• What is contemporary literature?
• Characteristics of contemporary literature
• Contemporary literary genres
• Frequent themes of contemporary literature
• Relevant authors of contemporary literature

We explain what contemporary literature is, its genres, themes and other characteristics. Also, its relevant authors.

Contemporary literature reflects political, social and spiritual remodeling.

What is contemporary literature?

The literature Contemporary is that produced in recent times and today. The limit on when that "recent" period begins is debated. It can be considered that it begins at the end of the XIX century, but in general the end of the WWII (1939-1945).

Beyond the temporal exactitudes, the important thing when talking about contemporary literature is to get a panoramic idea of ​​the trends that have prevailed in literature in the last century (the 20th and at most the beginning of the 21st).

This period was also key to the political, social and spiritual remodeling of the entire planet. On the one hand, they crossed two bloody world wars and a conflict long-standing as was the Cold War (1947-1991). On the other hand, the philosophical, aesthetic and spiritual legacy of the West as a result was severely affected.

Thus, contemporary literature collects the anguish of a period of loss in much of the world, as a result of the collapse of the powers European colonialists that ruled until the beginning of the 20th century, replaced by the United States as the economic, cultural and political power of the West, and by the Soviet Union like its eastern counterpart.

The latter also had the challenge of materializing the countercultural and anti-capitalist aspirations of the oppressed middle class, and was the heir to the philosophy Marxist that the western capitalist powers were fighting.

Therefore, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, during which the world was divided into two opposite and isolated sides, is one of the great milestones whose presence can still be felt in contemporary literature, in addition to many others Arts.

This event appears in the form of an exaltation of the liberal capitalist world or of the lament over the death of ideals, which became known as the "Great Stories" and which according to the Japanese-American philosopher Francis Fukuyama (1952-) represented the "End of history”.

On the other hand, contemporary literature is the first in history to have a developed publishing market with international scope itself. This is due, among other things, to the economic integration processes that led to the globalization economical.

Another factor to consider is the scientific-technological revolution that made it possible to considerably shorten the distances of the world and the ways to travel it. We must consider that the world changed more in technological and social terms during the 20th century, than during entire eras of the Antiquity.

Another essential factor when thinking about the context in which contemporary literature arises is Internet. With it came not only a global commercial and informational possibility, but also a whole 2.0 culture through services messaging, forums, exchange platforms and social networks. That was the breeding ground for the emergence of new forms of writing and expression. Some even suggest that new forms of literature are developing that go hand in hand with the immediate, the swift, and the diverse.

Characteristics of contemporary literature

Any characterization of contemporary literature is necessarily unfair, since the rate of real and literary changes in the world from the first third of the 20th century to that of the 21st century is dizzying.

It does not seem to be the same thing when we think of the literature of the second vanguards (1945-1970) and the literature of the new millennium (2000-present). Even so, we can highlight the following common features:

• Experimentation and the breakdown of traditional patterns are valued, especially in avant-garde, transgender or postmodern literature. Initially the theater and the story witness the same phenomenon, but finally the novel ends up absorbing the possibilities of literary experimentation.
• Various trends in genre literature (that is, popular literature) emerge: the Science fiction, the black cop or not to go, fantasy literature, horror novels, etc. Some enjoy more prestige than others in the academic circuits.
• In the matter of stories, the nineteenth-century look of the society, to give rise to new variants of the realism: dirty realism, socialist realism, magical realism, etc. Some tend to fulfill political or ideological agendas, while others approach the journalism in his search for anecdotes and in his lean, objective way of telling.
• Other experimental strands abandon the anecdote and dedicate themselves to meditation or description, if not the meta-text, the fragmentary and the game of references, building literary artifacts, rather than novels.
• The reversal, the tribute and the nod to the tradition they are frequent, especially in satirical approaches and in postmodern reworkings, that try to update some modern classic.
• Testimony and non-fiction have an enormous place as forms of literary elaboration of the horrors of the war, the dictatorship and the poverty.
• Towards the end of the second half of the 20th century, a robust publishing industry emerged in most Western languages, with portfolios of authors of diverse nationality and the possibility of international distribution, thus consolidating a more or less globalized publishing market.
• Interest in the alternative arises, especially at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, when the literature written in countries of the so-called Third World (Africa, Latin America, Asia minor) begins to gain interest in the large literary and publishing circuits. This is known as World Literature.

Contemporary literary genres

Children's literature had not been previously developed.

