The most important literary currents

Literary trends are called literary trends that share features of style, themes, aesthetics and ideologies typical of certain periods of history. They do not necessarily form a school, but are an expression of the spirit of an age.

Speaking of literary currents also includes literary movements and, many times, the terms are used interchangeably. Some authors reserve the expression literary movements to refer only to artists organized around a manifesto. Such movements can coexist with others, but they do not stop constituting a literary trend.

Classic literature

literary trends — Juan de la Corte: *The Trojan horse*, XVII century

Classical literature refers to the Greek and Roman literature of the so-called Classical Antiquity, that is, to the Greco-Roman literature that develops from the 10th century BC. C. until the 3rd century AD. C approximately. Greek literature was characterized by stories of mythological heroes and human exploits, and by the development of genres such as epic poetry, lyrical poetry, and theater (tragedy and comedy). Some of the most important authors and works of him were:

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Homer: The Iliad
Sappho: Ode to Aphrodite
Pindar: Olympic odes
Sophocles: King Oedipus
Aristophanes: The Frogs

Latin literature was open to the influence of Greek culture. However, Latin literature formed features of its own, and its spirit was charged with greater pragmatism. In addition to the genres already known, they also developed the fable, the satire and the epigram. Some examples of its most important authors and works are:

Virgil: The Aeneid
Ovid: Metamorphosis
Horacio Quinto Flaco: Odes

Medieval literature

The literature of the Middle Ages developed between the 10th and 14th centuries approximately. It was dominated by religious thought, the chivalric ideal, honor, and courtly love. It embraces a great diversity of expressions and tendencies. Prose, clergymen, troubadour poetry, short stories, novels were widely developed chivalric, the sentimental novel, the autos sacramentales and the prehumanist theater, among other genres. For example:

As Aristotle says - and it is a true thing -,
man works for two things: the first,
for having maintenance; and the other thing was
for being able to get together with a pleasant female.

Archpriest of Hita, Good love book

Among the most important works we can mention:

The song of Mío Cid , anonymous
Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of de Hita, Good love book
The Song of Roldán, anonymous
Song of the Nibelungs, anonymous
Geoffrey Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy
Francisco Petrarca: Song book
Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron

Renaissance humanism

In Renaissance literature, developed between the mid-fourteenth century and up to the mid-sixteenth century, dominated anthropocentric humanism, whose antecedents go back to the late Middle Ages, driving force behind humanism Christian. The humanism of the Renaissance fixed its attention on the human being, exalted free will and recovered the study of the Greco-Latin classics. This change of perspective transformed literature and gave space to the creation of new literary genres such as the essay. For example:

So, reader, know that I myself am the content of my book, which is no reason for you to spend your wandering on such a frivolous and trivial matter. Goodbye then.

Michael de Montaigne: "To the reader", essays

Among the best known authors of the Renaissance, we can mention the following:

Erasmus of Roterdam, In Praise of Insanity
Thomas More, Utopia
Michel de la Montaigne, essays
Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furious
François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
Luis de Camoens, The lusiads
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

To dig deeper, see: Renaissance

Spanish Golden Age

The Golden Age is the name given to the period of literary flourishing of Spain, which gained momentum in 1492 after the publication of the Castilian grammar, by Antonio de Nebrija, and declined in the middle of the seventeenth century. That is, it was born at the end of the Renaissance, and reached its full maturity in the first half of the Baroque. It was during the Golden Age that Miguel de Cervantes wrote The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote of La Mancha, which represents the last chivalric novel and the first modern novel.

His fantasy was filled with everything he read in books, both with enchantments and with quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, compliments, loves, storms and impossible absurdities; and it settled in such a way in his imagination that all that machine of those dreamed inventions that he read was true, that for him there was no other more true story in the world.

