Pop culture has one requirement: popularity.
Popular culture refers to ideas and media that most people in a society enjoy or promote. The whole point of art is to be seen by people and provide them with a cathartic response, so the goal of all true art (and not "art for art's sake") is to become popular and seen by more people.
In attempts to be more popular, artists tend to create in the vein of either works that inspire the artist or that they know are popular. When several artists in the same place and time start to write in a similar style about similar themes using similar tropes (characters, plots, motifs, and symbols), they create a literary movement.
The nature of a literary movement depends upon which ideas are widely popular at a time. As with all popular culture, overexposure to the same type of idea can make an audience tired and wanting something new; when this happens, an old literary movement dies and a new literary movement emerges. Literary movements can splinter into smaller movements (often called "schools"), coalesce with a previous movement into something new, or even be revived as a subgenre.
In attempts to be more popular, artists tend to create in the vein of either works that inspire the artist or that they know are popular. When several artists in the same place and time start to write in a similar style about similar themes using similar tropes (characters, plots, motifs, and symbols), they create a literary movement.
The nature of a literary movement depends upon which ideas are widely popular at a time. As with all popular culture, overexposure to the same type of idea can make an audience tired and wanting something new; when this happens, an old literary movement dies and a new literary movement emerges. Literary movements can splinter into smaller movements (often called "schools"), coalesce with a previous movement into something new, or even be revived as a subgenre.
New literary movements are catalyzed from major events
and become reactions against the old movement.
Here, the word catalyzed means "brought about and accelerated." This isn't the same as the birth of a movement, which often starts with a handful of authors experimenting with creating something special. Every story outside of a mainstream movement could be its own seed of a future literary movement. However, not all of those seeds germinate—the books and philosophies that become the foundation of a new literary movement are brought together and catch the attention of the popular culture after a major cultural event. When life radically changes, the old art that reflected life can't speak to the current moment, so whatever ideas do reflect the new changed reality become the new literary movement. Sometimes, the catalyzing event that makes a movement mainstream comes decades after it was first born.
The following are the major literary movements in the Western literary canon. While each could be broken down into more specific schools and concepts, the movements below should give a brief overview of how literary historians group and classify literature based on its reception and inclusion in the popular culture of the time.
The following are the major literary movements in the Western literary canon. While each could be broken down into more specific schools and concepts, the movements below should give a brief overview of how literary historians group and classify literature based on its reception and inclusion in the popular culture of the time.
Artist Unknown, Dionysiac Frieze in the Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii (c. 60 BCE)
CLASSICAL (3000 BCE-600 CE)
CATALYST: invention of writing
Plato Aristotle Sophocles Euripedis Aristophanes Ovid Virgil |
The oldest literature appears in the Indus Valley, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and ancient China. While these texts originated independently in very different cultures, they are all marked by adhering to the Unities: a single time frame, a single place, and a single action (plot). Characters are also all archetypes, and most stories are tied to myth. In every story, gods interact with man and usually enforce the fates of characters. Popular writers include
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Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Effects of Good Government (1339)
MEDIEVAL (500-1300)
CATALYST: rise of Christianity
Rashi Geoffrey Chaucer Thomas Aquinas |
Medieval writing featured mainly religious stories written by (usually) anonymous authors. These works examine the goodness of man against the suffering of the world and begin to use the elements of style (as written languages, including English, started to have consistent grammar, allowing authors to develop syntactic wordplay and tone). This time is history is marked by feudal lifestyles and grand wars, so most plots and conflicts revolved around dying in glory or accepting one's place in life. Most authors in Medieval times wanted to appear humble, so they submitted work anonymously (and even if they did want people to know of their work, many names were simply lost over time). Theologians on the other hand, like Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard, and Maimonides, were often well known for the religious philosophical works they produced. Other important Medieval authors include Rashi and Geoffrey Chaucer.
