What is literary direction?


Before you deal with specific literary trends, methods, styles, you first need to find out how these concepts are interpreted in theory.

The artistic method is the totality of the principles of ideological and artistic cognition and imaginative reproduction of the world, a way of comprehending reality by means of art. In the history of literature distinguish such artistic methods: baroque, classicism, sentimentalism, romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism. Each artistic method (with the exception of modernism) has a corresponding literary direction. The direction uses a certain method based on it.

The literary trend is a concrete historical embodiment of the artistic method, which manifests itself in the ideological and aesthetic community of a group of writers in a certain period of time. Literary direction is a kind of synthesis (combination) of the artistic method and the individual style of the writer. The category of a direction provides association of artists

on the basis of a uniform method, and also certain similarity of individual styles. Each literary direction corresponds to a set of works that have common characteristic features. Within a single literary period, several literary trends may appear, for example, in the Enlightenment – classicism, rococo, sentimentalism. The name of the dominant (leading) direction often becomes the name of the whole period, and its time frame is beyond the period (baroque,

The main literary directions:
– Baroque (XVII – XVIII century);
– Classicism (XVIII – early XIX centuries);
– Sentimentalism (the second half of the XVIII – early XIX centuries.);
– Romanticism (late XVIII – early XIX centuries);
– Realism (second half of the XIX century);
– Modernism (late XIX – XX centuries.);
– Impressionism, symbolism, neoromanticism, imaginism, futurism, acmeism, expressionism, dadaism, surrealism, existentialism, etc.;
– Postmodernism (since the 1980s).

Literary directions can have constituent parts.

These branching directions are called currents or schools.

Style – a set of characteristics that characterize the works of a certain time, direction, individual manner of the writer. The concept of style today is multifaceted. In literary criticism, too, the ambiguity of this concept is observed. Researchers consider:
– style of an epoch, style of a direction and a current;
– the style of the writer and the style of a certain period of his work; The style of the work and the style of its individual element.

The most common in the science of literature is the understanding of style as an individual creative manner, the “creative person” of an individual writer. Consequently, the individual style is a manifestation of the totality of the special essential features of the writer’s talent in a specific artistic work or in all of his work, the individual embodiment of the artistic method.


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What is literary direction?