Miguel de Cervantes, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote of La Mancha

During the Baroque, the Golden Age gave rise to two currents in Spain: the conceptism and the culteranismo (or gongorismo, alluding to Luis de Góngora, its greatest exponent). The culteranismo gave greater importance to the forms, and used exaggerated figures of speech and literary references. Conceptism took special care in exposing concepts through literary ingenuity.

Among the most important authors and works of him we can mention:

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote of La Mancha
Francisco de Quevedo, History of the life of the Buscón
Tirso de Molina, The Trickster of Seville
Lope de Vega. Sourceovejuna
Luis de Góngora. Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, The life is dream

Baroque literature

Baroque literature developed from the second half of the 16th century to the first half of the 18th century, approximately, which includes most of the Spanish Golden Age. He cast off the confident gaze of humanism and gave way to a more disenchanted outlook on life. He sought discursive beauty through formal exuberance and attention to detail.

In chasing me, World, what are you interested in?
How do I offend you, when I just try
put beauties in my understanding
and not my understanding in the beauties?

Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz, In chasing me, World, what are you interested in?

In addition to the writers of the Spanish Golden Age such as Góngora, Lope de la Vega or Quevedo, other representative authors of the Baroque, are:

Jean Racine, Phaedra
John Milton, Paradise lost
Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz, Divine narcissus

You can also see: Baroque

Neoclassicism

The aesthetic expression of Enlightenment is known as Neoclassicism, and it developed in the 18th century as a reaction to Baroque aesthetics. He proposed a return to reason and the rejection of emotion and effect. Critical and narrative genres, and the elegance of speech, predominated. The preferred genre was the essay, but adventure, didactic and sentimental novels were also developed; fables, and theater, always with an edifying purpose. For this reason, neoclassical literature focused its interest on the conflict between duty and honor with the passions. Thus, poetry was not his most prominent genre.

Awake, my dear Bolingbroke; Leave all the little things to the low ambition and pride of the potentates. Well, everything we can get out of this life is reduced to seeing clearly around ourselves, and then dying. Let us at least freely walk through this scene of man — an amazing labyrinth! But it has its certain regularity... Hey, come with me, let's explore this vast field, and now it is flat, now it is hilly, let's see what there is in it.

Alexander Pope, Philosophical Poem Essay on Man

Among some of the most prominent authors and works in terms of literature, we can mention the following:

Daniel Defoe, Robinson crusoe
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Alexander Pope, Essay on man, philosophical poem
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilio or Of Education
Voltaire, Naive or The optimism
Jean de la Fontaine, Fables
Goldoni, The locandiera
Montesquieu, Law spirit

Romanticism

Romantic literature had its beginnings in the German movement Sturm und Drang, at the end of the 18th century, and lasted until the first decades of the 19th century. It allowed a revolutionary development of national literatures, incorporated popular issues and genres, enhanced the subjectivity, freed poetry from neoclassical canons and stimulated new narrative genres such as the Gothic novel and the historical. For example:

Wilhem, what would the world be without love for our hearts? A magic lantern without light. As soon as you put the lamp, images of all colors appear on your white wall. And even if they were nothing more than that, passing ghosts, they constitute our happiness if we contemplate them as little children and become ecstatic at these wonderful apparitions.

Goethe, The Misadventures of Young Werther

Some of the most important authors and works of him are:

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Young Werther's Misadventures
Novalis, The spiritual songs
Lord Byron, Don Juan
John Keats, Ode on a Greek Urn
Victor Hugo, The Miserables
Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
José de Espronceda, The Salamanca student
Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, Rhymes and legends
Jorge Isaac, Mary

Learn more about him Romanticism

Realism

Realism was a reaction against romanticism, which he considered too sugary. It began around the middle of the 19th century and lasted for a few decades. Social reality was the center of his interest, and he tried to represent it objectively and critically. As an example:

Was that miserable life going to be eternal? Was he never going to get out of her? Wasn't she worth as much as those who were happy?