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Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (c. 1480)
RENAISSANCE (1300-1660s)
CATALYST: the printing press
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The Renaissance saw an expansion of writing in native tongues with development of Guttenberg press: suddenly, texts had informal and independent styles. While most Renaissance writing involves the upper class (as the wealthy had the leisure to write), texts began to show the perspective of the common man. As the renaissance introduced the world to the idea of social mobility, conflicts in stories shifted from those involving the gods and fate to those involving self-doubt and societal pressures. During this period, genres were developed, and imagery became well used, as writers wanted a text to reveal inner truth and beauty. Popular Renaissance writers include Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Thomas Malory, and Niccolo Machiavelli. The Renaissance also saw the rise of submovements, where a specific country or region infused Renaissance writing with their own unique tropes:
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Vicente Albán, Noble Woman With Her Black Slave (c. 1783)
COLONIALISM (1492-1750s)
CATALYST: discovery of New World
A True Relation of Virginia—John Smith Of Plymouth Plantation—William Bradford The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America—Anne Bradstreet Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration--Mary Rowlandson The Wonders of the Invisible World— Cotton Mather Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God—Jonathan Edwards A Key into the Language of America— Roger Williams |
In 1492, Columbus' journeys to the New World inspired a rush to the Americans, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the South Pacific, all "unclaimed" lands that inspired exploration and independence. Almost all the native societies of these places did not have a system of writing, yet some of their mythology and stories were recorded and are all that exist of Pre-Colombian literature. Pre-Colombian literature is interesting to analyze, as it cannot be divorced from the fact that it was translated, recorded, and in some cases altered by the colonizers. After areas were colonized, the sons and daughters of the first colonizers began expressing themselves in a different manner than their parents. They felt separate from the Europe of their parents, having never lived there, yet were not true natives of these new lands. While this literature has heavy European influence and religious themes, it carries tropes of survival and exploration unknown in Europe. Much of the writing is epistolary and about journeys, pirates, and fights with natives.
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Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates (1787)
NEOCLASSICISM & THE ENLIGHTENMENT (1640s-1800)
CATALYST: the scientific revolution
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In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, philosophies and social ideas became more based in reason and factual evidence rather than gods and beliefs. The belief in humanism, a focus on human connections and secular affairs over religious matters, led authors to explore moral philosophies to replace religious belief as ethical authority. In their search, these leaders rediscovered the democratic and libertine philosophies of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Writers in France, Italy, England, and America began to write modern parables and adages about ideal governments and ways the moral man should act in society. At the forefront of Enlightenment works is a desire for popular rule and liberty; these writings became the catalyst for the American and French Revolutions and the spread of republicanism across Europe. Important American Enlightenment writers included Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson; important European Enlightenment writers include Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, and Montesquieu.
One specific submovement of the Enlightenment was NEOCLASSICISM (1760-1865). Neoclassicism began as a visual artistic reaction to the ornate, lavish patterns of the Baroque and Rococo movements. While modern artists had been trying to make designs more complex, reactionaries craved the simpler, "purer" designs of the ancient Classical period. This drive for simplicity caught on and bled into literature. Neoclassicists returned to The Unities and archetypal characters and plots. While they retained concepts like poetry with a conceit and allusions to industrial cities, they otherwise tried to make their writing seem of an older time. Unlike Enlightenment authors, these writer still used religious characters and allusions, as all Classical literature referred to the will of the gods. Neoclassical writers include John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope. |
Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton (1856)
ROMANTICISM (1780s-1890s)
CATALYST: American Revolution
Last of the Mohicans—James Fenimore Cooper Hope Leslie—Catherine Marie Sedgwick The Scarlet Letter, The Blythsdale Romance—Nathaniel Hawthorne Collected Poems—Emily Dickenson Leaves of Grass—Walt Whitman Walden—Henry David Thoreau Moby Dick, "Bartleby the Scrivener"— Herman Melville Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame--Victor Hugo "The Raven," "Annabelle Lee"—Edgar Allen Poe Frankenstein—Mary Shelley Dracula—Bram Stoker |
Enlightenment's discussions of perfect, utopian societies caused several writers to write fictional narratives centered on the joy one would feel in such a society. While some European authors engaged in this type of writing before 1800, the movement was primarily shaped by American authors. After the American Revolution, the newly formed country was filled with writers wanting to extol the virtues of American colonists and "write the new American mythology." These texts became bestsellers because, after decades of purely reasonable and objective writing, audiences craved writing that appealed to their emotions. This became ROMANTICISM.
