Literary movements divide literary works into groups based on their similarities, as opposed to grouping them by period or genre. Some movements are defined by the authors themselves, while others are defined decades or even centuries later.

These 16 major movements provide a framework for categorizing literature.

1. __The Augustans__: Augustan literature is a style of English literature produced in the first half of the eighteenth century. This movement made significant advancements in novel writing and popularized satire in literature. The movement would end with the death of its founding members, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift.
2. __Romanticism__: Taking place during the nineteenth century, the Romantic period is characterized by an emphasis on individualism and emotion. It was largely a reaction to industrialization and the Age of Enlightenment. The English poet and founder of English Romanticism, William Wordsworth, wrote poetry that often focused on humans’ relationship to nature. 
3. __American Romanticism__: American literature would see its own Romantic period flourish in the early nineteenth century. Emily Dickinson was a popular poet from this time period whose works explored humanity’s relationship to nature and mortality. Nathaniel Hawthorne, another American Romantic, wrote the wildly popular novel *The Scarlet Letter* in 1850, which criticized Puritanism and influenced American culture. Other formative works from this era include *Moby Dick* by Herman Melville and *Leaves of Grass* by Walt Whitman.
4. __Transcendentalism__: Transcendentalists rejected formal religious customs in favor of a personal connection with the divine in everyday life—particularly nature. *Walden: Life in the Woods* by Henry David Thoreau and *Self-Reliance* by Ralph Waldo Emerson are seminal works from this movement. 
5. __Gothic fiction__: Gothic fiction, specifically the Gothic novel, combined themes of Romanticism with science fiction, horror, and violence in the late nineteenth century. Some of the most famous Gothic novels include *Frankenstein* by Mary Shelley, *The Legend of Sleepy Hollow* by Washington Irving, and *Dracula* by Bram Stoker, while Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories helped further solidify the movement.
6. __Realism__: Literary [realism](https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-literary-realism) represents reality by portraying mundane, everyday experiences as they are in real life. With roots in the nineteenth century and iterations that have evolved to this day, realist works depict familiar people, places, and stories—primarily about the middle and lower classes of society. Literary realism seeks to tell a story as truthfully as possible instead of dramatizing or romanticizing it. Popular authors that helped define this movement include Gustave Flaubert, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, and Mark Twain.
7. __Naturalism__: An extreme form of realism influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Naturalism, founded by Émile Zola, explores the belief that science can explain all social and environmental phenomena. William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily,” (1930) is an example of Naturalism. Other writers from this literary period include Stephen Crane, Guy de Maupassant, and Theodore Dreiser.
8. __Modernism__: Influenced by worldwide industrialization, the first World War, and the Great Depression, literary [modernism](https://www.masterclass.com/articles/modernist-literature-guide) was an emotional and experimental style of prose and poetry that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature. Renowned writers from the modern period include Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, William Carlos Williams, and W.B. Yeats.
9. __Stream of consciousness__: Works from this movement depict the many thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind of a narrator. While the term “[stream of consciousness](https://www.masterclass.com/articles/writing-101-what-is-stream-of-consciousness-writing-learn-about-stream-of-consciousness-in-literature-with-examples)” traces back to the nineteenth century, stream of consciousness writing became especially popular among writers of the modernist era. Famous modernist practitioners of the technique include Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. It remained fashionable in the ensuing years, appearing in the midcentury works of William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Flannery O’Connor and those of contemporary writers like Stephen King, Salman Rushdie, and Nathaniel Rich.
10. __The Harlem Renaissance__: In the 1920s following the Great Migration, Black American writers, poets, artists, and intellectuals formed a community in New York's Harlem neighborhood. A new style of lyrical and innovative literature flourished, offering a thorough examination and celebration of Black American life. Many famous authors such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston found their voice in this movement.
11. __The Lost Generation__: Ernest Hemingway popularized the term “the Lost Generation” to refer to a group of writers who lived and worked in Paris and other parts of Europe between the end of World War I and the Great Depression. Disillusionment with the American dream characterized the work of Ernest Hemingway and other writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein.
12. __Minimalism__: In the post-World War II era, writers like Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett told stories with simple plots full of matter-of-fact observation, both of which would become a hallmark of literary minimalism. By the 1960s, the sparse prose of writers like John Barth, Robert Coover, and William H. Gass continued the trend of writers adopting an emotional distance from their subjects. By the early 1970s, Raymond Carver brought minimalist fiction into mainstream literature. Contemporary authors like Bret Easton Ellis, Amy Hempel, and Cormac McCarthy are also associated with literary minimalism.
13. __Magical realism__: A type of realism that blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, magical realism portrays the world but truthfully with magical elements that are not found in our reality. *One Hundred Years of Solitude* by Gabriel García Márquez (1967) is a seminal magical realism novel about a man who invents a town according to his own perceptions. 
14. __Surrealism__: Surrealism was a twentieth-century movement that sought to access the subconscious mind through the creation of imaginary worlds. Popular surrealists include Jean Cocteau, Jose Maria Hinojosa, and André Breton.
15. __Beat Generation__: Beat poets like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg formed a countercultural movement in the 1950s and ’60s, writing literary works that rejected materialism and celebrated liberation.
16. __Postmodernism__: Rising to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, [postmodern](https://www.masterclass.com/articles/postmodern-literature-guide) literature eschews absolute meaning and instead emphasizes play, fragmentation, metafiction, and intertextuality. Common examples of postmodern literature include *Gravity’s Rainbow* by Thomas Pynchon, *Slaughterhouse-Five* by Kurt Vonnegut, and *Catch-22* by Joseph Heller. Literary theorists that crystalized postmodernity in literature include Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jorge Luis Borges, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard.
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Literary movements help categorize authors and literary works that share similar philosophies, aesthetics, or topics.


