What are the major Western literary genres?

Realism: one of the basic creative methods of literature and art. In the history of literature and art, it and romanticism are two major trends. It advocates the objective observation of real life and the accurate representation of typical characters in typical environments according to the original mask of life. Realism has a long history and high achievements in China, and in the history of literature, such as part of the works in the Classic of Poetry, Du Fu's poems, Guan Hanqing's dramas, and Cao Xueqin's Dream of Red Mansions are its representative works.

Romanticism: In reflecting real life, the Romanticism is good at expressing the passionate pursuit of the ideal world, and often uses passionate language, magnificent and magical imagination and exaggeration to shape the image. Such as Chinese Qu Yuan, Li Bai's poetry, Wu Chengen's novel Journey to the West, etc. have distinctive characteristics of romanticism. Romanticism, as a literary trend, arose in the late 18th century and early 19th century in the era of bourgeois revolution in Europe, reflecting the ideology of the bourgeoisie during the period of ascendancy, and its representative writers include Goethe and Schiller in Germany, Hugo and George Sand in France, and Byron and Shelley in Britain.

Classicism: a literary trend that emerged in Europe in the 17th century. It was called "classicism" because it advocated ancient Greece and Rome as its models. With the most complete development of France, they respect the king's right, advocate rationality, the pursuit of elegance, harmony and balanced unity in art. The representative writers of France are Racine and Molière.

The Perplexed Generation: a literary school that appeared in the United States after World War I. It is not an organized, **creative* literary school. It is not an organized, **** the same platform of the group. The term originated with Gertrude Stein, an American woman writer living in Paris. She once pointed to Ernest Hemingway and others and said, "You're all a lost generation." Ernest Hemingway used this as an epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises, and the "Lost Generation" became the name of a literary genre. The writers of the "Bewildered Generation" shared the same **** that they were disgusted with the imperialist war, but could not find a way out. Their works reflected these thoughts and feelings. Ernest Hemingway is a representative writer of the "lost generation". The "Lost Generation" refers not only to the writers who fought in the Great War in Europe, but also to the writers of the 1920s who did not participate in the war, but were confused and hesitant about the future, such as Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot and Thomas Wolfe, and so on. The "Lost Generation" flourished mainly in the 1920s, and their creative tendencies changed after the 1930s.

Critical Realism: the dominant literary trend in Europe in the 1830s. It paid attention to the study of social problems, expanded the life surface that truly reflected the reality with a realist attitude, shaped a lot of typical aristocratic and bourgeois images, exposed and criticized the evil phenomena of feudal and capitalist society, revealed the process of the decline of the aristocracy and the rise and fall of the bourgeoisie, and revealed some essential aspects of the social life, and some of the works also expressed sympathy for the misery of the working people; at the same time, it also enriched the literary thinking. Some works also sympathize with the plight of the working people; at the same time, they enrich the artistic skills and techniques. Their representative writers include Balzac and Stendhal of France, Dickens of England, Gogol and Tolstoy of Russia.

Futurism: the earliest and most rebellious genre of the 20th century. It came and went in a hurry during the decade. The basic characteristic is "denial of everything". Negating the state machine, denying traditional culture, advocating the complete abandonment of artistic heritage and traditional culture, glorifying machinery and urban chaos, praising the "beauty of speed" and "power", and advocating the breaking of the formal norms of rationality, and the use of free and uninhibited statements to carry out art at will. The founder was the Italian writer Marinetti. The founder is the Italian writer Marinetti, whose main achievement is poetry, and whose representative writers and works are Apollinaire's The Book of Wine and Mayakovsky's Clouds in Pants.

Surrealism: originated in France, the distinctive pioneering spirit, the Dadaism of 1916, "destroy everything", "remove everything" to give it a powerful revelation. 1924, "Surrealist Manifesto" was published, marking the official start of the movement. In 1924, the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism marked the official beginning of the movement, which reached its climax in France in the 20s and 30s, and expanded into a global phenomenon in the 40s and 50s, ending in 1969. The movement emphasized the expression of the surreal and irrational unconscious world and the dream world, which transcended the constraints of the real world and emphasized intuition, believing that the subconscious and the dream were the most real; it advocated unconscious writing without any theme. They widely use the "automatic writing method" and "dream record method". His works are grotesque, exaggerated, obscure and mysterious. Influenced the later absurdism, black humor and magic realism. Representative figures include Breton, Aragon, and Eluard.

Late Symbolism: The continuation and development of Symbolism at the end of the 19th century and another climax in the 1920s. It advocated grasping the inner reality by intuition, searching for the "objective counterpart" of thought, embodying abstract ideas in sensible forms, and implying the philosophy of life in imagery and symbols. It has a broader vision and deeper thinking than Symbolism. It advocates the expression of people's complex and subtle subjective feelings by means of hints, images, metaphors, free associations and other artistic techniques, and pursues the artistic effects of half-brightness, half-darkness, confusion and mysterious colors. Eliot's (1888-1965) The Waste Land is its masterpiece. There are also the French Valéry's "Seaside Cemetery", the Austrian Rilke, Metrlink's play "The Green Bird", the Russian Blok's "Twelve" and Yesenin, the Irish Yeats, the American Pound and so on.