Romanticism focused on the self-sufficient individual as opposed to the group mindset of the Enlightenment. Romanticism eclipsed all other literature in America after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803--the new lands and fresh wave of encounters with Native tribes led Americans to romanticize both the unknown frontier and their colonial past. Building on the work of James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Catherine Marie Sedgwick, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Romanticism became the first true American literary movement. Romanticism spread to Europe thanks to authors like Jane Austen and Alexandre Dumas. Not all Romanticism depicted an ideal and noble past. A popular variation of Romanticism was DARK ROMANTICISM, whose authors explored the outcasts and pariahs of American history (both their colonial past and antebellum present). Characters are typically beset by guilt over their personal sins—guilt that often drives characters to madness and depravity. There are often hints of the supernatural, the pursuit of arcane knowledge, forbidden love, and a fascination with death. Dark Romantic authors include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mary Shelley, and the Brontë sisters, but perhaps the most well-known Dark Romantic was Edgar Allan Poe. Or was he a Gothic author? Some works by Poe, like "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," are purely Dark Romantic, he was one of the pioneers of GOTHIC LITERATURE. Gothic stories don't just hint at the supernatural—they fully embrace it. Gothic novels are notable for their macabre scenes of death and their decaying settings: crumbling castles, winding catacombs, and dilapidated manors. Unlike Dark Romance, Gothic literature focuses on the corruption of the wealthy (specifically the tyrannical patriarch) and an inevitable march toward doom. Poe's Gothic stories include "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Raven." Other popular Gothic writers include Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Daphne du Maurier, Bram Stoker, and some Victor Hugo (like Poe, a good deal of his work is also Dark Romanticism). While Gothic literature lasted past the end of the Romantic movement into the 1930s, the most influential branch of Romanticism only lasted for 30 years: TRANSCENDENTALISM. Transcendental philosophy expresses that nature is higher than reason, and the individual can “transcend” to a higher truth by spending time in nature away from the modern world. Transcendentalists embraced exploring the wilderness, preached freedom from government or social interference, and took religion out of churches to focus on a personal relationship with the divine—all of which are still hallmarks of American cultural identity. Influential Transcendentalists include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. |
Jean-Francois Millet, The Gleaners (1857)
REALISM (1850s-1940s)
CATALYST: American Civil War
Last of the Mohicans—James Fenimore Cooper Hope Leslie—Catherine Marie Sedgwick The Scarlet Letter, The Blythsdale Romance—Nathaniel Hawthorne Collected Poems—Emily Dickenson Leaves of Grass—Walt Whitman Walden—Henry David Thoreau Moby Dick, "Bartleby the Scrivener"— Herman Melville Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame--Victor Hugo "The Raven," "Annabelle Lee"—Edgar Allen Poe Frankenstein—Mary Shelley Dracula—Bram Stoker |
The brutality of the American Civil War, coupled with the spread of industrialization across American and Europe, killed the optimism and sense of beauty that drove Romanticism. Instead, writing focused on realism: writing focusing on the actual and not the fanciful. This is not to say the realism rejected beauty; realists instead found beauty in the everyday and the common. Realists depicted hardworking (often poor) modern characters faced with challenges of survival. Almost all realist works were also tragedies, or at the very least comedies where not everyone had a happy ending. Realists also delved into the psychology of characters, examining different perspective and what motivated a character's actions and beliefs. Popular American realists included Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Horatio Alger.