Regarding genders, contemporary literature has not changed the paradigm:

• The poetry. He continues his way free of rhymes and metrics, thus encompassing a vast and disparate set of texts whose only related trait is sonority, the absence of a story and the language descriptive. In some cases, the short formats of Internet allowed true revival of haiku (Japanese hyper-short poetry) and similar subgenres.
• The narrative. It prioritizes the novel as the great genre, well above the short story (which is still cultivated), but yielding to the pressures of experimentation: the hyperlink, the non-fiction novel, the postmodern novel, different approaches that try to revolutionize the genre of the novel have been produced throughout almost a century, without much success in really reformulating what a novel is. On the other hand, the chronicle and non-fiction, hand in hand with journalism, have emerged as an important trend among narrative writers, as well as the newspaper and other short formats that were believed to be extinct, such as the short story. The novel seems to have become the genre in which everything fits.
• Children's literature. It also arises in contemporaneity, and includes a whole branch of stories and poetic games dedicated to children's readers. This genre would not have been possible previously, since the concept of “childhood” is relatively recent for the humanity.
• The rehearsal. It has changed very little since its appearance in the Modern age, but it has been restricted to an academic or legal field, being perhaps the least popular genre in contemporary literature.
• The dramaturgy. It went through enormous changes during the twentieth century, especially at the hands of the avant-garde, who saw in the theatrical montage the tool to reach large audiences, something that later the movie theater he conquered for himself. The great playwrights of the 20th century left their mark forever on the theater, which by the end of the century seems to succumb to other digital entertainment formats.

Furthermore, transgeneric works promise a fusion of genres or a experience reading apart from them, which is a unique and characteristic feature of the modern age: the diverse, the multiple and the collage. However, most of these "transgeneric" books can be classified as novels or essays.

Frequent themes of contemporary literature

The most recurrent themes in contemporary literature can be summarized as:

• The memory and the testimony. Given the high number of wars, dictatorships, massacres, revolutions and socioeconomic crises of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the impulse to count and preserve individual memory as a legacy to future generations became very frequent.
• Genre fiction. Terror, science fiction, fantasy, police not to go and other popular genres abound in contemporary literature, especially that intended for mass consumption, as well as combinations between these genres: fantasy / terror, science fiction police, etc.
• The coming of age. It is known by this name to the stories that address the life of a character child, a child, and accompany him throughout the discovery of adulthood, that is, through various events that will lead him to discover who he is.
• The family novel. Approaching the members of a familyWhether emphasizing one of them or not, in this case the misadventures of the family caste are narrated, often as a form of parallelism with the fate of the countries (family = country).
• The questioning of the real. The doubt about what is real and what is not, about how much the senses can be trusted and about technological simulations is present in many of the stories in contemporary literature. Many of these anguish are the result of the recent tech boom.
• Dystopias and the end of the world. Another recurring scenario both in contemporary literature and cinema has to do with the end of the world, the end of civilization or the survival of planetary catastrophes. This theme was particularly common during critical moments of the Cold War. Historical reinterpretations are also frequent, in which the "official" story is modified.
• The writing itself. There is a whole literary aspect in contemporaneity dedicated to reflecting on the nature of art and writing, to playing with imaginary writers or books, to intervene in the literary canon or other operations of homage, satire or similar appropriation.

Relevant authors of contemporary literature

Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010.

Any list that we tried in this matter would necessarily be incomplete, but we can still try a summarized one:

• Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). French philosopher, playwright and writer highly involved in the politics worldwide, he was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but rejected the award due to ideological considerations. He was a cultist of existentialism and of humanist Marxism, and consort of the writer Simone de Beaouvoir.
• George Orwell (1903-1950). British writer and journalist born to the British Raj in India, he was a fervent socialist activist against the imperialism British and an opponent of both Nazism and Stalinism during World War II. He was a chronicler, novelist and literary critic, and his is the figure of "Big Brother" (from his novel 1984) in common use in politics today.
• Albert Camus (1913-1960). French writer born in Algeria, he developed an important novelistic and dramaturgical work under the influence of German existentialism, and the works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
• Cousin Levi (1919-1987). A chemist by profession and of Italian nationality, this writer of Jewish origins survived the Nazi death camps in Europe and developed an important testimonial work telling it and reflecting on the nature of the fascism.
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008). Russian writer and historian, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. His work unveiled the Gulag, the Stalinist concentration camps in Soviet Russia, in which he himself was imprisoned for 11 years. He was expelled from the USSR in 1974 and could not return until the dissolution of this nation communist.
• Jack Kerouac (1922-1969). American novelist of the so-called "beat generation", along with the poet Allen Ginsberg and the narrator William Burroughs. He was a member of the culture hippie against radicalism, and died at the age of 47 as a result of alcoholism.
• Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987). The Belgian-American novelist, essayist, playwright and poet wrote under this pseudonym, whose works of poetic character and enormous erudition opened the doors of the French Academy to her.
• Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). One of the best known poets in the United States along with Anne Sexton, both worshipers of confessional poetry. She was married to fellow writer Ted Hughes, and spent most of her life clinically depressed, until her suicide in 1963.
• Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006). Polish science fiction writer whose satirical and philosophical work has been frequently made into a film in films such as Solaris. He is one of the few non-English-speaking authors considered a true authority in this genre.
• Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014). Maximum expose of magical Realism, this Colombian writer and journalist was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. His work One hundred years of loneliness is perhaps one of the most famous novels of the so-called "Latin American boom”From the second half of the 20th century.
• Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-). Peruvian writer and politician, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 and the Cervantes Prize in 1994, has an important novelistic work that was part of the “Latin American Boom”. He was a candidate for the presidency of Peru in 1990, when he was defeated by Alberto Fujimori.
• Orhan Pamuk (1952-). Architect and writer of Turkish origin, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, he is the author of a work that reflects with his own symbols the clash of cultures own of the Turkish nation. His works have been translated into more than 40 languages.