Literary Movements
Discover the main literary movements
1920s–1930s
Harlem Renaissance
USA
African-American cultural and literary blossoming centered in Harlem, New York; Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston are central figures.
1920s–1930s
Lost Generation
USA / Europe
Generation of American writers marked by World War I and European exile; Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos.
1919–1930
New Culture Movement
China
Chinese cultural modernization movement associated with the May Fourth Movement; promoted vernacular (baihua) literature over classical.
1918–1925
Ultraism
Spain / Argentina
Hispanic literary avant-garde influenced by Futurism and Dadaism; celebrates pure metaphor and formal renewal; influenced the young Borges.
1916–1930
Creationism
Chile / France
Hispanic poetic movement founded by Vicente Huidobro that proposes the poem as an autonomous creation and not an imitation of reality.
1916–1924
Dadaism
Switzerland / Europe
Anti-art movement born in Zurich that rejects conventional logic and aesthetics; uses absurdity, chance, and provocation as artistic strategies.
1915–1945
Portuguese and Brazilian Modernism
Portugal / Brazil
Radical literary renewal in Portugal (Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Almada) and Brazil (Modern Art Week of 1922, Oswald and Mário de Andrade).
1915-1927
Orphism (Portuguese)
Portugal
Literary movement of very short duration centered on the magazine Orpheu (1915); brought together Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Almada Negreiros; founding moment of Portuguese modernism and sensationism, intersectionism and paulism.
1913–1930
Literary Cubism
France
Application of pictorial cubism to literature; Apollinaire and his calligrams are the best-known expression of this formal experimentation.
1912–1930
Russian Futurism
Russia
Russian poetic avant-garde that breaks with tradition and experiments with language; Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov and the cubo-futurists are its central figures.
1912–1922
Georgian poets
England
Group of British poets gathered in the Georgian Poetry anthologies; they cultivated a rural, accessible, and conservative lyricism in transition to modernism; Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas are central figures.
1912–1917
Imagism
United Kingdom / USA
Anglophone poetic school valuing precise imagery, direct language, and verse experimentation; Ezra Pound and H.D. are central figures.
1910–1925
Acmeism
Russia
Russian poetic school that reacts against symbolism in favor of clarity, concreteness, and precision; Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam are its greatest names.
1909–1944
Futurism
Italy
Avant-garde movement that celebrates speed, the machine, war, and technological modernity; founded by Marinetti with the 1909 Futurist Manifesto.
1908–1920
Unanimism
France
French literary movement that conceives the human group as a collective soul; Jules Romains is its main theorist and practitioner.
1906–1930
Novecentism
Catalonia / Portugal
Classicist reaction to Symbolist modernism; in Spain/Catalonia it values serenity and balance, in Portugal it is associated with Pessoa and the Renascença Portuguesa.
1905–1940
Bloomsbury Group
England
London intellectual and literary circle that included Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey; associated with Anglophone modernism and cultural liberalism.
1905–1930
Expressionism
Germany / Europe
Movement that distorts reality to express inner states and intense emotions; Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn in German poetry.
1902–1922
Brazilian Pre-Modernism
Brazil
Period of Brazilian literary transition between Naturalism/Parnassianism and the Modernism of 1922; Euclides da Cunha and Lima Barreto are references.
1900–1930
Mahjar literature
North America / South America
Arabic diaspora literature produced by Syrian and Lebanese emigrants; Khalil Gibran is its best-known name in the Western world.
18th century
Arcadianism
Europe / Portugal / Brazil
Neoclassical current of worship of simplicity and pastoral nature; in Portugal and Brazil linked to the anti-Baroque literary reform of the Arcadian academies.
18th century
Augustan Age
England
English poetry of the 18th century with a classical Latin inspiration; Pope, Dryden and Swift cultivated satire, the heroic-comic and the formal ode.
18th century
Encyclopedism
France
French intellectual movement associated with Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie; it influenced the prose of ideas and literary criticism of the Enlightenment.
18th century
Literary Rococo
France / Europe
Literary expression of the Rococo style, characterized by lightness, grace, gallantry, and frivolous love themes; parallel to Rococo in the decorative arts.
18th century
Neoclassicism
Europe
Return to Greco-Roman models in reaction to the Baroque; valorization of reason, order, balance and formal clarity in literature and the arts.
1898–1915
Generation of '98
Spain
Generation of Spanish writers marked by the national crisis after the defeat of 1898; Unamuno, Machado, and Azorín reflect on Spanish identity.
1898–1915
Spanish Modernismo
Spain
Spanish strand of Hispanic modernism, contemporary to the Generation of '98; Juan Ramón Jiménez is its most representative figure.
1890s–1910
Japan Romantic School
Japan
Japanese literary school of European influence that valued sentiment, aesthetic beauty, and individualism in reaction to naturalism.
1890–1910
Viennese Modernism
Austria
Late 19th-century Viennese cultural flourishing with Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, and Karl Kraus; atmosphere of crisis and aesthetic renewal.
1890–1910
Young Vienna
Austria
Viennese literary circle associated with Wiener Moderne; gathered writers such as Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler around a symbolist and decadentist aesthetic.
1888–1911
Catalan Modernisme
Catalonia
Movement of Catalan cultural renewal contemporary to European symbolism; Joan Maragall is its main poet.
1880–1920
Majorcan School
Balearic Islands / Spain
Catalan poetic current from Mallorca with a classicist and symbolist tendency; Costa i Llobera and Joan Alcover are its main representatives.
1880–1915
Spanish American Modernismo
Latin America
First major autonomous literary movement in Latin America; Rubén Darío is its central figure; radical renewal of the Spanish poetic language.
1880–1910
Symbolism
France / Europe
Poetic movement that rejects realism and naturalism in favor of suggestion, symbol, musicality, and mystery; Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé.
1880–1900
Decadentism
France / Europe
Fin de siècle literary movement marked by pessimism, aestheticism, artifice, and fascination with decadence and the morbid; related to Symbolism.
1880–1900
Fin de siècle
Europe
European cultural climate of the late 19th century marked by pessimism, crisis of values, and the search for new aesthetic forms.
1870–1900
Aestheticism
England
English art for art's sake movement, which places beauty above any moral or social function; Oscar Wilde is its most representative figure.
1870–1900
Verism
Italy
Italian version of literary Realism/Naturalism; Giovanni Verga is the main representative, focusing on the lives of Sicilian peasants.
1870–1890
Generation of 1870
Portugal
Generation of Portuguese intellectuals and writers associated with the 1871 Casino Conferences; Antero de Quental, Eça de Queirós, Ramalho Ortigão, and Oliveira Martins.
1866–1900
Parnassianism
France / Brazil / Portugal
Poetic school that values formal perfection, objectivity, exoticism, and art for art's sake; Leconte de Lisle in France, Olavo Bilac and Alberto de Oliveira in Brazil.