The Movements in Order, With Their Dates

The idea

Nine labels cover most of what the context band asks. Puritanism, roughly sixteen twenty to seventeen forty, writing to record providence and examine the soul. The Enlightenment, roughly seventeen forty to eighteen hundred, writing to argue and persuade. Romanticism and transcendentalism, eighteen twenty to eighteen sixty-five, valuing intuition, nature and the individual, with the dark romantics testing the same beliefs against evil. Realism, eighteen sixty-five to nineteen hundred, ordinary life rendered plainly, with regionalism its local branch. Naturalism, eighteen ninety to nineteen fifteen, heredity and environment as forces the character cannot beat. Modernism, nineteen ten to nineteen forty-five, fragmentation, allusion and the broken vocabulary. The Harlem Renaissance, the nineteen twenties, Black writing on its own terms. Confessional poetry, from nineteen fifty-nine. Postmodernism, from the nineteen sixties, self-conscious fiction about its own telling.