English Literary Movements & Periods
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Complete list of Terms and Definitions for English Literary Movements & Periods

Terms Definitions
Thomas Hobbes Enlightenment
Religious belief was one the wane The Victorian Period
Samuel Johnson Neoclassicism
Christopher Marlowe Elizabethan era
Public theatres The Renaissance
Chaucer Middle English
Emergence of minority writers The Postmodern Period
Everyman Middle Ages/Late Medieval Period
Jean-Jacques Rousseau Enlightenment
Alexander Pope Neoclassicism
The Book of the City of Ladies Medieval
Alexander Pope Augustan Period
The Well Wrought Urn New Criticism
An intellectual movement in France and other parts of Europe that emphasized the importance of reason, progress, and liberty. Primarily associated with nonfiction writing, such as essays and philosophical treatises. Major writers include Thomas Hobbes, Jo Enlightenment
Marlow The Renaissance
Jack Kerouac (On The Road) Beat Generation
Sir Philip Sidney Elizabethan era
Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales Middle English
5th-11th Centuries Old English/Early Medieval Period
René Descartes Enlightenment
James Joyce’s Ulysses High modernism
An informal group of friends and lovers, including Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes, who lived in the Bloomsbury section of London in the early 20th century and who had a considerable liberaliz Bloomsbury Group
Revolutions in France and America The Romantic Period
Literate elite wrote for an emerging middle class The Augustan Period
Writing of this period helped to cast a good light on British imperialism and promote patriotism in WWI (the Great War) The Victorian Period
Improvisational comedy first developed in Renaissance Italy that involved stock characters and centered around a set scenario. The elements of farce and buffoonery, as well as its standard characters and plot intrigues, have had a tremendous influence on Commedia dell’arte
Generally considered the golden age of modernist literature High modernism
Jonathan Swift Neoclassicism
Allen Ginsberg (Howl) Beat Generation
A loose term that can refer to any work that aims at honest portrayal over sensationalism, exaggeration, or melodrama. Technically, realism refers to a late-19th-century literary movement—primarily French, English, and American—that aimed at accurate Realism
Dickens Realism & Victorian
Morality plays Middle English/Medieval Ages
1945-Present The Postmodern Period
1900-1945 The Modern Period
John Locke Enlightenment
Tended to see works of literature as constructs that fused and reconciled complex paradoxical elements within an organic pattern. New Criticism
The first professional writers and critics emerged The Augustan Period
Sidrak and Bokkus Middle English/Medieval Ages
Edmund Burke Neoclassicism
William Shakespeare The Renaissance
Thomas Pynchon Postmodernism
The period of English history between the passage of the first Reform Bill (1832) and the death of Queen Victoria (reigned 1837–1901). Though remembered for strict social, political, and sexual conservatism and frequent clashes between religion and scie Victorian era
Lytton Strachey Bloomsbury Group
Stephen Crane Naturalism
A late-19th-century movement that believed in art as an end in itself. Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater rejected the view that art had to posses a higher moral or political value and believed instead in “art for art’s sake.” Aestheticism
1540-1640 The Renaissance
George Eliot Realism
A group of American writers in the 1950s and 1960s who sought release and illumination though a bohemian counterculture of sex, drugs, and Zen Buddhism. Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac (On The Road) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl) gained fame by giving readin Beat Generation
Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time High modernism
Writers of this movement translated and imitated respected ancient and modern authors. The Augustan Period
The Divine Comedy Medieval
E. M. Forster Bloomsbury Group
William Shakespeare Elizabethan era
New Criticism The Modern Period
Literature began to be studied in grade school and became a major course of study in college The Victorian Period
William Caxton invented the printing press Renaissance
John Dryden Neoclassicism
Walter Pater Aestheticism
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Middle English/Late Medieval
Jane Austen Romanticism
Geoffrey Chaucer Middle Ages/Late Medieval Period
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.” Gothic fiction
Virginia Woolf Bloomsbury Group
Courtiers wrote for noblemen Middle English/Late Medieval
Brontë sisters Victorian era
A literary and artistic movement that provided a radical breaks with traditional modes of Western art, thought, religion, social conventions, and morality. Major themes of this period include the attack on notions of hierarchy; experimentation in new form Modernism
Literary criticism became an academic subject The Modern Period
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. Neoclassicism
Vladimir Nabokov Postmodernism
Francis Bacon Elizabethan era
Tristan Tzara Dadaism
Appearance of a literate middle class The Augustan Period
Edgar Allan Poe Gothic fiction
12th-15th Centuries Middle English/Late Medieval
William Wordsworth Romanticism
Professional playwrites The Renaissance
Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto Gothic fiction
Theodore Dreiser Naturalism
Clive Bell Bloomsbury Group
William Langland Middle Ages/Late Medieval Period
A movement, primarily in the theater, that responded to the seeming illogicality and purposelessness of human life in works marked by a lack of clear narrative, understandable psychological motives, or emotional catharsis. literature of the Absurd
Oscar Wilde Aestheticism
Bardic poetry written about warriors, bravery in battle, and heroics Old English/Early Medieval Period
Literature by and about people from former European colonies, primarily in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. This literature aims both to expand the traditional canon of Western literature and to challenge Eurocentric assumptions about liter Postcolonial
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Romanticism
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 (1957) is one of the seminal works of this movement. Angry Young Men
1920-1960 New Criticism
Dante Gabriel & Christina Rossetti Pre-Raphaelites
Portrayed any unchecked social mobility that might threaten state stability as the result of personal evil The Renaissance
John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger Angry Young Men
Percy Bysshe Shelley Romanticism
1670-1790 The Augustan Period
William Blake Romanticism
A literary movement that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. Naturalism
Charles Darwin Victorian era
Epic poetry Old English/Early Medieval Period
John Keats Romanticism
Kurt Vonnegut Postmodernism
Ben Jonson Elizabethan era
Edmund Spenser Elizabethan era
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 pas Postmodernism
Celebrated the powers of nature and the creative spirit of individualism The Romantic Period
Beowulf Old English/Early Medieval Period
Revelations of Divine Love Medieval
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot literature of the Absurd
Summar Theologica Medieval
Scivias Medieval
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway High modernism
John Maynard Keynes Bloomsbury Group
The transitional period between Anglo-Saxon and modern English. The cultural upheaval that followed the Norman Conquest of England, in 1066, saw a flowering of secular literature, including ballads, chivalric romances, allegorical poems, and a variety of Middle English
Oral tradition Old English/Early Medieval Period
Pagan Germanic tribes Old English/Early Medieval Period
Writing tended to promote chivalric ideals to promote a social hierarchy based on bloodlines Middle English/Late Medieval
Émile Zola Naturalism
T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land High modernism
Miracle plays Middle English/Medieval Ages
Appearance of the novel The Augustan Period
A flourishing period in English literature, particularly drama, that coincided with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I Elizabethan era
Roger Fry Bloomsbury Group
vernacular literature Renaissance
Came about when the well-educated elite feared that all of the new writing was going to crowd out the traditional attitudes, placing low importance on classic texts of ancient Greece and Rome The Augustan Period
1790-1840 The Romantic Period
Lord Byron Romanticism
Consolation of Philosophy Medieval
1840-1900 The Victorian Period
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, they produced nihilistic and antilogical prose, poetry, and art, and rejected the traditions, rules, and ideals of prewar E Dadaism
The literary arm of an artistic movement that drew inspiration from Italian artists. Combined sensuousness and religiosity through archaic poetic forms and medieval settings. Pre-Raphaelites