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Literature vocabulary · Literary Movements

Literary movement

Meaning in literature, with examples

nounCore term

In literature, literary movement means: A group of writers in a particular period who share similar ideas, styles and aims, such as Romanticism, Realism or Modernism.

In Turkish: edebi akım, yazınsal akım, edebiyat akımı

How it is used

Used in survey courses and literary history. Writers belong to, lead, join or react against a movement; critics trace how one movement grows out of or rejects another. Many movement names end in -ism and are capitalized in English.

Example sentences

  1. Which literary movement do you think this poem belongs to, and why?

  2. The Garip poets started a literary movement that rejected ornate language.

Common collocations

  • literary movement
  • belong to a movement
  • react against a movement
  • the leading figure of the movement
  • RomanticismA movement in literature and art from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century that valued emotion, imagination, nature and the individual over reason and rules.
  • RealismA nineteenth-century literary movement that aimed to show ordinary life and ordinary people accurately, without idealizing them, often with attention to social detail.
  • ModernismAn early twentieth-century movement that broke with traditional forms and experimented with new ways of writing, such as fragmentation, multiple viewpoints and stream of consciousness.
  • PostmodernismA movement in literature after the Second World War that plays with form and questions truth, often through irony, parody, mixing genres and fiction that comments on itself.
  • genreA category of literature defined by shared features of form, style or subject, such as poetry, drama and the novel, or crime, fantasy and romance.

More terms: Literary Movements

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