Disputed Statements

Lost Generation, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 1930

The Paris expatriate community dispersed through the Depression years with no single agreed closing date; some accounts extend the generation to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.

Source Lost Generation (Wikipedia) tier 2

Magical Realism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1955

The term itself originates earlier and outside literature: the German art critic Franz Roh coined 'magischer Realismus' in 1925 to describe a style of post-Expressionist painting. Its literary sense is often dated to Angel Flores' 1955 essay 'Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction,' though the mode's most influential works, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), came later still, so no single date marks the movement's true beginning.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

Maqamat Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamadhani, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States 990

Sources place composition variously in the 9th or 10th century; al-Hamadhani lived 967-1007, so a precise composition year is not firmly attested.

Source Maqamat Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamadhani (Wikipedia) tier 2

Metaphysical Poetry, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1600

Conventionally dated from John Donne's earliest verse, but the label was coined retrospectively by Samuel Johnson in 1779-81 and the canon it names is contested.

Source Metaphysical Poets (Wikipedia) tier 2

Metaphysical Poetry, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 1690

No fixed closing date commands agreement; some scholars argue the poets are better read as Baroque poets alongside their European contemporaries rather than isolated as a uniquely English school.

Source Metaphysical Poets (Wikipedia) tier 2

Modernism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1890

No single event marks Modernism's beginning; literary historians variously point to the 1890s aestheticist and symbolist ferment, or to specific landmark works published between 1910 and the early 1920s (Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses, both 1922, are often treated as high-water marks rather than starting points). The movement is better described as an emergence than an event.

Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature tier 1

Modernism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 1945

Commonly closed around the Second World War, after which Postmodernism is generally reckoned to begin, but the transition is gradual and contested rather than a fixed date, and some scholars extend Modernism's active period well past 1945 for individual writers.

Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature tier 1

Murasaki Shikibu, Authors

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States 973

Given as circa 973 by most modern reference sources, reconstructed from her own diary and court records rather than a direct record of her birth; some scholars place it as much as a decade later.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

Naturalism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1871

1871 marks Zola's first Rougon-Macquart novel, but the theoretical grounding, drawn from Claude Bernard's 1865 Introduction a l'etude de la medecine experimentale, predates it, and national literatures adopted Naturalism at different points, American Naturalism only emerging in the 1890s.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

Naturalism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 1902

1902 marks Zola's death, but American Naturalism continued into the following decades in Dreiser's work, and no single closing date is agreed across the movement's several national literatures.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

Negritude, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 1960

The literary movement is usually placed in the 1930s and 1940s, while a related visual-arts wave (the Dakar School) continued into the 1970s; Nigerian and later critics judged the movement's aesthetic outdated and insufficiently militant by the 1960s.

Source Negritude (Wikipedia) tier 2

New York School (Poetry), Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1958

EBSCO Research Starters gives only the approximate range 'late 1950's' rather than an exact year, and other sources place the school's start around 1960.

Source New York School (Poetry) (EBSCO Research Starters)

Oedipus Rex, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States 429 BCE

Wikipedia's lead states the play is thought to have first been performed circa 429 BC, but calls this "highly uncertain".

Source Oedipus Rex (Wikipedia) tier 2

One Thousand and One Nights, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States 800

Core material drew on an earlier Persian collection known as Hezar Afsan (A Thousand Tales); the earliest surviving Arabic textual fragments date to around the ninth century.

Source One Thousand and One Nights (Wikipedia) tier 2

One Thousand and One Nights, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, To (Year)

Currently States 1500

The collection kept absorbing new material through the Mamluk period; some canonical tales such as Aladdin and Ali Baba entered only through Antoine Galland's early eighteenth century French translation and are absent from the oldest Arabic manuscripts, so no single completion date is agreed.

Source One Thousand and One Nights (Wikipedia) tier 2

Postcolonial Literature, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Common Name

Currently States Post-colonial Literature

Scholars disagree over the hyphen: post-colonial reads as a period strictly after colonialism ends, while postcolonial signals colonialism's persisting impact across time and geography; usage varies by author and is not settled.

Source Postcolonial Literature (Wikipedia) tier 2

Postmodernism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1945

Some critics trace Postmodernism to the rupture of the Second World War around 1945, others to the 1960s, when the term gained sustained critical currency in Ihab Hassan's and later Fredric Jameson's theorization; no single starting event is agreed.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

Postmodernism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 2000

EBSCO Research Starters states postmodernism lacks a clear end, with some scholars holding it continued through the early twenty-first century and others holding it ended about the turn of the millennium, matching the same kind of disagreement already recorded for the period start year.

Source Postmodernism, Literary period (EBSCO Research Starters)

Realism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1830

French literary history commonly dates the movement's emergence to Stendhal and Balzac beginning around 1830, but Realism arrived in different national literatures at markedly different times, English and Russian realism generally reckoned somewhat later, so no single start year holds across the whole movement.

Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature tier 1

Realism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 1900

Realism does not end sharply so much as give way gradually to Naturalism and then Modernism around the turn of the twentieth century, and specific national literatures place that transition at different points, so any single boundary year is a simplification rather than a scholarly consensus.

Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature tier 1