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Among the most important authors and works of him, we highlight the following:

Stendhal, Red and black
Honoré de Balzac, Eugenia Grandet
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Charles Dickens, Oliver twist
Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer's adventures
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Leo Tolstoy, Ana Karenina
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, The cherry garden
Benito Pérez Galdós, Fortunata and Jacinta
Eça de Queirós, The crime of Father Amaro

Naturalism

Naturalism is a derivation of realism, and it took place around the second half of the 19th century. He was heavily influenced by determinism, experimental science, and materialism. It also dealt with social reality, but instead of critically positioning itself in front of it, it tries to show it without the intervention of personal judgment.

This dream of the physiologist and experimental physician is also the dream of the novelist who applies the experimental method to the natural and social study of man. Our goal is yours: we also want to be owners of the phenomena of the intellectual and personal elements so that we can direct them. We are, in a word, experimental moralists who demonstrate by experience how a passion behaves in a social environment.

Emile Zola, The experimental novel

Among the most prominent authors of it can be mentioned:

Emile Zolá, Naná
Guy de Maupassat, Tallow ball
Thomas Hardy, Dynasties

Costumbrismo

Costumbrismo was a trend of the nineteenth century that drank from nationalism. At the same time, it inherits from realism its claim to objectivity. It focused specifically on the uses and customs of countries or regions, not infrequently it was tinged with picturesqueness. The novel of manners was its maximum expression. For example:

Among all those rascals there was no sign of a shoe or a full shirt; all six were barefoot, and half of them were shirtless.

Jose Maria Pereda, Sotileza

José María de Pereda, Sotileza
Jiménez de Juan Valera, Nugget
Fernán Caballero, Seagull
Ricardo Palma, Peruvian traditions

Parnasianism

Parnassianism was one of the currents of the post-romantic period, which spanned the second half of the nineteenth century. He sought formal preciousness, avoiding the sentimental excess of romanticism, and exalted the idea of art for art's sake. For example:

Artist, sculpt, file or chisel;
let your fluctuating dream be sealed
in the block that opposes resistance

Théophile Gautier, The art

Its authors include:

Théophile Gautier, The dead in love
Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle, Ancient poems

Symbolism

Developed in the post-romantic period towards the last third of the 19th century, symbolism reacted against the postulates of realism and naturalism. He vindicated the imagination, the dreamlike, the spiritual and the sensual. For example:

One night, I sat Beauty on my knee. And I found it bitter. And I reviled her.

Arthur Rimbaud, A season in hell

Some important authors included in the symbolism were:

Charles Baudelaire, The flowers of Evil
Sthepane Mallarmé, Faun's siesta
Arthur Rimbaud, A season in hell
Paul Verlaine, Saturnian poems

Decadentism

Decadence was contemporary with symbolism and Parnassianism, and as such, it is inscribed in the post-romantic period. He approached issues from a skeptical perspective. Likewise, it was an expression of disinterest in morality and a taste for formal refinement.

He uttered a sick wish that he could stay young, and that the painting grow old; may her beauty remain unaltered, and may her face in the cloth bear the burden of her passions and sins; that the painted image faded with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he kept the flower and the almost conscious charm of his adolescence. Surely his wish had not been fulfilled. Those things are impossible. It was monstrous just thinking about that. And yet there was the painting in front of him, with a touch of cruelty in its mouth.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Some important authors included in post-romanticism were:

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Georges Rodenbach, Witches the dead

Modernism

Modernism was a Spanish-American literary movement that developed between 1885 and 1915. His aesthetics were characterized by the aspiration to cosmopolitanism, the musicality of language and expressive refinement. For example:

I am the one who only said yesterday
the blue verse and the profane song,
on whose night a nightingale had
which was a lark of light in the morning.