Like Romanticism, realism was a global literary movement and had several submovements. VICTORIAN LITERATURE (1837-1901) was an English fusion of realism and romanticism during the reign of Queen Victoria. Victorian literature was marked by the widespread development of the novel and features working-class characters interacting at some level with aristocracy. Victorian writers include Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and Oscar Wilde. A similar movement called REGIONALISM (1850-1890) rose in the US. As a nation of various ecosystems, wide expanses of land, and multiple cultural heritages, America saw a rise to several unique communities over the 18th and 19th centuries. However, with the rise of industrialization, everything from dialects to economies were becoming standardized. Dozens of American writers responded by trying to capture the spirit and identity of these enclaves before they were homogenized and disappeared. Writers working to capturing the “unique America” included Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, and Kate Chopin. Industrialization allowed a majority of people to pursue social mobility through new jobs, and this was reflected in the hero of realism: the poor character who works hard to create a better place in his or her life despite the harsh reality. NATURALISM (1893-1914) took a slightly different turn from most realism. Inspired by Darwin's theories, Naturalism still examined how harsh reality can be, but held that heredity and social status (not hard work) determined a person's character, and people are hapless victims of natural law. This movement was prominent in America with authors Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, and in Europe with authors Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola. Another submovement created by industrialization was CLINICAL EXISTENTIALISM (1850-present). Philosophy had traditionally been community minded and centered on what is outside man, such as God or society. Yet industrialization saw the fracturing of societies and proliferation of multicultural societies without a single right answer. Philosophers founding what would become the social sciences started writing essays moving the single person is the center of philosophical meaning and focusing on the individual experience. Note that this is a nonfiction movement: existentialism became literary with the spread of modernism. Existentialists included Karl Marx, Northrop Frye, Horace Mann, and Friedrich Nietzsche. |
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks (1942)
MODERNISM (1900-1970s)
CATALYST: WWI, Einstein, & Freud
Last of the Mohicans—James Fenimore Cooper Hope Leslie—Catherine Marie Sedgwick The Scarlet Letter, The Blythsdale Romance—Nathaniel Hawthorne Collected Poems—Emily Dickenson Leaves of Grass—Walt Whitman Walden—Henry David Thoreau Moby Dick, "Bartleby the Scrivener"— Herman Melville Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame--Victor Hugo "The Raven," "Annabelle Lee"—Edgar Allen Poe Frankenstein—Mary Shelley Dracula—Bram Stoker |
The realist generation had grew up in close-knit communities with long-standing religious, social, and community traditions and then adapted to industrialization by moving to cities. Their children, the next generation, grew up without any of their parents' traditions and turned to realist literature for emotional anchors on how to act in the world, culminating in the idea that hard work brings reward. Then The Communist Manifesto was published and made them question social economics. And Sigmund Freud developed psychology and made them question their identity. Next, Einstein developed his theory of relativity and proved that there was no objectivity reality. Finally, World War I occurred and saw the rise of weapons that slaughtered hundreds of men in minutes. The next generation of authors was stunned: in a world without common cultural assurance in religious belief or rigid social roles, where life could be ended in an instant, what was the meaning of life?
This was modernism, an attempt to find meaning in an alienating world where all beliefs and societal foundations are relative. Modernism took ideas from the existentialists as well as the discovery of relativity (the idea that there is no absolute measure for anything). Relativity created the idea of social isolation, which was encapsulated by the ultimate Modernist image: the flaneur, where a camera captured a still person while the world moved around them. Modernism affected all art, from the isolated stark paintings of Edward Hopper to Diaghilev's Russian ballets. Many popular naturalist authors like Steinbeck and Robert Frost embraced the new movement, which believed truth came as the result of dealing with intense struggle and had the motto of "Make it new!" As Modernism was an attempt to find meaning in the world, authors created different submovements and experiments to seek different answers:
While most of modernist movement died out by the end of World War II, other modernist movements continued. For example, the Bloomsbury Group continued on into the late sixties. THE BEAT GENERATION (1945-1964) in America, for example, was a modernist reaction against materialism, conformity, and consumerism popular after World War II; beats like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Alan Ginsberg, and Lenny Bruce instead called for individual freedom and a rejection of social norms in order to discover real truth. The Beats embraced and expanded upon the stream-of-consciousness techniques of the early modernists as well as embraced Harlem Renaissance jazz and surrealist art. America also had a modernist Gothic revival called SOUTHERN GOTHIC (1935-1975). Southern Gothic is sinister, magical-realist writing about the evils of poverty, alienation, and racism in the post-Civil War American South and attempts to find meaning in those suffering under the terrible legacy of slavery and the war. Southern Gothic authors included Harper Lee, William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty. While modernism was declared "dead" by the 1970s, a handful of artists still follow the aesthetics of modernism; Southern Gothic has even started to return in the 2010s. |
