Postwar and Existentialist Movements

Movements arising after the second World War around questions of meaning, absurdity and personal confession: existentialism's philosophy of individual freedom and responsibility in a meaningless universe, the theatre of the absurd's dramatization of that same meaninglessness, the Beat Generation's rejection of postwar conformity, and confessional poetry's turn to explicit autobiographical material. Belongs here: a movement whose active period runs from roughly the late 1940s to the 1960s and whose concern is personal or philosophical crisis. Does not belong here: postmodernism, a broader and later movement tracked under modernism and its currents above.