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| 11222790579 | Angry Young Men(1950s-1980s) | A group of male British writers who created visceral plays and fiction at odds with the political establishment and a self-satisfied middle class. John Osborne's play "Look Back in Anger" is one of the seminal works of this movement. | 0 | |
| 11222828690 | Beat Generation (1950s-1960s) | A group of American writers in the 1950s and 1960s who sought release and illumination through a bohemian counterculture of sex, drugs, and Zen Buddhism. Writers such as Jack Kerouac (On The Road) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl) gained fame by giving readings in coffeehouses, often accompanied by jazz music. ( After WW2) | 1 | |
| 11222832550 | Bildungsroman | A literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood. Emotional maturation. | 2 | |
| 11222849776 | Black Comedy/Dark Humor | Disturbing or absurd material presented in a humorous manner, usually with the intention of confronting uncomfortable truths. Joseph Heller's Catch 22 is a notable example. | 3 | |
| 11222874545 | Commedia dell'arte(1500s-1700s) | Improvisational comedy first developed in Renaissance Italy that involved stock characters and centered around a set scenario. The elements of farce and buffoonery in commedia dell'arte, as well as its standard characters and plot intrigues, have had a tremendous influence on Western comedy, and can still be seen in contemporary drama and television sitcoms. | 4 | |
| 11222934425 | Dadaism (1916-1922) | An avant-garde movement that began in response to the devastation of World War I. Based in Paris and led by the poet Tristan Tzara, the Dadaists produced nihilistic and antilogical prose, poetry, and art, and rejected the traditions, rules, and ideals of prewar Europe. | 5 | |
| 11222952431 | Didactic Literature | Literature intended to instruct or educate. For example, Virgil's Georgics contains farming advice in verse form. | 6 | |
| 11222968635 | Elizabethan Poetry | The period coinciding with the reign of England's Queen Elizabeth I(1558-1603), considered to be the literary height of the English Renaissance. Poets and dramatists drew inspiration from Italian forms and genres such as the love sonnet, the pastoral, and the allegorical epic. | 7 | |
| 11223015085 | Epic Poetry | Lengthy narrative poetry that describes the deeds of a heroic figure, often of cultural importance, in elevated language. Beowulf or Virgil's Aeneid are famous examples. | 8 | |
| 11223057113 | Explication | A close reading of a text that identifies and explains the figurative language and forms found within the work. | 9 | |
| 11223068564 | Gothic Literature | A genre of late-18th-century literature that featured brooding, mysterious settings and plots and set the stage for what we now call "horror stories." Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, set inside a medieval castle, was the first major gothic novel. | 10 | |
| 11223112345 | Harlem Renaissance | a flowering of African-American literature,art, and music during the 1920s in NYC. W.E.B. DuBois's "The Souls of Black Folk" anticipated the movement. | 11 | |
| 11223149091 | History Plays | One of the three main genres in the Western theatre alongside tragedy and comedy, although it originated in its modern form thousands of years later than the other primary genres. For this reason, it is often treated as a subset of tragedy. A play in this genre is known as a history play and is based on a historical narrative, often set in the medieval or early modern past. | 12 | |
| 11223206921 | Intertextuality | The various relationships a text may have with other texts, through allusions, borrowing of formal or thematic elements, or simply by reference to traditional literary forms. The term is important to structuralists and post-structuralists who argue that texts relate primarily to one another and not to an external reality. | 13 | |
| 11223262699 | Literary Theory and Criticism | Interpretive tools to help readers think more deeply and insightfully about literature. | 14 | |
| 11223266822 | Lost Generation | A term used to describe the generations of writers, many that came to maturity during World War I. Notable members of this group F. Scott Fitzgerald. and artists disillusioned with the consumer culture of the 1920s. | 15 | |
| 11223356436 | Magic realism (c. 1935-present) | A style of writing, popularized by Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, and others, that combines realism with moments of dream-like fantasy within a single prose narrative. Something so moving its magical. | 16 | |
| 11223367600 | Metafiction | Fiction that concerns the nature of fiction itself, either by reinterpreting a previous fictional work or by drawing attention to its own fictional status. | 17 | |
