ABSTRACT
The identification of literary movements is a popular way of marking out significant moments in literary culture; it has the consequence of giving literary history shape and direction. A history of literary movements is, by definition, highly selective; and it begs the question of what sorts of literary practices can be said to constitute a movement? This chapter begins by distinguishing between two basic ways of defining literary movements; it also makes a distinction between literary movements and literary schools. It then proceeds to discuss what are generally agreed to be the four main British literary movements of the nineteenth century: Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Decadence and Symbolism. None of these movements was confined solely (nor even principally) to literary culture, and all argued for a strong connection between the literary and visual arts. Moreover, all of them placed a premium on poetry rather than prose, and in this respect they can all be seen, at least in part, as reacting against the taste for popular fiction which, as earlier chapters have observed, had come to dominate literary culture from the 1830s onwards.