Andy Warhol, Portrait Of Seymour H. Knox (1985)
POSTMODERNISM (1940s-2010)
CATALYST: World War II & Cold War
Last of the Mohicans—James Fenimore Cooper Hope Leslie—Catherine Marie Sedgwick The Scarlet Letter, The Blythsdale Romance—Nathaniel Hawthorne Collected Poems—Emily Dickenson Leaves of Grass—Walt Whitman Walden—Henry David Thoreau Moby Dick, "Bartleby the Scrivener"— Herman Melville Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame--Victor Hugo "The Raven," "Annabelle Lee"—Edgar Allen Poe Frankenstein—Mary Shelley Dracula—Bram Stoker |
Modernism tried multiple different avenues to try to develop a meaning and coherence to existence, hoping that such a discovery would prevent a future world war. As we all know, that didn't happen. Though some modernist endure today, World War II obliterated the goals of the modernists and the modernist aesthetic. A new generation of artists started to argue that the modernist search for the meaning of life was fruitless and that life has no meaning. This new aesthetic, called postmodernism, held that characters (and authors) were insignificant, that a character's success in dependent upon luck and chance, and that all other conflicts pale to the conflict of the man who realizes his life has no significance. A common idea of postmodern works is absurdity, which is the principle that even the best logic breaks down in practice. In modernism, whatever is not expected happens (also known as irony), plans always go awry, and the most absurd and unsuccessful characters are the ones to win in the end. Postmodernism upended the idea of post-structuralist binaries like man-woman, good-evil, and true-false by showing the futility of categorization and faith in taxonomy. Postmodernism also employs pastiche in order to show that authors of the past were just as clueless about life as authors now. Some of the best postmodern writers are Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Don DeLillo, and Jorge Luis Borges.
As postmoderism embraced ironic rebellion, it had several submovements centered around different types of rebellions. A similar gripe was held by the writers of NEW JOURNALISM (1960-1990), who hated how dry an manufactured the news was. Thus, journalists like Thomas Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson used literary techniques to make factually true narratives seem untrue. Yet Americans weren't the only ones rebelling. Britain saw the rise of the ANGRY YOUNG MEN (1957-1975), who were working class British male authors rebelling against British aristocracy and gentility by exposing the beauty of anarchy and social alienation. John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, and Anthony Burgess were all Angry Young Men. Meanwhile, the French had the NOUVEAU ROMAN (1955-1970) movement, which rebelled against the structure of narrative itself. Writers like Georges Perec and Marguerite Duras wrote books without cohesive plot, conflict, character development, tension, or even complete thoughts. The Nouveau Romans wanted every text to have its own style, never to be repeated; these artist inspired American IMAGE FICTION (1980-present), which attempts to take common items and images and make them unrecognizable and absurd (popular image fiction writers are Chuck Palahniuk and David Fincher). Another more global rebellion was the development of postcolonial literature, which was written by natives of former Western colonies in the Americas, Africa, and several island nations. The goal of postcolonialism is to break with Western styles of writing instituted by colonizes and rediscover their culture’s own voice. One postcolonial attempt by Latin American authors is called TESTIMONIO (1940-present). Testimonio rebels against traditional literature by blurring the line between truth and fiction by mixing magical realism with examinations of the how the political world is inseparable from the domestic sphere. Great writers of Testimonio include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Achy Obejas, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julia Alverez. |
Paul Harvey, Girl and Olive Tree (2011)
NEW SINCERITY (1990s-present)
CATALYST: rise of internet & 9/11
Last of the Mohicans—James Fenimore Cooper Hope Leslie—Catherine Marie Sedgwick The Scarlet Letter, The Blythsdale Romance—Nathaniel Hawthorne Collected Poems—Emily Dickenson Leaves of Grass—Walt Whitman Walden—Henry David Thoreau Moby Dick, "Bartleby the Scrivener"— Herman Melville Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame--Victor Hugo "The Raven," "Annabelle Lee"—Edgar Allen Poe Frankenstein—Mary Shelley Dracula—Bram Stoker “The next real literary 'rebels' in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction... These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere [. . .] The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs [. . .] To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness.” --David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" |
In the mid-1990s, personal blogs cropped up all over a new communication tool called the internet, and many of these pages celebrated all matter of icon and celebrity. Hipsters (a product of Postmodernism) praised the most unpopular or kitschy pages in an ironic and laughable way.
