Louis Stevenson,Rafael Sabatini,Knut Hamsun,Alexander Grin,Jaishankar Prasad,Kahlil Gibran,Konstantin Paustovsky |
| Decadent movement | In the mid 19th century,decadence came to refer to moral decay, and was attributed as the cause of the fall of great civilizations, like theRoman Empire. The decadent movement was a response to the perceived decadence within the earlier Romantic, naturalist and realist movements in France at this time.[52] The decadent movement takes decadence in literature to an extreme, with characters who debase themselves for pleasure,[53][54] and the use of metaphor, symbolism and language as tools to obfuscate the truth rather than expose it[55] | Joris-Karl Huysmans,Gustav Flaubert,Charles Baudelaire,Oscar Wilde |
| Aestheticism | An artistic and literary movement ofVictorian era from 1860s related to the decadents that cultivated beauty, rather than didactic purpose, and illustrated by the slogan "art for art's sake"[56][57][58][59] | Dante Gabriel Rossetti,Algernon Charles Swinburne,Walter Pater,Oscar Wilde,A. E. Housman |
| Parnassianism | A French-origin group of the anti-Romantic poets, mainly occurring prior tosymbolism during the 1860s–1890s that strove for exact and faultless workmanship[60] | Théophile Gautier,Leconte de Lisle,Théodore de Banville,Felicjan Medard Faleński,Sully Prudhomme,José-Maria de Heredia,Alberto de Oliveira,Olavo Bilac |
| Symbolism | PrincipallyFrench movement of thefin de siècle, symbolism is codified by theSymbolist Manifesto in 1886, and focused on the structure of thought rather than poetic form or image;[61][62][63] influential for English language poets fromEdgar Allan Poe toJames Merrill | Charles Baudelaire,Stéphane Mallarmé,Arthur Rimbaud,Paul Valéry,Maurice Maeterlinck,Hugo von Hofmannsthal,Alexandru Macedonski,Cruz e Sousa |
| Russian symbolism | It arose enough separately from West European symbolism, emphasizing mysticism ofSophiology anddefamiliarization[61][62][64] | Alexander Blok,Valery Bryusov,Fyodor Sologub,Konstantin Balmont,Andrei Bely |
| Irish Literary Revival | A movement withinCeltic Revival in the late 19th and early 20th century that advocated renaissance of creativity inIrish language[65] | George Sigerson,W. B. Yeats,Roger Casement,Thomas MacDonagh |
| Modernism | A variegated movement, includingmodernist poetry, origined in the late 19th century, encompassingprimitivism,formal innovation, or reaction toscience andtechnology[66][67][68][69] | Joseph Conrad,Knut Hamsun,Marcel Proust,Gertrude Stein,Thomas Mann,James Joyce,Ezra Pound,H.D.,T. S. Eliot,Fernando Pessoa,Karel Čapek,Peter Weiss,Mário de Andrade,João Guimarães Rosa,Rabindranath Tagore |
| Mahjar | The "émigré school" was a neo-romantic movement withinArabic-language writers in the Americas that appeared at the turn of the 20th century[70][71][72][73] | Ameen Rihani,Kahlil Gibran,Nasib Arida,Mikhail Naimy,Elia Abu Madi,Nadra andAbd al-Masih Haddad |
| Futurism | Anavant-garde, largely Italian and Russian, movement codified in 1909 by theManifesto of Futurism. Futurists managed to create a new language free of syntax punctuation, and metrics that allowed for free expression[74][75][76][77] | Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,Giovanni Papini,Mina Loy,Aldo Palazzeschi,Velimir Khlebnikov,Almada Negreiros,Vladimir Mayakovsky,Stanisław Młodożeniec,Jaroslav Seifert |
| Cubo-Futurism | A movement withinRussian Futurism with practice ofzaum, the experimental visual and sound poetry[78][79][80] | David Burliuk,Velimir Khlebnikov,Aleksei Kruchyonykh,Vladimir Mayakovsky |
| Ego-Futurism | A school withinRussian Futurism based on a personality cult[78][81] | Igor Severyanin,Vasilisk Gnedov |
| Acmeism | A Russian modernist poetic school, which emerged ca. 1911 and to symbols preferred direct expression through exact images[82][83][84][85][86] | Nikolay Gumilev,Osip Mandelstam,Mikhail Kuzmin,Anna Akhmatova,Georgiy Ivanov |
| New Culture Movement | AChinese movement together with theMay Fourth Movement as its part during the 1910s and 1920s that opposed Confusian culture and proclaimed a new culture, including the use ofwritten vernacular Chinese. It clustered in theNew Youth literary magazine andPeking University[87][88] | Chen Duxiu,Lu Xun,Zhou Zuoren,Li Dazhao,Chen Hengzhe,Hu Shih,Yu Pingbo |
| Stream of consciousness | Early-20th-century fiction consisting of literary representations of quotidian thought, without authorial presence[89] | Dorothy Richardson,Virginia Woolf,James Joyce |