Rubén Darío, fragment of I am the one

Among the most important authors of modernism we can mention the following:

Ruben Dario, Blue
Leopoldo Lugones, The mountains of gold
Jose Asuncion Silva, The book of verses
Loved nerve, Mystical
Manuel Diaz Rodriguez, Broken idols

Avant-garde

The literary avant-gardes developed in the first half of the 20th century. It is a series of movements and currents that proposed a break with the conventions of language. Among those movements articulated around a manifesto we can mention: Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Creationism and Ultraism. For example:

Futurism: aims to express dynamism, violate the syntax and value objects as a subject. Its highest representative was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of Mafarka the Futurist.
Cubism: Some authors call poetic works that challenged the boundaries between poetry and painting cubist through typographical and syntactic experimentation. He usually refers to Guillaume Apollinaire, author of Calligrams.
Dadaism: he was characterized by his nihilistic gaze, immediacy as a procedure and arbitrariness. For example, Tristan Tzara, The first heavenly adventure of Mr. Antipirina
Expressionism: he focused his interest on subjectivity around uncomfortable themes and approaches such as sexuality, the grotesque and the sinister. For example, Frank Wedekind, The awakening of spring.
Creationism: He tried to create a new reality through the poetic word through the juxtaposition of images. Its greatest exponent was Vicente Huidobro, author of Altazor or the parachute ride.
Ultraism: influenced by creationism, he proposed to put aside ornamentation and seek new syntactic forms. One of his representatives was Guillermo de Torres Ballestero, author of Propellers
Surrealism: under the influence of psychoanalytic theories, he explored the unconscious through automatism. Its highest representative was André Breton, author of Nadja and the Surrealist manifesto.

In addition to these avant-garde movements, the first half of the 20th century also witnessed an important literary renewal at the hands of authors who are not easy to classify. In poetry, writers stood out who, influenced by modernism and open to avant-garde, achieved their own aesthetic. Among them, Gabriela Mistral and her work Desolation; Pablo Neruda and Twenty love poems and a desperate song and Fernando Pessoa, whose best known work is the Book of restlessness.

In the narrative, the authors experimented with resources such as polyphony, fragmentation, interior monologue, and open endings. For example, Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway); Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time); James Joyce (Ulises); Franz Kafka (Metamorphosis) and William Faulkner (While I agonize).

Learn more about Literary vanguards

Contemporary literature

More than a current, by contemporary literature we refer to the vast and diverse literary production that takes place from the middle of the 20th century to the present, and that covers a great variety of currents.

Within this diversity, contemporary literature opens up a concern for the contradictions of modernization, nationalisms, the tension between authoritarianism and democratization, totalitarianisms, science and technology, hyper-industrialization and the society of consumption.

Among some of its most representative authors we can mention:

Jack Kerouac, In the path (Beat generation)
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Truman Campote, Cold-blooded
Antonio Tabuchi, Holds Pereira
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Umberto Eco, The name of the rose
Jose Saramago, Essay on Blindness

Hispanomérica will also gain its own voice in this period, which reaches its peak with the so-called Latin American boom. Very important trends were developed such as magical realism and the marvelous real, fantastic literature and important feathers stood out in poetry and essays. Among the most important Latin American authors of the second half of the 20th century we can mention:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One hundred years of loneliness
Alejo Carpentier, The kingdom of this world
Julio Cortazar, Bestiary
Mario Vargas Llosa, The party of the goat
Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude

It may interest you

Magical realism
Avant-garde poems

Timeline of literary currents

The timeline of Western literary currents and movements could be drawn like this:

Old age

Classical literature (10th century BC. C. to III d. C.)

Middle Ages

Medieval literature (X-XIV)

Modern age

Renaissance humanism (XIV-XVI)
Spanish Golden Age (XVI-XVII)
Baroque (XVI-XVIII)
Neoclassicism (XVIII)

XIX century

Romanticism (late 18th - early 19th century)
Realism
Naturalism
Costumbrismo
Parnasianism
Symbolism
Decadentism

20th and 21st centuries

Modernism (late 19th-early 20th century)
Avant-garde
- Futurism
- Cubism
- Dadaism
- Expressionism
- Creationism
- Ultraism
- Surrealism
Contemporary literature (up to the present)