This attitude did not sit well with the page authors, who legitimately enjoyed subjects like daredevil Evel Knievel and animated 1980s cartoons. A movement of these writers coalesced as the antithesis of postmodernism—writers who wanted to create texts with personal meaning and honesty and without irony, apology, or cynicism. Several Hysterical Realist authors took notice, and one of them by the name of David Foster Wallace coined this movement "THE NEW SINCERITY." Instead of embracing irony and hypocrisy, these authors embrace paradox, or the ability for two contradictory ideas to both be true. Instead of cynicism about the intentions of others, these authors embrace optimism. Instead of apathy, these authors have such sentimentality that they would prefer naivety (a lack of wisdom or judgment) over detachment. Modernism sought to discover truth and meaning in the world; postmodernism claimed that there was no truth or meaning to the world; and New Sincerity announces loudly that the meaning of life is the relationships we build and how the things we love make our life meaningful. New Sincerity picked up momentum after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The demonstrations of sorrow and full-throated patriotism were not only genuine but also lacked ironic critique, as few dared to make light of the tragedy. But don't think that New Sincerity is soft and overly sensitive: those who embrace New Sincerity are the same individuals protesting at Occupy Wall Street and No Kings, as they are sincere enough to stand up to injustice. While New Sincerity is focused on universal tolerance and a "live and let live" attitude, its members quickly acknowledge that their ultimate enemy is the Hate Group, which is any cynical organization that seeks to harm and oppress others but seeks safety under ironic victimhood. One of the cornerstone issues for New Sincerity is climate change, and some authors use the tools of New Sincerity to interrogate how people and cultures exist at the edge of global disaster. This school is called ANTHROPOCENE REALISM and examines the chaos caused by global catastrophe—it's like dystopian science fiction without the fiction. Other New Sincerity authors deal with their anxieties another way: horror. The NEW GOTHIC movement is a 21st-century reclamation of Gothic tropes like decay, the grotesque, imprisonment, and trauma. Instead of crumbling castles, New Gothic stories are in soulless suburbs that have seen better days. Instead of dealing with the trauma of an ancestral sin, New Gothic characters carry personal trauma resulting from generational abuse. Instead of a vampire or ghoul, New Gothic protagonists are terrorized by the feeling that something isn't right and part of their lives is a lie. This anxiety that one is living a lie is also the main conflict of the VIRTUAL REALIST school. Unlike the horror of New Gothic, Virtual Realism leans into the genre of science fiction. These stories borrow ideas from Modernist existentialism to interrogate what life means in a society where the physical and digital have equal weight and importance. Common motifs of the movement include the self vs. the avatar, ontological fluidity, torturous hedonism, and digital permanence. New Sincerity is also behind the early twenty-first-century push for nostalgia, as it celebrates what one loves without ironic judgment and can connect adults to the sensitivity and understanding of their childhood. The remaining Postmodernists, however, took notice of this and saw it as a way to cash in one last time before their movement was truly dead. Under the guise of sincerity, popular media in the last quarter century have combined New Sincerity's love of nostalgia, sensitivity, and reimagining with Postmodernism's love of irony, absurdity, and commodification. This new form of Postmodernism called NEOPASSEISM focuses on the commercial viability of art over message, and its hallmarks are vampiric nostalgia, cultural stasis, sterility, inoffensiveness, gloss, and predictability. |
NEODECADENCE (emerging since 2010s)
CATALYST: COVID-19 pandemic
Last of the Mohicans—James Fenimore Cooper Hope Leslie—Catherine Marie Sedgwick The Scarlet Letter, The Blythsdale Romance—Nathaniel Hawthorne Collected Poems—Emily Dickenson Leaves of Grass—Walt Whitman Walden—Henry David Thoreau Moby Dick, "Bartleby the Scrivener"— Herman Melville Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame--Victor Hugo "The Raven," "Annabelle Lee"—Edgar Allen Poe Frankenstein—Mary Shelley Dracula—Bram Stoker |
Decay acceleration and sprophyte
Anti-apocolyptic Decandant aestetic Post-humanism Grotesque Syntheic Lousy AGAINST: Pios Guilt, poison nostalgia, coporate thinking, workshopped creativity |