The most striking features of 19th-century Ukrainian literature are its relatively belated start (largely reflecting the political provincialization of Ukraine in the 18th century) and its rapid development in the latter two thirds of the century. Although Kotliarevs'kyi's travesty of the Aeneid, Eneida, had already appeared in 1798 (in St. Petersburg, and without his knowledge and approval!) the next two decades showed little belletristic production in vernacular Ukrainian. The literary interests of Ukrainian society were still being served in Russian, although the thematics (primarily history and ethnography) were centered on Ukraine. Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism continued well into the second half of the century. In the first three decades the dominant mode for literature written in Ukrainian was travesty and burlesque (so-called kotliarevshchyna), and for many (especially in Russia) this became synonymous with Ukrainian literature.

In the 1820's and early 1830's the spread of Romantic ideas gave rise to various publications of folk songs, oral epics (dumy), and much ethnographic material. The first printed collections of poetry, from the late 1830's expressed a Romantic poetics, but one where nostalgia for the past and folklorism predominated. Taras Shevchenko's Kobzar (The Minstrel) of 1840 (also published in St. Petersburg) was a major watershed in that Romantic historicism and a focus on the folk (the narod) was overshadowed by a powerful individual voice, the notion of the poet as national spokesman and carrier of the Divine Word, and a new conception of Ukraine as a victim of tsarist tyranny.

The arrest, in 1847, and subsequent exile of Shevchenko, Panteleimon Kulish, Mykola Kostomarov, and other members of the Brotherhood of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, a secret society that promoted utopian Christian and Slavophile ideals, marked the first major counterattack by Russian officialdom against Ukrainian literature and the political separatism that it implied. Subsequent decrees in 1863, and particularly the Ems Ukaz of 1876, which for all practical purposes banned the publication and importation of Ukrainian books, severely impeded the spread of Ukrainian literature (especially among the masses). But by driving it underground (and abroad) they accelerated the political articulation of a Ukrainian identity. Ukrainian literary and political activities shifted to Western Ukraine, then under Austria-Hungary, which also gave rise to the political goal of a unified Ukraine.

The literary process itself was continually expanding. By the end of the century not only was Ukrainian literatureŠnow written exclusively in Ukrainian-Šrepresented in all the major genres, including literary criticism and scholarship, but it was also differentiated into various reading audiences. By the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century Ukrainian modernism was commensurate with analogous movements in Poland and Russia.