Aspects of Various Periods in the Western, Euro-American Tradition

1. A blending of the picturesque (the wild, the unexpected, the fantastic) with Renaissance formalism.
2. Stress on movement, energy, and realism
3. Discord and suspension is set within a heightened, rhetorical emphasis
4. Its use of asymmetry, rough form, and obscurity could sometimes lead to an emphasis on the grotesque and the contorted
5. The practice of the metaphysical conceit, a strong, unexpected analogy between two objects intended to enlighten both the reason and the emotions
6. Tends to focus on the analytical, psychological, and commonplace.
7. Often absorbed with thoughts of love, death, and religious devotion.

1. Stress on reason and the scientific method.
2. A belief in the perfection of human nature and society; universally valid principles of nature and society are discoverable
3. Even faith is rational; God is reasonable and obeys accepted rational standards. (As a result, this leads many to discount or disbelieve entirely any emphasis on the supernatural)
4. Reliance on models of classical Greece and Rome (e.g. the three unities)
5. Reverence for order and accepted rules.
6. Stress on good taste, decorum, unity, harmony, proportion, and grace in art. Art’s purpose is "to teach" and "to delight."
7. Stress on public life, the role of tradition, and sociability stress codes of manners and networks of dependency.
8. Traditional hierarchical relationships are (slowly) giving way to republican and mercantile models of government and economics.
9. Distrust of invention and extreme displays of emotion, an interest in sentiment and sublimity. The comic is intended to mock lapses in these ideals.

1. Shifts in intellectual and cultural emphasis:
   
   1. from reason to emotion and imagination;
   2. from developed to primitive;
   3. from universal to particular;
   4. from humanity to nations;
   5. from community to individuals;
2. Feelings as the judge of truth. Intuition and instinct become acceptable if not dominant models for uncovering the reality.
3. The theory and practice of revolution: the purging of the old, corrupt society to make way for the new and innocent; stress on liberty and freedom from restraint; individuals will do what is right if freed from authority
4. The rise of the commercial class and the Industrial Revolution
5. History as a primal force of Necessity or World Soul
6. The self as the final arbitrator of what is real and right. The sacredness of the individual.
7. The artist or poet moves from having genius to  being a genius, from being a maker, one who imitates nature, to a creator, one who brings forth new truth from the self’s expression
8. The imagination of offers a realm of reality that science cannot offer. Aesthetic standards become "organic"
9. Nature becomes the organic world, which is unified by the spirit of the World Soul.
10. At first, society is regarded as simply corrupt, but later romanticism takes on a new belief in social action as the expression of truth in history.

• an acceleration in the growth of the Industrial Revolution, rapid transportation, and population growth.
• a number of reactionary movements, some reconsidering medieval social cooperation, Christian or Marxist socialism, or "art for art’s sake"
• Darwinian evolution, French positivism, and social evolution
• growing doubts in eventual progress and superiority of Western civilization
• British utilitarianism

1. Realistic portrait of contemporary life; to present life as it really occurs. Often, it focuses on either middle-class life or the perverse, the vulgar, and the criminal.
2. Stress on a belief in scientific materialism, a rejection of romanticism
3. Stress on political, social reforms
4. Distrust of traditional novelistic patterns; life, after all, lacks symmetry and form.
5. Stress on the inner lives of characters; seeks to give an honest portrait of human inwardness.

Aspects of Naturalism (ca. 1870-1930)

1. A belief in scientific determinism, that humans are a product of evolutionary and social determinism.
2. Life and history are fueled by competition
3. The novel is, like a laboratory, studying life empirically.
4. Tends to see life and nature as amoral, a product of chance forces.
5. Humans are one more species of animal controlled by hunger, anger, fear, and sexual desire.

1. An extension of the romantic notion of self-consciousness and metaphor.
2. Stresses multiple perspectives and the resources of the senses.
3. Language as the form of symbols points to another, the larger plane of existence that cannot be understood through scientific, rationalistic methods
4. Language is highly controlled to produce its effects.
5. More interested in the allusive and the fragmentary.
6. It had a large influence on early twentieth-century modernism.

• A partial break with romantic and realist movements, yet some modernist art continues to borrow from these.
• Solipsism: the world is experienced as we perceive it. Some go as far as to argue that we create the world through the act of perception.
• Stress on historical fragmentation, alienation, loss, despair, and angst. A desire to bring out of this some experience of order and/or form.
• History is a subjective portrait.
• Deeply influenced by Freudian portraits of the subconscious.
• Stress on complex, dense, polyvalent forms.
• Adopts methods such as surrealism, futurism, and stream-of-consciousness to express the above.
• An interest in existentialism: the creation of personal meaning, the absurdity (or mystery) of existence.
• Also influenced by shifts in the sciences:
  • Einstein (theory of relativity)
  • Heisenberg (uncertainty principle)
  • Kuhn (paradigm shifts)
  • Godel (multiple, exclusive logics)
• Its influence (for better or worse) is spread around the globe through colonialism.

1. An extension or a break with twentieth-century modernism. It continues to stress modernist traits of fragmentation, solipsism, alienation, and subjective history.
2. Yet it also rejects modernist interests in symbols and form for an interest in the surface, chance, the impersonal, and/or local.
3. Strong interest in post-structuralism and deconstruction, theories that find language’s ability to communicate highly problematic. All language is tied to what it seeks to describe. No objectivity.
4. Often stresses a cool, detached, emotionally uninvolved style.
5. Argues that no coherent, unified reality is possible.
6. The (dis)connection between modernism and post-modernism can also be seen not as two discrete movements, but as two poles of an experience: