Over the years, people have seen many literary movements and periods come and go. A lot of these have vanished because people’s perspectives about life and their surroundings have greatly changed. However, most are still here to stay and are even evolving into a new form. In this post, you will learn about the most interesting literary movements and periods that have taken the world by storm.

1. Modernism. This literary period became the springboard of the modern works that you read today. Modernism centers on Emmanuel Kant’s belief of portraying the essence of reality. Authors like George Orwell, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Franz Kafka all showed that reality is a messy and difficult thing to portray using art. Modernism gave birth to different writing techniques because authors tried to find the best way to represent reality using words.

2. Magical realism. Remember the fantastic stories that your grandmother used to tell you? Those tales have a touch of magical realism in them. This is a literary period wherein stories that have a deadpan sense of realism are peppered with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as objects from myths and fairy tales.

Magical realism became quite popular when Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Isabel Allende used it in their works. Although it has been considered controversial because the genre is a bit limiting, it is still a very popular trend. From Latin America, writers from other countries, like Haruki Murakami and John Fowles, have also created works that are imbued with magical realism.

3. Contemporary Period. What would happen if God is dead? This idea was first introduced in the contemporary period. In this era, people began to question the meaning of life, and arrived at the answer that if God does not exist, everything is meaningless. There is no objective truth – and we can only rely on our perspectives to make sense of what is real and what is not.

Contemporary writers like T.S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald dealt with the issues of how people could move on with their lives and survive with these new ideas.

4. Existentialism. This movement attempts to define the meaning of our existence amidst this very chaotic world. In a life filled with inherent meaninglessness, authors often tend to answer the question: "Why should I go on living?"

Oftentimes, characters in existentialist stories are placed in hopeless circumstances, forcing them to think about their existence. Their main objective is to find the meaning of their lives. Popular writers of this period are Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Learning a thing or two about literary movements and periods can provide certain benefits to a writer. If you know how literature evolves, you will be able to track the next movement that will become popular, thus giving you an idea of what genre to write next. Secondly, it will be easier for you to locate trends that have the potential to become the next best-seller. Who knows, your writing skill might propel the world of literature into the next period.