Literary Movements
Discover the main literary movements
Catalan Modernisme
Movement of Catalan cultural renewal contemporary to European symbolism; Joan Maragall is its main poet.
Félibrige
Revitalization movement of the Occitan/Provençal language and literature; founded by Frédéric Mistral, Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904.
Viennese Modernism
Late 19th-century Viennese cultural flourishing with Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, and Karl Kraus; atmosphere of crisis and aesthetic renewal.
Young Vienna
Viennese literary circle associated with Wiener Moderne; gathered writers such as Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler around a symbolist and decadentist aesthetic.
Majorcan School
Catalan poetic current from Mallorca with a classicist and symbolist tendency; Costa i Llobera and Joan Alcover are its main representatives.
Novecentism
Classicist reaction to Symbolist modernism; in Spain/Catalonia it values serenity and balance, in Portugal it is associated with Pessoa and the Renascença Portuguesa.
Futurism
Avant-garde movement that celebrates speed, the machine, war, and technological modernity; founded by Marinetti with the 1909 Futurist Manifesto.
Russian Futurism
Russian poetic avant-garde that breaks with tradition and experiments with language; Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov and the cubo-futurists are its central figures.
Dadaism
Anti-art movement born in Zurich that rejects conventional logic and aesthetics; uses absurdity, chance, and provocation as artistic strategies.
Expressionism
Movement that distorts reality to express inner states and intense emotions; Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn in German poetry.
Imagism
Anglophone poetic school valuing precise imagery, direct language, and verse experimentation; Ezra Pound and H.D. are central figures.
Literary Cubism
Application of pictorial cubism to literature; Apollinaire and his calligrams are the best-known expression of this formal experimentation.
Acmeism
Russian poetic school that reacts against symbolism in favor of clarity, concreteness, and precision; Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam are its greatest names.
Unanimism
French literary movement that conceives the human group as a collective soul; Jules Romains is its main theorist and practitioner.
Creationism
Hispanic poetic movement founded by Vicente Huidobro that proposes the poem as an autonomous creation and not an imitation of reality.
Ultraism
Hispanic literary avant-garde influenced by Futurism and Dadaism; celebrates pure metaphor and formal renewal; influenced the young Borges.
Spanish American Modernismo
First major autonomous literary movement in Latin America; Rubén Darío is its central figure; radical renewal of the Spanish poetic language.
Portuguese and Brazilian Modernism
Radical literary renewal in Portugal (Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Almada) and Brazil (Modern Art Week of 1922, Oswald and Mário de Andrade).
Brazilian Pre-Modernism
Period of Brazilian literary transition between Naturalism/Parnassianism and the Modernism of 1922; Euclides da Cunha and Lima Barreto are references.
Generation of '98
Generation of Spanish writers marked by the national crisis after the defeat of 1898; Unamuno, Machado, and Azorín reflect on Spanish identity.
Bloomsbury Group
London intellectual and literary circle that included Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey; associated with Anglophone modernism and cultural liberalism.
Harlem Renaissance
African-American cultural and literary blossoming centered in Harlem, New York; Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston are central figures.
Négritude
Literary and philosophical movement of affirmation of African and Afro-descendant identity and culture; Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas.
Mahjar literature
Arabic diaspora literature produced by Syrian and Lebanese emigrants; Khalil Gibran is its best-known name in the Western world.
New Culture Movement
Chinese cultural modernization movement associated with the May Fourth Movement; promoted vernacular (baihua) literature over classical.
Objectivism (poetry)
American poetic school that values the poem as an object and the precision of perception; Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen are its main representatives.
CoBrA
Artistic and literary movement in Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam; spontaneous, expressive, and experimental poetry associated with gestural painting.
Spanish Modernismo
Spanish strand of Hispanic modernism, contemporary to the Generation of '98; Juan Ramón Jiménez is its most representative figure.
Literary Existentialism
Literary expression of philosophical existentialism; Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir explore freedom, anguish, and the absurdity of the human condition.
New York School
Group of American poets influenced by abstract expressionism and surrealism; Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch are central figures.
Black Mountain poets
American poetic school associated with Black Mountain College; Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan experiment with projective verse and breath rhythm.
Beat Generation
American counterculture literary movement that rejects conventional values; Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs explore freedom, spirituality, and marginality.
Lost Generation
Generation of American writers marked by World War I and European exile; Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos.
Group 47
Post-war German literary group that brought together the main German-language writers; Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass are its most prominent names.
Hussards
Group of right-wing French writers who opposed Sartrean existentialism; Roger Nimier and Michel Déon cultivated an ironic and elegant style.
Nouveau roman
French avant-garde school that eliminated psychological characters and conventional plot in favor of objective description; Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Butor.
Misty Poets
Chinese post-Cultural Revolution poetic movement using metaphor and ambiguity to resist socialist realism; Bei Dao and Shu Ting are central figures.
Beijing School
Avant-garde Chinese literary movement that emerged in Beijing in the context of post-Mao reforms; explores cultural identity and modernity.
Progressive Writers' Movement
South Asian Marxist-inspired literary movement that produced literature in Urdu, Hindi, and other languages; Faiz Ahmed Faiz is its most celebrated poet.
Scottish Renaissance
Movement for the revival of Scottish literature in English and Scots; Hugh MacDiarmid is its central figure.