Literary movements help categorize authors and literary works that share similar philosophies, aesthetics, or topics.


Western Literary Movements Guide: Timeline of 16 Literary Movements 

Literary movements divide literary works into groups based on their similarities, as opposed to grouping them by period or genre. Some movements are defined by the authors themselves, while others are defined decades or even centuries later.

What Are Literary Movements? 

These 16 major movements provide a framework for categorizing literature.<ol class="mc-m-4"><li class="mc-my-4"> 1. The Augustans: Augustan literature is a style of English literature produced in the first half of the eighteenth century. This movement made significant advancements in novel writing and popularized satire in literature. The movement would end with the death of its founding members, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 2. Romanticism: Taking place during the nineteenth century, the Romantic period is characterized by an emphasis on individualism and emotion. It was largely a reaction to industrialization and the Age of Enlightenment. The English poet and founder of English Romanticism, William Wordsworth, wrote poetry that often focused on humans’ relationship to nature. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 3. American Romanticism: American literature would see its own Romantic period flourish in the early nineteenth century. Emily Dickinson was a popular poet from this time period whose works explored humanity’s relationship to nature and mortality. Nathaniel Hawthorne, another American Romantic, wrote the wildly popular novel The Scarlet Letter in 1850, which criticized Puritanism and influenced American culture. Other formative works from this era include Moby Dick by Herman Melville and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 4. Transcendentalism: Transcendentalists rejected formal religious customs in favor of a personal connection with the divine in everyday life—particularly nature. Walden: Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau and Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson are seminal works from this movement. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 5. Gothic fiction: Gothic fiction, specifically the Gothic novel, combined themes of Romanticism with science fiction, horror, and violence in the late nineteenth century. Some of the most famous Gothic novels include Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving, and Dracula by Bram Stoker, while Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories helped further solidify the movement. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 6. Realism: Literary <a href='https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-literary-realism' target='_self' class='mc-text--link' data-mc-segment-trigger='true' data-mc-segment-event-type='Article Page Click' data-event-obj='{"textTag":"p","href":"https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-literary-realism","linkCopy":"realism","category":null}'>realism</a> represents reality by portraying mundane, everyday experiences as they are in real life. With roots in the nineteenth century and iterations that have evolved to this day, realist works depict familiar people, places, and stories—primarily about the middle and lower classes of society. Literary realism seeks to tell a story as truthfully as possible instead of dramatizing or romanticizing it. Popular authors that helped define this movement include Gustave Flaubert, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, and Mark Twain. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 7. Naturalism: An extreme form of realism influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Naturalism, founded by Émile Zola, explores the belief that science can explain all social and environmental phenomena. William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily,” (1930) is an example of Naturalism. Other writers from this literary period include Stephen Crane, Guy de Maupassant, and Theodore Dreiser. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 8. Modernism: Influenced by worldwide industrialization, the first World War, and the Great Depression, literary <a href='https://www.masterclass.com/articles/modernist-literature-guide' target='_self' class='mc-text--link' data-mc-segment-trigger='true' data-mc-segment-event-type='Article Page Click' data-event-obj='{"textTag":"p","href":"https://www.masterclass.com/articles/modernist-literature-guide","linkCopy":"modernism","category":null}'>modernism</a> was an emotional and experimental style of prose and poetry that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature. Renowned writers from the modern period include Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, William Carlos Williams, and W.B. Yeats. