Disputed Statements

Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States 1315

Traditionally attributed to Luo Guanzhong, who lived sometime between 1315 and 1400, late Yuan to early Ming; the earliest written combination of the Three Kingdoms stories, the pinghua Sanguozhi Pinghua, was published between 1321 and 1323, and the novel itself was first printed in 1522.

Source Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Wikipedia) tier 2

Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, To (Year)

Currently States 1400

1400 marks the later bound of Luo Guanzhong's traditional lifespan (1315-1400); the novel was first printed in 1522 as Sanguozhi Tongsu Yanyi.

Source Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Wikipedia) tier 2

Romanticism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1789

Literary historians differ on a starting date. Some fix it to a political event, the French Revolution of 1789, on the reasoning that Romanticism is inseparable from its political moment; English-language literary history more often points to the 1798 joint publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads as the movement's effective English start. Both dates are in real scholarly use, not interchangeable, and neither commands universal agreement.

Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature tier 1

Romanticism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 1837

Commonly closed at the death of Sir Walter Scott (1832) or the accession of Queen Victoria (1837) in English literary history, but continental Romanticism is generally read as continuing later, and no single end date is agreed across the movement's several national literatures.

Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature tier 1

Science Fiction, Genres

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Description

Currently States Science fiction explores the imagined consequences of scientific and technological change through settings, inventions or phenomena that extrapolate from real or plausible science. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), whose protagonist is a practicing man of science working with the era's advanced study of galvanic electricity, is widely credited as the genre's first novel, predating Jules Verne's Extraordinary Voyages and H. G. Wells's scientific romances by decades. The genre's own name arrived later: the publisher and editor Hugo Gernsback coined scientifiction in 1923 and settled on science fiction by 1929, after founding Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted to the genre, in 1926.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is widely credited as the genre's first novel, but some scholars date science fiction proper only from Jules Verne and H. G. Wells's later, more technologically explicit work, reading Frankenstein instead as Gothic or proto-science-fiction.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

Sijo, Forms

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Korea

The form's more specific origin is genuinely unsettled among scholars: one influential account traces its shape to fifteenth-century mandaeyeop court music scores, though sijo is attested no later than the middle of the Goryeo period (918 to 1392).

Source Poetry Foundation tier 2

Social Realism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1930

Vaia dates the movement's prominence to the 1930s, but other reference accounts trace social realism's literary origins to the late nineteenth century, so no single start year is agreed.

Source Social Realism: Literary Movement, Theory, Definition and Examples (Vaia)

Sophocles, Authors

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States 497 BCE

Wikipedia's lead gives Sophocles's birth as circa 497 or 496 BC.

Source Sophocles (Wikipedia) tier 2

Sturm und Drang, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1767

The cited source places the start in the late 1760s without naming a single year; 1767 is given here as a commonly used approximate start within that range.

Source Sturm und Drang (Wikipedia) tier 2

Sturm und Drang, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 1785

The cited source places the end in the early 1780s without naming a single year; 1785 is given here as a commonly used approximate close within that range.

Source Sturm und Drang (Wikipedia) tier 2

Symbolism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1886

1886 marks Moreas's manifesto, the movement's formal founding under its own name, but Baudelaire's 1857 Les Fleurs du Mal is its widely acknowledged precursor text, predating the named movement by nearly three decades.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

Symbolism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 1900

Symbolism does not end sharply so much as feed directly into 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 Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

The Faithful Shepherdess, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States 1608

Most scholarship dates the first performance to around 1608, but the exact date is not firmly established.

Source The Faithful Shepherdess (Wikipedia) tier 2

The Harlem Renaissance, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1918

Some historians date the movement's beginning to the end of the First World War and the Great Migration's acceleration around 1918, others to the early 1920s when its defining publications began to appear; both are in real use and the movement's roots reach further back than either date.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

The Harlem Renaissance, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 1937

Most commonly closed with the mid-1930s onset of the Great Depression, which curtailed the patronage and publishing opportunities the movement had depended on, though some scholars extend it to the start of the Second World War; no single closing date is universally used.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

The Iliad, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States -750

Given as circa 750 to 700 BCE by most modern classical scholarship, reconstructed from linguistic layering within the text and comparison with the archaeological record rather than any external date; the poem's roots in oral tradition reach considerably further back than its written composition, and some scholars argue for a later, seventh-century fixation in writing. See the Homeric Question for the deeper authorship dispute this dating is bound up with.

Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature tier 1

The Limerick, Forms

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Origin unsettled between an Irish oral tradition and an English print tradition; see the open question on this entry.

One line of scholarship traces the form to the Gaelic verse-jousting of the eighteenth-century Fili na Maighe poets who met in a public house in Croom, County Limerick, Ireland; the earliest printed English collection, Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen (1822), predates the word 'limerick' itself, first recorded for the form only in 1896. Neither claim has documentary evidence connecting it to the other.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

The Mabinogion, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States 1050

Individual tale dates are scholarly disputed; 1050 and 1225 are the low and high bounds of the range Wikipedia reports as proposed, with consensus narrower at the late 11th to 12th centuries.

Source Wikipedia: Mabinogion

The Mabinogion, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, To (Year)

Currently States 1225

Individual tale dates are scholarly disputed; 1050 and 1225 are the low and high bounds of the range Wikipedia reports as proposed, with consensus narrower at the late 11th to 12th centuries.

Source Wikipedia: Mabinogion

The Novel, Genres

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Disputed across traditions and centuries.

Candidates proposed as the earliest novel come from multiple traditions, including Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century Japanese Tale of Genji and the eighteenth-century English novel of Defoe and Richardson; see The First Novel Question, already recorded on this atlas.

Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature tier 1