Atlas Trail
Where Does It Really Begin? Literature's Unsettled Origins
Seven stops through this atlas's own recorded disagreements about where a genre, movement or form actually began, and whether some of them have ended at all.
Stop 1 of 7.
Genres
Start with the paradigm case: The First Novel Question, this atlas's own record that no single text is agreed to be the first novel.
Stop 2 of 7.
Genres
A genre with a named founder, Walter Scott's Waverley, and a documented dissent naming an earlier rival by 136 years.
Stop 3 of 7.
Forms
A comic form whose own name was not recorded until 1896, seventy-four years after the earliest printed English examples.
Stop 4 of 7.
Movements
A term coined in 1925 for painting, decades before it named a Latin American literary movement; which one it truly belongs to is unsettled.
Stop 5 of 7.
Forms
A technique named by a psychologist in 1890, adapted into a literary method thirty years later by Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner.
Stop 6 of 7.
Movements
A movement whose own closing date is disputed: 1945 is the common answer, but not the only one on record.
Stop 7 of 7.
Movements
The movement that followed Modernism, with a debated start and, on this atlas's own open record, no agreed end at all.
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