| 11223373540 | Metaphysical Poets | A group of 17th-century poets who focused on philosophical issues. Their work combined indirect language with complex images, paradoxes, and conceits. Robert Herrick, Abraham Cowley, John Donne, and Andrew Marvel are examples. Poetic emotion in an unexpected expressed emotion/action. | 18 | |
| 11223398884 | Modernism(1890s-1940s) | A literary and artistic movement that provided a radical break with traditional modes of Western art, thought, religion, social conventions, and morality. Major themes of this period include the attack in notions of hierarchy; experimentation in new forms of narrative, such as a stream of consciousness; doubt about the existence of knowable, objective reality. | 19 | |
| 11223452714 | Naturalism (1865-1900) | A literary movement that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. Leading writers in the movement include Emile Zola. | 20 | |
| 11223465887 | Neoclassicism (c. 1660-1798) | A literary movement, inspired by the rediscovery of classical works of ancient Greece and Rome that emphasized balance, restraint, and order. Neoclassicism roughly coincided with the Enlightenment, which espoused reason over passion. Notable neoclassical writers include Edmund Burke, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. | 21 | |
| 11223470614 | New Criticism | This approach discourages the use of history and biography in interpreting a literary work. Instead, it encourages readers to discover the meaning of a work through a detailed analysis of the text itself. | 22 | |
| 11223478903 | Pastoral Poetry | A celebration of the rustic life of shepherds, usually written by a sophisticated, urban writer. Christopher Marlowe's " the Passionate Shepard to his Love" epitomizes pastoral topics. | 23 | |
| 11223510707 | Postmodernism (c. 1945-present) | A notoriously ambiguous term, especially as it refers to literature, postmodernism can be seen as a response to the elitism of high modernism as well as to the horrors of World War II. Postmodern literature is characterized by a disjointed, fragmented writing; a pastiche of high and low culture that reflects the absence of tradition and structure in a world driven by technology and consumerism. Morrison, Nabokov, Pynchon, Vonnegut among authors. | 24 | |
| 11223514435 | Post-structuralism | A movement that compromised Deconstruction and the laster works of Foucault. It criticized structuralism for its claim to scientific objectivity, including the assumption that the system of signs with which language operates is stable. | 25 | |
| 11223561030 | Realism (1830-1900) | A loose term that can refer to any work that aims at an honest portrayal over sensationalism, exaggeration, and melodrama. Technically, realism refers to a late-19th century literary movement-primarily French, English, and American- that aimed at the accurate detailed portrayal of ordinary, contemporary life. Many of the 19th century's greatest novelists, such as Charles Dickens as classified realists. | 26 | |
| 11223636459 | Romanticism(1798-1832) | A literary and artistic movement that reacted against the restraint and universalism of the Englishtenment. Celebrated spontaneity,imagination, subjectivity, and the purity of nature. | 27 | |
| 11223687039 | Structuralism(1920s-1930s) | An intellectual movement that read texts as an interrelated system of signs that refer to one another rather than to any external "meaning" that is fixed either by the author or reader. | 28 | |
| 11223730305 | Surrealism | An avant-garde movement, based primarily France that sought to break down the boundaries between rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, through a variety of literary and artistic experiments. | 29 | |
| 11223777160 | Symbolists (1870s-1890s) | A group of French poets who reacted against realism with a poetry of suggestion based on private symbols, and experimented with new poetic forms such as free verse and the prose poem. The symbolists—Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine are the most well known—were influenced by Charles Baudelaire. In turn, they had a seminal influence on the modernist poetry of the early 20th century. | 30 | |
| 11223798823 | Theater of Absurd (1930s-1970s) | Drama using row abandonment of conventional dramatic form to portray the futility of human struggle in a senseless world. Major exponents include Samual Beckett, whose work focused largely on the idea of existentialism and expressed what happens when human existence has no meaning. | 31 | |
| 11223999191 | Transcendentalism (1835-1860) | An American philosophical and spiritual movement, based in New England, that focused on the primacy of the individual conscience and rejected materialism in favor of closer communion with nature. | 32 |
