Disputed Statements

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 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

The Novella, Forms

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Description

Currently States The novella is a work of prose fiction longer than a short story and shorter than a novel, conventionally reckoned at roughly seventeen thousand to forty thousand words, built around a single incident, character or turning point rather than the multiple subplots a novel's length affords. The Cambridge History of the English Short Story situates the novella explicitly between the novel and the story, its own hybrid territory rather than a mere length category.

Since Judith Leibowitz's 1970 dissertation, published in 1974 as Narrative Purpose in the Novella, some scholars argue the novella is not simply a length category but a generically distinct form of its own; see the recorded dissent on this fact.

Source The Cambridge History of the English Short Story tier 2

The Odyssey, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States -700

Dated by scholarly convention to the eighth or seventh century BCE; as an oral-tradition poem fixed in writing only later, no single composition date is settled.

Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature tier 1

The Panchatantra, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States -300

Dating is uncertain; the surviving Sanskrit text is traditionally attributed to Vishnu Sharma, and estimates for its compilation range from around the third century BCE to the third century CE, drawing on an older oral fable tradition.

Source Panchatantra (Wikipedia) tier 2

The Panchatantra, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, To (Year)

Currently States 300

Dating is uncertain; estimates for the text's compilation range from around the third century BCE to the third century CE, and the version that reached Persia by the sixth century CE already shows revision from any single original.

Source Panchatantra (Wikipedia) tier 2

The Tale of Genji, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States 1006

Most reference sources place composition in the first decade of the eleventh century, commonly cited as substantially complete by around 1008 based on a contemporary diary reference, but the work's composition across many chapters over an extended period, and uncertainty about its precise chronology, mean no single start year is agreed.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1

Theatre of the Absurd, Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Period, From (Year)

Currently States 1950

Martin Esslin's own 1961 study, which named the movement, treats Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (1950) as an early landmark and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953) as its most influential work; because Esslin grouped independently written plays under a single retrospective label rather than describing a self-declared movement, no single founding date is universally accepted.

Source Theatre of the Absurd (Wikipedia) tier 2

They Flee from Me, Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Composed, From (Year)

Currently States 1557

1557 is the year of first (posthumous) print publication in Tottel's Miscellany; the poem is generally believed to have been composed earlier, during Wyatt's lifetime (he died in 1542), but no specific composition year is documented.

Source They Flee from Me (Wikipedia) tier 2

William Shakespeare, Authors

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Birth Year

Currently States 1564

His baptism is recorded on 26 April 1564; birth is traditionally placed three days earlier on 23 April by convention, aligning it with his death date and England's patron saint's day, rather than from a direct birth record, which does not survive.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 1