The Movement (literature)

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As The Movement , a loose group of English writers referred to the 1950s.

The term was first used in 1954 in The Spectator magazine to characterize a supposed anti-romantic and anti-modernist commonality in the works of Donald Davie , Thom Gunn , Kingsley Amis , Iris Murdoch, and John Wain . Two anthologies, Poets of the 1950s (1955) and New Lines (1956), also linked DJ Enright , Robert Conquest (the respective editors), Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Jennings to The Movement.

The anti-romanticism and anti-modernism of the Movement are often seen in the aversion to excessive feelings and against stylistic experiments as well as in the resulting formal, linguistic and content-related clarity of the works that are assigned to the Movement. In literary studies, however, it is unclear whether The Movement was a conscious, real movement by the authors mentioned; in addition, the initial blanket criticism of anti-modernism and the accusation that it hindered the development of English poetry are only partially supported today.

The Movement gradually faded with the advent of The Group and the Angry Young Men .

literature

  • Zachary Leader (Ed.), The Movement Reconsidered. Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries , Oxford 2009.
  • Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s , Oxford 1980.
  • Randall Stevenson, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 12: 1960–2000, The Last of England? , Oxford 2006.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s , Oxford 1980, pp. 1ff.
  2. ↑ Blackwell Reference Online: The Movement (excerpt)
  3. ^ Cover text for Zachary Leader (Ed.), The Movement Reconsidered. Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries , Oxford 2009.