Europe

Abstract

After World War I, and throughout the twentieth century, most European countries continued to grow, albeit at a slower rate, their populations stabilizing after World War II. In the rest of Europe, though, and to varying degrees, Romanticism lasted until the revolutions of 1848, and in some cases beyond. Realism in literature ran parallel to the era in which the middle classes, or the (petty) bourgeoisie, came to occupy the political center – roughly speaking, the 1830s. This was the case in all of Western Europe, while in those parts of the continent lagging behind economically it defined the political horizon. From the 1870s, naturalism takes over from realism, first in France, and then around Europe. After 1945, new literary movements were born, or came to major fruition, elsewhere: magical realism in Latin America, postmodernism – referring to a particular current in Post-Modernism – and multiculturalism in North America, postcolonialism in/from Europe's former colonies.