Literary Periods Summed Up in One Sentence, With Dates

Key points from the graphic

The graphic lists 20 literary periods and movements, from Old English to Post-Modernism, each summed up in one joke sentence.
It is satire. The lines are meant to be memorable, not definitions you would use in an essay.
The graphic gives no dates, authors or titles. We have added when and where each movement happened, with sources.
The panels run roughly in time order down the left column. The right column mixes 19th and 20th century movements.
The SparkNotes blog post it comes from has 21 entries. Romanticism is in the post but not on the graphic [1].

Literary periods on the graphic, with dates

The table follows the graphic’s order: left column first, then right. The summaries are copied from the graphic, with two dashes replaced by commas. The third column comes from the sources listed.

Period or movement	SparkNotes one sentence summary (as on the graphic)	When and where
Old English	Everyone’s speaking in alliterative verse, and the Vikings are coming.	From the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066 [3]
Middle English	None of us is free from sin; the only good and righteous thing is ale.	Late 12th century to the 1470s [4]
Elizabethan	To thine own self be true, unless you are the common man, in which case do better.	Reign of Elizabeth I, 1558 to 1603 [5]
Jacobean	Someone has done you a great personal wrong, and for this they must die.	Reign of James I of England, from 1603 [6]
Late Renaissance	‘Tis all but a metaphor for individualism!	English Renaissance ran from the late 15th to the early 17th century [7]
Age of Enlightenment	We’ve figured out everything, more or less.	Late 17th century, peaking in the 18th [8]
Sturm und Drang	They’ve figured out nothing.	German movement, late 1760s to early 1780s [9]
Gothic literature	You’re surveying a derelict mansion, or you’re lurking on a misty moor; either way, a storm is surely coming.	First labelled Gothic work, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, 1764 [10]
Victorian	Everyone has a public face, a private face, and a tuberculosis face.	Reign of Queen Victoria, 1837 to 1901 [11]
Transcendentalism	People are okay, I guess, but trees are even better.	New England, late 1820s and 1830s [12]
Literature of the Absurd	Everything is ridiculous and nothing matters in the chaos of an unknowable void.	Theatre of the absurd, late 1950s [13]
Realism	Machines will be the death of us, although we sure do have a lot of corn these days.	Began in mid 19th century French and Russian literature [14]
The Lost Generation	We’re poor in money, but rich in disillusionment with the American Dream.	American writers in Paris in the 1920s [15]
Post-Colonialism	You stole our land, now kindly GTFO.	Writing from formerly colonised countries [16]
The Harlem Renaissance	Let’s talk about institutional racism, social integration, and emerging black pride, and also what’s up with Prohibition, are we still doing that?	Harlem, New York, 1920s and 1930s [17]
Surrealism	Here is a jumble of words that make sense separately but not together, please enjoy.	Europe, after the First World War [18]
The Beat Generation	I wrote this poem while I was languishing in a desert, high on peyote.	Work published mainly in the mid to late 1950s [19]
Magic Realism	All the banalities of daily life, but it’s raining flowers and someone married a tiger.	Realistic setting with magical elements [20]
Modernist	Out with the old, in with the ironic.	Late 19th and early 20th centuries [21]
Post-Modernism	Marriage is a social construct and so are clocks.	Emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s [22]

Literary periods and movements, the difference

The graphic mixes two kinds of label. Some are periods named after a monarch or a stage of the language, such as Elizabethan, Jacobean, Victorian, Old English and Middle English. Others are movements: groups of writers who shared ideas or a style, such as Transcendentalism, Surrealism or the Beat Generation. Wikipedia’s overview explains that literary movements group works by shared philosophical, topical or aesthetic features, as opposed to divisions by genre or period [2]. Some movements were named by their own members, while other labels were applied decades or centuries later, so scholars often disagree about where one ends and the next begins [2].

The jokes, explained

Most lines point at a real feature of the movement. Old English poetry was written in alliterative verse [3]. Sturm und Drang, “storm and stress”, reacted against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, which is why the graphic follows “We’ve figured out everything” with “They’ve figured out nothing” [9]. Transcendentalists believed in the inherent goodness of people and nature, hence the trees [12]. The Lost Generation line plays on the “disoriented, wandering, directionless” spirit of many First World War survivors, a label Gertrude Stein is credited with coining and Ernest Hemingway popularised in The Sun Also Rises (1926) [15]. The Realism panel uses Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic, which explains the line about corn.

Notes on this infographic

Missing movement. The SparkNotes post includes Romanticism (“In this world of ours nothing is rational, least of all feelings, of which I am experiencing many”), but the graphic does not [1].
Title. The graphic is headed “Every Book in the History of Literature summed up in a single sentence”. The blog post is titled “Every Literary Movement in History, Summed Up in a Single Sentence” [1].
Order. The right column is not chronological. Literature of the Absurd (late 1950s) appears above Realism (19th century), for example [13] [14].
Punctuation. Two summaries on the graphic use a long dash. We show them with commas.

Questions about literary periods

What are literary periods?

Ways of grouping writing by time, often named after a ruler or a stage of a language, such as the Elizabethan or Victorian periods. Literary movements are related but group writers by shared ideas or style instead [2].

What literary period are we in now?

There is no agreed name. Of the movements on this graphic, Postmodernism is the most recent, emerging strongly in the United States in the 1960s [22]. Because labels are often applied long after the fact, scholars dispute where movements begin and end [2].