| Impressionism | It influenced by the EuropeanImpressionist art movement and subsumed into several other categories. The term is used to describe not some movement, but a work of literature characterized by the selection of a few details to convey the sense impressions left by an incident or scene[90][91] | Joseph Conrad,Stephen Crane,Virginia Woolf,Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky,Aleksey Remizov,Vladimir Nabokov |
| Expressionism | Part of the larger expressionist movement, literary andtheatrical expressionism is an avant-garde movement originating in Germany, which rejects realism in order to depict emotions and subjective thoughts[92][93] | Franz Kafka,Alfred Döblin,Gottfried Benn,Leonid Andreyev,Heinrich Mann,Oskar Kokoschka |
| First World War Poets | British poets who documented both the idealism and the horrors of the war and the period in which it took place[citation needed] | Siegfried Sassoon,Rupert Brooke,Wilfred Owen |
| Imagism | An English-language modernist group founded in 1914 that poetry based on description rather thantheme, and on the motto, "the natural object is always the adequate symbol"[94] | Ezra Pound,H.D.,Richard Aldington |
| Dada | Touted by its proponents as anti-art, the Dada avant-garde focused on going against artistic norms and conventions[95] | Jean Arp,Kurt Schwitters,Tristan Tzara |
| Imaginism | An avantgardist post-Russian Revolution of 1917 poetic movement that created poetry based on sequences of arresting and uncommon images[96] | Sergei Yesenin,Anatoly Marienhof,Rurik Ivnev |
| The Lost Generation | The term 'Lost Generation' is traditionally attributed toGertrude Stein and was then popularized byErnest Hemingway in theepigraph to his novelThe Sun Also Rises, and his memoirA Moveable Feast. It refers to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts of Europe from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of theGreat Depression[97] | F. Scott Fitzgerald,Ernest Hemingway,Ezra Pound,Waldo Pierce,John Dos Passos |
| Stridentism | A Mexican artistic avant-garde movement. They exalted modern urban life and social revolution | Manuel Maples Arce,Arqueles Vela,Germán List Arzubide |
| Harlem Renaissance | African American poets, novelists, and thinkers, often employing elements ofblues andfolklore, based in theHarlem neighborhood ofNew York City in the 1920s[98] | Langston Hughes,Zora Neale Hurston |
| Jindyworobak movement | The Jindyworobak movement originated inAdelaide, South Australia during the great depression. It sought to preserve uniquely Australian culture from external influence by incorporatingAustralian aboriginal languages andmythology and unique Australian settings[99][100][101] | Rex Ingamells,Xavier Herbert |
| Surrealism | Originally a French movement, which developed in the 1920s fromDadaism byAndré Breton withPhilippe Soupault and influenced by surrealist painting, that uses surprising images and transitions to play off of formal expectations and depict theunconscious rather thanconscious mind (surrealist automatism)[102] | André Breton,Philippe Soupault,Jean Cocteau,José María Hinojosa Lasarte,Sadegh Hedayat,Mário Cesariny,Haruki Murakami |
| OBERIU | A short-lived influential Soviet Russian avantgardist art group in Leningrad from 1927 to repressions in 1931, which held provocative performances, that foreshadowed the Europeantheatre of the absurd, nonsensical illogicalabsurd verse and prose[103] | Daniil Kharms,Alexander Vvedensky,Nikolay Zabolotsky,Nikolay Oleynikov,Konstantin Vaginov,Evgeny Schwartz |
| Los Contemporáneos | A Mexican vanguardist group, active in the late 1920s and early 1930s; published aneponymousliterary magazine which served as the group'smouthpiece and artistic vehicle from 1928 to 1931 | Xavier Villaurrutia,Salvador Novo |
| Villa Seurat Network | A group of left and anarchist writers living in Paris in the 1930s, largely influenced by Surrealism[104] | Henry Miller,Lawrence Durrell,Anaïs Nin,Alfred Perles |
| Objectivism | A loose-knit modernist mainly American group from the 1930s. Objectivists treated the poem as an object; they emphasised sincerity, intelligence, and the clarity of the poet's vision[105] | Louis Zukofsky,Lorine Niedecker,Charles Reznikoff,George Oppen,Carl Rakosi,Basil Bunting |
| Southern Agrarians | A group of SouthernAmerican poets, based originally atVanderbilt University, who expressly repudiated many modernist developments in favor ofmetrical verse andnarrative. Some Southern Agrarians were also associated with theNew Criticism[106] | John Crowe Ransom,Robert Penn Warren |
