Disputed Statements

Aesop's Fables, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States -300

The fables were an oral tradition not gathered into a written collection until roughly three centuries after Aesop's traditional 620-564 BCE lifetime; the earliest documented collection was compiled by Demetrius of Phalerum in the 4th century BCE. No single composition year is attested.

Source Aesop's Fables (Wikipedia) tier 2

Angry Young Men, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1954

EBSCO Research Starters gives only the approximate range mid-1950's to early 1960's rather than exact years for the movement.

Source Angry Young Men Express Working-Class Views (EBSCO Research Starters)

Angry Young Men, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 1962

EBSCO Research Starters gives only the approximate range mid-1950's to early 1960's rather than exact years for the movement.

Source Angry Young Men Express Working-Class Views (EBSCO Research Starters)

Beowulf, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States 700

The date of composition is disputed. E. Talbot Donaldson dates it to the first half of the eighth century; other scholars argue for dates as late as around the year 1000. The only certain date is for the sole surviving manuscript, produced between 975 and 1025.

Source Beowulf (Wikipedia) tier 2

Beowulf, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, To (Year)

Currently States 1000

Scholarly estimates run to around the year 1000; the poem's sole manuscript, the only certain date connected to the work, was produced between 975 and 1025.

Source Beowulf (Wikipedia) tier 2

Chu Ci, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States -300

The anthology includes works traditionally attributed to Qu Yuan and Song Yu of the Warring States period alongside a large number of poems composed centuries later in the Han dynasty; -300 anchors to the Warring States floruit of Qu Yuan and Song Yu, the earliest material in the collection.

Source Chu Ci (Wikipedia) tier 2

Chu Ci, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, To (Year)

Currently States 150

The traditional 17-section anthology was compiled into its current form by Wang Yi, a 2nd-century AD librarian under Emperor Shun of Han; 150 anchors within that century.

Source Chu Ci (Wikipedia) tier 2

Chunhyangjeon, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States 1694

Composition date is unknown; the present form is dated only to a range of 1694 to 1834.

Source Chunhyangjeon, Wikipedia

Chunhyangjeon, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, To (Year)

Currently States 1834

Composition date is unknown; the present form is dated only to a range of 1694 to 1834.

Source Chunhyangjeon, Wikipedia

Confessional Poetry, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 1975

The core group, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and W.D. Snodgrass, published its defining work between 1959 and the mid-1970s; because the confessional mode's influence continues in later poetry with no clear closing event, literary historians differ on whether, or where, to place an end date.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

Epic of Gilgamesh, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States -2100

Composition spans over a millennium. The earliest known Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh may date to the Third Dynasty of Ur, around 2100 BCE; the fullest surviving text, the Standard Babylonian version compiled by the scribe Sin-leqi-unninni, is dated by scholars to between the 13th and 10th centuries BCE.

Source Epic of Gilgamesh (Wikipedia) tier 2

Epic of Gilgamesh, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, To (Year)

Currently States -1000

The Standard Babylonian version compiled by the scribe Sin-leqi-unninni, the fullest surviving text, is dated by scholars to somewhere between the 13th and 10th centuries BCE; -1000 marks the later end of that scholarly range.

Source Epic of Gilgamesh (Wikipedia) tier 2

Existentialism, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, To (Year)

Currently States 1960

Scholars do not agree on a firm closing date. Camus died in 1960 and Sartre continued writing into the 1980s, though existentialism's dominance in French letters is usually described as fading during the 1960s as structuralism rose.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

Fantasy, Genres

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Modern literary origin usually dated to Victorian Britain.

Supernatural material runs throughout earlier literary history worldwide, but the modern literary GENRE, as opposed to myth, folktale or romance, is usually dated from George MacDonald's Phantastes (1858), widely considered the first fantasy novel written for an adult readership; where exactly that boundary should be drawn is itself debated in genre scholarship.

Source Fantasy (Wikipedia) tier 2

Free Verse, Forms

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Description

Currently States Poetry that abandons a fixed meter and regular rhyme scheme, relying instead on rhythms of ordinary speech, the visual arrangement of the line, and patterns of repetition and image to create its effects. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is the form's most influential English language starting point, and the form became the dominant mode of poetry written in English over the twentieth century. Where free verse ends and prose poetry begins is a genuinely unsettled question among scholars of poetic form, addressed in this entry's dissent record rather than settled here.

T. S. Eliot's 1917 essay Reflections on Vers Libre challenges the premise that free verse is simply formless; see the recorded dissent on this fact.

Source The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics tier 1

Hikayat Hang Tuah, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States 1688

Braginsky's dating to 1688 through the 1710s is one scholarly theory. Henri Chambert-Loir instead proposed an earlier layer followed by revision, so the exact composition date is disputed among scholars, and the 1710s upper bound is a decade estimate, not a specific year.

Source Wikipedia: Hikayat Hang Tuah

Historical Fiction, Genres

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Description

Currently States A genre setting invented characters and plots against real events, real historical figures or a documented past, using the fiction to dramatize what a chronicle can only report. Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), published anonymously and set during the 1745 Jacobite rising, is the genre's most influential founding text and lent its name, the Waverley Novels, to the string of historical novels Scott wrote across Scottish and English history over the following two decades; he did not publicly confirm his own authorship until 1827. Whether Waverley is truly the form's starting point is itself argued rather than settled; see the dissent on this entry.

The description itself, Scott and Waverley (1814), is well documented; what is genuinely debated among literary historians is whether Waverley is the genre's true starting point or whether an earlier work, notably Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves (1678), has the better claim. See the dissent on this entry.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

Holy Sonnets, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States 1609

Most of the sequence is dated to around 1609-1610, but Sonnet XVII is dated after 1617 (following the death of Donne's wife), so the sequence as a whole was not composed in a single period.

Source Holy Sonnets (Wikipedia) tier 2

Holy Sonnets, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, To (Year)

Currently States 1617

Sonnet XVII is dated after 1617; the bulk of the sequence is earlier, around 1609-1610.

Source Holy Sonnets (Wikipedia) tier 2

Idylls, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States -275

Theocritus lived circa 300 BC to shortly after 260 BC; internal historical references date two of the individual poems (16 and 17) specifically to between 275 and 270 BC, but no comprehensive composition chronology survives for the collection as a whole, so the -275 value here anchors only to that datable pair, not the full collection.

Source Theocritus (Wikipedia) tier 2