Expressionism: It originated in German painting at the beginning of the 20th century, and later expanded to music, literature and other fields. Its theoretical program is "art is expression, not reproduction". It requires to break through the appearance of things and express the inner essence of things, to break through the depiction of human behavior and reveal its inner soul, and to break through the lyricism of temporary phenomena and show the eternal quality and truth. In terms of artistic method, due to the emphasis on eternity, the characters are often abstractions or symbols of certain ****ity; due to the emphasis on writing inner activities, intuition and dreams, more inner alone, dreams, subtext, and other means; plot bizarre, abrupt changes, with exaggeration, distortion, deformation, absurdity of the writing method, highlighting the subjective feelings, and the pursuit of strong artistic effect. Representatives and works include Kafka's The Castle and The Metamorphosis, American O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, Czech science fiction writer ?apek, Swedish writer Strindberg's play To Damascus. and the German dramatist Brecht, among others.

Stream of Consciousness: Taking unconscious activities as the object of literary expression, suggesting different levels of psychological activities and emphasizing the contradictions and complexity of human consciousness. In the works, the plot is diluted, the author does not intervene, and the characters directly express their inner activities, not according to the plot but according to the characters' consciousness flow structure works, breaking the chronological order of the narrative, with the flow of the characters' consciousness, through the free association to show the theme, the organization of the plot, not subject to the limitations of time, the past, the present, and the future inverted each other, penetrate into each other, overlap each other and the mesh type of the main body of the structure. Representative writers include Ireland's Joyce's Ulysses, France's Proust's In Memory of Lost Years, America's Faulkner's The Hustle and the Fury, and Britain's Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

Existentialist Literature: It arose in France in the 1930s and became increasingly popular in Europe and America. It believes that the world is absurd and life is painful. On the one hand, it exposes the absurdity and ugliness of the capitalist world; on the other hand, it expresses people's misfortune and destructive destiny and the ideological emotions of loneliness, despair, and fear, and at the same time, it also inspires people to face the heavy pressure of reality and rise up to fight against it. Artistically, it retains the traditional style, and ideologically, it explores the depth of philosophy. Representative writers and works include Sartre's Nausea and Camus' The Outsider.

Theatre of the absurd: emerged in France in the 1950s. It was inspired by the existentialist concept of "absurdity" and absorbed surrealist techniques in its art. In the form of absurd drama, it expresses the absurdity of the world and life: the meaninglessness of life, the alienation of human beings, the separation between human beings and the world, and the estrangement between human beings. Deliberately adopting the opposite of traditional drama to create a strong absurd effect. With ambiguous background, symbolic, allegorical, exaggerated, non-logical fragmentary scenes, abstracted and universalized characters, irrational and meaningless language. Representative writers' works include: France Unescu's The Bald Songstress and The Chair, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Russia's Adamov's The Pinball Machine, America's Albee's Tales from the Zoo, and France's Jean Genet's The Balcony.

New Fiction School: emerged in France in the 1950s. A product of the "skeptical spirit" of the "age of skepticism". Opposed to the traditional realist novel's artistic model. It is believed that novels should mainly depict the world of objects, and should reveal the subconscious activities of human beings through the trivial daily life, so as to express the "potential reality". De-meaning, de-plotting and de-characterization were the three basic arguments of the New School of Fiction. Stylistic innovation. Representative writers and works include Nathalie Salot's Portrait of a Nobody, Michel Butor's Milan Lane, Claude Simon's Flanders Highway, and so on.

Black humor: an important literary genre in the 1960s in the U.S. In March 1965, Friedman compiled a collection of short stories by twelve writers titled Black Humor, from which the term "black humor" was derived. These writers believe that the world is a wasteland, that history is a mess, and that individuals are unable to change the status quo of their existence and control their own destiny. In this case, both the lack of confidence in the solemn spirit of tragedy, but also the lack of contempt for the opponent of the bright spirit of comedy, can only be "bitter people's laughter". Black humor not only mocks others, but also mocks itself, and comedic techniques are not only used to deal with ugliness and deformity, but also with pain and misfortune. Representative writers and works include: Heller's "The Twenty-Second Army Rule", Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five", Bass's "The Tobacco Broker", and Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow".

Magical realism: the tide of Latin American fiction creation, began in the 1940s, to the 60s and 70s to form a climax. It is rooted in the foundation of national cultural traditions, and absorbed the expression of European and American modernism. The novel "turns reality into fantasy without losing its truth". In the narration and description of real life, a large number of supernatural factors are introduced, and images of miracles, hallucinations, dreams and even ghosts often appear in the plots, the chronological relationship is disrupted, and the scenes are often characterized by symbolic colors, with distinctive national and regional colors. Representative writers and works include Colombia's Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Mexico's Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo", Guatemala's Asturias's "The Corn People" and "Mr. President", and Cuba's Carpentier's "The Kingdoms of This World".

The Beat Generation: was a loosely bonded collection of young poets and writers who emerged in the United States after World War II. The name was first coined by writer Jack Kerouac around 1948. "Most members of the Beat Generation were cynical and believed in liberal ideas. Their literary ideas were often spontaneous and sometimes very confused. "The works produced by Beat Generation writers are often controversial because they do not adhere to traditional creative conventions and are often disorganized in structure and form, with coarse or even vulgar language. Major literary works include Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and William Borroughs' Naked Lunch.