| Postcolonialism | A diverse, loosely connected movement within thecontemporary literature, writers from formercolonies of European countries, whose work is frequently politically charged[107][108] | Jamaica Kincaid,V. S. Naipaul,Derek Walcott,Salman Rushdie,Giannina Braschi,Wole Soyinka,Chinua Achebe |
| Black Mountain poets | A self-identified avant-garde group of poets, originally, from the 1950, based atBlack Mountain College, who eschewed patterned form in favor of the rhythms and inflections of the human voice[109] | Charles Olson,Denise Levertov,Robert Creeley |
| Absurdism | The absurdist movement is derived in the 1950s fromAbsurdist literature andphilosophy, which argues that life is inherently purposeless and questions truth and value. As such, absurdist literature andtheatre of the absurd often includesdark humor,satire, and incongruity[110][111] | Jean-Paul Sartre,Samuel Beckett,Arthur Adamov,Albert Camus,Imre Kertész,Gao Xingjian |
| The Movement | A 1950s group of English anti-romantic and rational writers[112] | Kingsley Amis,Philip Larkin,Donald Alfred Davie,D. J. Enright,John Wain,Elizabeth Jennings,Robert Conquest |
| Nouveau roman | The "new novelists", appeared in French literature in the 1950s, generally rejected the traditional use of chronology, plot and character in novel, as well as theomniscient narrator, and focused on the vision of thins[113][114] | Alain Robbe-Grillet,Claude Simon,Nathalie Sarraute,Michel Butor,Robert Pinget,Marguerite Duras,Jean Ricardou |
| Concrete poetry | The Concrete poetry was an avantgardist movement started in Brazil during the 1950s, characterized for extinguishing the general conception of poetry, creating a new language called ''verbivocovisual''[115] | Augusto de Campos,Haroldo de Campos,Décio Pignatari |
| Beats | An American movement of the 1950s and 1960s concerned withcounterculture and youthful alienation[116] Its British variety were the 1960sLiverpool poets | Jack Kerouac,Allen Ginsberg,William S. Burroughs,Ken Kesey,Gregory Corso |
| Confessional poetry | American poetry that emerged in the late 1950s, often brutally, exposes the self as part of an aesthetic of the beauty and power of human frailty[117] | Robert Lowell,Sylvia Plath,Alicia Ostriker |
| Village Prose | A movement in Soviet literature beginning during theKhrushchev Thaw, which included works that cultivated nostalgia of rural life[118] | Valentin Ovechkin,Alexander Yashin,Fyodor Abramov,Boris Mozhayev,Viktor Astafyev,Vladimir Soloukhin,Vasily Shukshin,Vasily Belov,Valentin Rasputin |
| Soviet nonconformism | A dissident, stylistically diverse artistic "movement" in the post-Stalinist era Soviet Union from 1950s to 1980s in opposition to officialsocialist realism[119][120][121] | Vasily Grossman,Varlam Shalamov,Yury Dombrovsky,Viktor Nekrasov,Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,Alexander Zinoviev,Vasily Aksyonov,Vladimir Voinovich,Andrei Bitov,Venedikt Yerofeyev,Joseph Brodsky,Dmitry Prigov,Sergei Dovlatov,Sasha Sokolov |
| Oulipo | Founded in 1960 French poetry and prose group based on seemingly arbitrary rules for the sake of added challenge[citation needed] | Raymond Queneau,Walter Abish,Georges Perec,Italo Calvino |
| Postmodernism | Contemporary movement, emerged strongly in the 1960s U.S., skeptical of absolutes and embracing diversity,irony, and word play[68][122] | Kathy Acker,John Barth,Jorge Luis Borges,Philip K. Dick,William Gaddis,Alasdair Gray,Thomas Pynchon,Subimal Mishra,Sasha Sokolov,Samir Roychoudhury,Kurt Vonnegut,Yukio Mishima,Bret Easton Ellis |
| Hungry generation | A literary movement in postcolonial India (Kolkata) during 1961–65 as a counter-discourse to Colonial Bengali poetry | Shakti Chattopadhyay,Malay Roy Choudhury,Binoy Majumdar,Samir Roychoudhury,Debi Roy,Sandipan Chattopadhyay,Subimal Basak |
| New York School | Urban, gay or gay-friendly,leftist poets, writers, and painters of the 1960s[123] | Frank O'Hara,John Ashbery |
| New Wave | The New Wave is a movement inscience fiction produced in the 1960s and 1970s and characterized by a high degree of experimentation, both in form and in content, a "literary" or artistic sensibility, and a focus on "soft" as opposed to hard science. New Wave writers often saw themselves as part of themodernist tradition and sometimes mocked the traditions ofpulp science fiction, which some of them regarded as stodgy, adolescent and poorly written[124] | John Brunner,M. John Harrison,Norman Spinrad,Barrington J. Bayley,Thomas M. Disch |