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 9. Stream of consciousness: Works from this movement depict the many thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind of a narrator. While the term “<a href='https://www.masterclass.com/articles/writing-101-what-is-stream-of-consciousness-writing-learn-about-stream-of-consciousness-in-literature-with-examples' target='_self' class='mc-text--link' data-mc-segment-trigger='true' data-mc-segment-event-type='Article Page Click' data-event-obj='{"textTag":"p","href":"https://www.masterclass.com/articles/writing-101-what-is-stream-of-consciousness-writing-learn-about-stream-of-consciousness-in-literature-with-examples","linkCopy":"stream of consciousness","category":null}'>stream of consciousness</a>” traces back to the nineteenth century, stream of consciousness writing became especially popular among writers of the modernist era. Famous modernist practitioners of the technique include Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. It remained fashionable in the ensuing years, appearing in the midcentury works of William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Flannery O’Connor and those of contemporary writers like Stephen King, Salman Rushdie, and Nathaniel Rich. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 10. The Harlem Renaissance: In the 1920s following the Great Migration, Black American writers, poets, artists, and intellectuals formed a community in New York&#39;s Harlem neighborhood. A new style of lyrical and innovative literature flourished, offering a thorough examination and celebration of Black American life. Many famous authors such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston found their voice in this movement. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 11. The Lost Generation: Ernest Hemingway popularized the term “the Lost Generation” to refer to a group of writers who lived and worked in Paris and other parts of Europe between the end of World War I and the Great Depression. Disillusionment with the American dream characterized the work of Ernest Hemingway and other writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 12. Minimalism: In the post-World War II era, writers like Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett told stories with simple plots full of matter-of-fact observation, both of which would become a hallmark of literary minimalism. By the 1960s, the sparse prose of writers like John Barth, Robert Coover, and William H. Gass continued the trend of writers adopting an emotional distance from their subjects. By the early 1970s, Raymond Carver brought minimalist fiction into mainstream literature. Contemporary authors like Bret Easton Ellis, Amy Hempel, and Cormac McCarthy are also associated with literary minimalism. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 13. Magical realism: A type of realism that blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, magical realism portrays the world but truthfully with magical elements that are not found in our reality. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967) is a seminal magical realism novel about a man who invents a town according to his own perceptions. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 14. Surrealism: Surrealism was a twentieth-century movement that sought to access the subconscious mind through the creation of imaginary worlds. Popular surrealists include Jean Cocteau, Jose Maria Hinojosa, and André Breton. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 15. Beat Generation: Beat poets like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg formed a countercultural movement in the 1950s and ’60s, writing literary works that rejected materialism and celebrated liberation. </li><li class="mc-my-4"> 16. Postmodernism: Rising to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, <a href='https://www.masterclass.com/articles/postmodern-literature-guide' target='_self' class='mc-text--link' data-mc-segment-trigger='true' data-mc-segment-event-type='Article Page Click' data-event-obj='{"textTag":"p","href":"https://www.masterclass.com/articles/postmodern-literature-guide","linkCopy":"postmodern","category":null}'>postmodern</a> literature eschews absolute meaning and instead emphasizes play, fragmentation, metafiction, and intertextuality. Common examples of postmodern literature include Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Literary theorists that crystalized postmodernity in literature include Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jorge Luis Borges, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard. </li></ol>

A Brief Timeline of Western Literary Movements  

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Literary movements help categorize authors and literary works that share similar philosophies, aesthetics, or topics.