List of literary movements

A catalog of literary movements: artistic currents linked by characteristic styles, ideas, or historical periods. It organizes movements across literary history rather than describing one movement.

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Classicism: An artistic tradition that values order, proportion, restraint, and models from ancient Greek and Roman culture. Its revival in different eras makes it a recurring reference point across literary history.
Neoclassicism: An early modern movement that modeled literature on classical works and emphasized decorum, reason, and formal rules. Romantic writers challenged its restraint and reliance on inherited rules.
Don Quixote: Miguel de Cervantes’s early seventeenth-century novel about a man whose chivalric fantasies collide with ordinary life. Its treatment of romance and reality complicates simple accounts of literary change.
Literary genre: A category of writing defined by conventions of form, subject, or style. Genres classify works by conventions, while movements connect them through shared historical and intellectual currents.
Periodization problem: The difficulty of dividing continuous historical change into clear, agreed-upon periods. Movements rarely begin or end neatly, so their dates vary across histories.
Romanticism: A literary and artistic movement emphasizing imagination, emotion, nature, and individual experience. Its late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rise marks a major shift from neoclassical ideals.
Naturalism: A late nineteenth-century literary movement that portrays people as shaped by heredity, environment, and social forces. It intensifies realism’s observational method into a more deterministic account of human life.
Lyrical Ballads: A poetry collection by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798. Its preface and poems are central evidence for the emergence of English Romanticism.
Literary theory: The systematic study of literature’s forms, meanings, contexts, and methods of interpretation. Theories provide interpretive frameworks that can cross the boundaries between movements.
Canon formation: The process by which institutions and communities select, preserve, and value literary works. Choices about whose works count can reshape the movements represented in a catalog.