| Minimalism | In the late 1960s and '70s U.S. emerged, an avantgardist artistic, dramatic and literary movement is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description.[125][126][127] | Samuel Beckett,Grace Paley,Raymond Carver,Frederick Barthelme,Richard Ford,Mary Robison,Amy Hempel,Jon Fosse |
| British Poetry Revival | A loose wide-reaching collection of groupings and subgroupings during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a modernist reaction to the conservativeThe Movement[128][129] | J. H. Prynne,Eric Mottram,Tom Raworth,Denise Riley,Lee Harwood |
| Language poets | An avantgardist group or tendency in American poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the poem as a construction in and of language itself[130] | Bernadette Mayer,Leslie Scalapino,Stephen Rodefer,Bruce Andrews,Charles Bernstein |
| Misty Poets | The Misty Poets wereChinese poets who resisted state artistic restrictions imposed during theCultural Revolution since 1970s. They made use of metaphors and hermetic imagery and avoided objective facts[87][131][132] | Bei Dao,Duo Duo,Shu Ting,Yang Lian,Gu Cheng,Hai Zi |
| Spoken Word | A postmodern literary movement srarted ca. 1970, where writers use their speaking voice to present fiction, poetry, monologues, and storytelling arising from Beat poetry, the Harlem Renaissance, and thecivil rights movement in the urban centers of the United States.[133] The textual origins differ and may have been written for print initially then read aloud for audiences | Spalding Gray,Laurie Anderson,Hedwig Gorski,Pedro Pietri,Piri Thomas,Giannina Braschi,Taalam Acey |
| Moscow Conceptualists | A movement withinSoviet nonconformist art emerged during the 1970s and related to westernconceptual andneo-conceptual art in which theconcept(s) involved in the work are prioritized equally to or more than traditional aesthetic or material concerns. The Moscow group included not only artists but also writers[134][135][136] | Dmitry Prigov,Lev Rubinstein,Anna Alchuk,Vladimir Sorokin |
| Metarealism | Namely metaphysical realism, a movement in the 1970s–90s unofficial postmodern Soviet and Russian literature, whom all members used complex metaphors which they called meta-metaphors[135][137][138] | Konstantin Kedrov,Viktor Krivulin,Elena Shvarts,Yuri Arabov,Alexei Parshchikov |
| New Formalism | A movement originating ca. 1977 in American poetry advocating a return to traditionalaccentual-syllabic verse[139][140] | Dana Gioia,X.J. Kennedy,Brad Leithauser,Molly Peacock,Mary Jo Salter,Timothy Steele |
| Performance poetry | This is the lasting viral component ofSpoken Word and one of the most popular forms of poetry in the 21st 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 AmericanHedwig Gorski 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 from performance art. Instead of books, poets use audio recordings and digital media along with television spawningSlam Poetry and Def Poets on television and Broadway | Beau Sia,Hedwig Gorski,Bob Holman,Marc Smith,David Antin,Taalam Acey |
| New Sincerity, a.k.a.Postpostmodernism | A cultural movement and trend that matured in the 1990s within Postmodernism, primarily in America, preferring sincerity ethos to the hegemony of postmodernist irony and cynicism[141][142] | David Foster Wallace,Marilynne Robinson,Jonathan Franzen,Victor Pelevin,Michael Chabon,Dave Eggers,Stephen Graham Jones,Zadie Smith |
| Sastra wangi | A label for the movement ofIndonesian literature started circa 2000 and written by young, urban Indonesian women who take on controversial issues such as politics, religion andsexuality[143] | Ayu Utami,Djenar Maesa Ayu,Dewi "Dee" Lestari,Fira Basuki,Nova Riyanti Yusuf |
| Neo-Decadence | An artistic movement which, though influenced by the aesthetic ideology of the Decadent movement, might be seen as much as a reaction against other trends in contemporary literature as a resurrection of the original movement. In general, Neo-Decadence has more in common with avant-garde literary movements (Symbolism, Decadence and Futurism) than with genre fiction categories such as speculative fiction or horror, with which it is often compared.[144][145] | Brendan Connell,Quentin S. Crisp, Justin Isis |
| Electronic literature | A wide ranging literary movement encompassing other genres but using electronic elements (games, navigation, sound, images, etc) to add meaning.[146] | M.D. Coverley,John Cayley,Shelley Jackson,Stephanie Strickland examples. SeeList of electronic literature writers. |
Literature portal