Disputed Statements

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

Murasaki Shikibu, Authors

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Year

Currently States 1014

Given as circa 1014 or 1025 depending on the source; the later court records that would fix it precisely do not survive.

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wave (the Dakar School) continued into the 1970s; Nigerian and later critics judged the movement's aesthetic outdated and insufficiently militant by the 1960s.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

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

Ovid, Authors

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Year

Currently States 17

Wikipedia's lead states Ovid died in AD 17 or 18; ancient sources do not fix the exact year.

Source Ovid (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

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

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

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

Sophocles, Authors

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Year

Currently States 406 BCE

Wikipedia's lead gives his death as the winter of 406 or 405 BC.

Source Sophocles (Wikipedia) tier 2