Which Literary Movement Do You Belong In?

You belong with the Romantic writers like Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and William Blake. The 19th-century (1800 to 1860) movement emphasizing emotion and imagination, rather than logic and scientific thought.

You are part of the Transcendentalist movement along with writers Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman. The poetry and philosophy of this 19th-century American movement was concerned with self-reliance, independence from modern technology. One of the transcendentalists' core beliefs was in the inherent goodness of both people and nature, in opposition to ideas of man as inherently sinful, or "fallen," and nature as something to be conquered.

You're part of the Beat Generation with writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. Their literature explored and influenced American culture in the post-World War II era. Central elements of Beat culture are rejection of standard narrative values, the spiritual quest, exploration of American and Eastern religions, rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.

You are part of the Gothic movement, joining writers Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, Horace Walpole, and Bram Stroker to create some of the most terrifying stories of the late 18th century. These stories combine fiction, horror, death and Romanticism.

You belong in the Lost Generation with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka. This generation came of age during World War I and thrived during the Roaring 20s. Lost means not vanished but disoriented, wandering, directionless — a recognition that there was great confusion and aimlessness among the war's survivors in the early post-war years.

You are a Modernist writer along with Virginia Woolfe, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, and Frederico Garcia Lorca. They rejected narratives telling of mainstream ("bourgeois") culture and ideas, and, instead, developed unreliable narrators, exposing the "irrationality at the roots of a supposedly rational world". This can reflect doubts about the philosophical basis of realism, or alternatively an expansion of our understanding of what is meant by realism. So that, for example the use of stream-of-consciousness, or interior monologue reflects the need for greater psychological realism.