en.wikipedia.org - NATURALISM, MODERNISM & OTHER -ISMS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

I've highlighted the keywords & lines in order to minimize the time needed to go through the articles on Wikipedia. The terms given below are the key terms asked by my English literature teachers to go through when we were reading Greek dramas.

NATURALISM, MODERNISM, LITERARY REALISM, NIHILISM,  APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN, FATALISM, ENDEARMENT

Naturalism - MAN CONTROLLED BY NATURE - EVERYTHING ACQUIRED BY GENES - (as distinct from Naturalist, Nature and Natural) refer to various topics within philosophy and science, environmental movements, and other areas.

In the arts, naturalism may refer to:

Naturalism (arts), a style in painting and the visual arts
Naturalism (literature), a literary style
Naturalism (theatre), a movement in theatre and drama that began in the 19th century.

Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from 1865 to 1900 that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was depicted as a literary  movement that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. Naturalism is the outgrowth of Realism, a prominent literary movement in mid-19th-century France and elsewhere.


Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.


Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of general "realism," Realist authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation. Jorge Luis Borges, in an essay entitled "The Scandinavian Destiny", attributed the earliest discovery of Realism in literature to the Northmen in the Icelandic Sagas, although it was soon lost by them along with the continent of North America.

Nietzsche saw nihilism  as the outcome of repeated frustrations in the search for meaning. He diagnosed nihilism as a latent presence within the very foundations of European culture, and saw it as a necessary and approaching destiny. The religious worldview had already suffered a number of challenges from contrary perspectives grounded in philosophical skepticism, and in modern science's evolutionary  and heliocentric theory. Nietzsche saw this intellectual condition as a new challenge to European culture, which had extended itself beyond a sort of point-of-no-return. Nietzsche conceptualizes this with the famous statement "God is dead", which first appeared in his work in section 108 of The Gay Science, again in section 125 with the parable of "The Madman", and even more famously in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The statement, typically placed in quotation marks,[1]  accentuated the crisis that Nietzsche argued that Western culture must face and transcend in the wake of the irreparable dissolution of its traditional foundations, moored largely in classical Greek philosophy and Christianity.

The Apollonian and Dionysian is a philosophical and literary concept, or dichotomy, based on certain features of ancient Greek mythology. Several Western philosophical and literary figures have invoked this dichotomy in critical and creative works, including Plutarch, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Robert A. Heinlein, Ruth Benedict, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, singer Jim Morrison, literary critic G. Wilson Knight, Ayn Rand, Stephen King, Diane Wakoski and cultural critic Camille Paglia.

Fatalism generally refers to several of the following ideas:

  1. A flawed perception of the consequences of exercised free will, ignorance, and forgetfulness.
  2. That free will does not exist, meaning therefore that history has progressed in the only manner possible. [1] This belief is very similar to determinism.
  3. That actions are free, but nevertheless work toward an inevitable end. [2] This belief is very similar to compatibilist predestination.
  4. That acceptance is appropriate, rather than resistance against inevitability. This belief is very similar to defeatism.


A term of endearment is a word or phrase used to address and/or describe a person or animal for which the speaker feels love  or affection.
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