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Literary Terms and Criticism > English, American and postcolonial literature > Flashcards

English, American and postcolonial literature Flashcards

1
Q

Victorian Literature time period

A

Period ca. 1830-1900

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2
Q

Renaissance literature or Modern literature time period

A

Period: ca. 1500-1600 (slight overlap with Medieval lit)

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3
Q

characteristics of postmodernist literature (2)

A
  1. Experimental form of writing, which can be found in poetry, drama and fiction
  2. It moves beyond the methods of the modernists in finding a new way of writing about life in a confusing world.
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4
Q

What is a historical context?

A

An historical context means it belongs to a particular historical period as writers tend to have similar concerns and often similar values.

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5
Q

Old English or Anglo-Saxon Literature time period

A

BEFORE the Norman Conquest in 1066.

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6
Q

Victorian Literature examples

A
  1. Tennyson
  2. Browning
  3. Charles Dickens
  4. George Eliot
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7
Q

What is a mode an author might choose to write in?

A

a mode is a recognized type or kind of work within a genre (such as the realistic novel, or a sonnet)

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8
Q

Late 19th C - 20th C were also called modernists

A

end in 1920s as people get more concerned with the daily world than experiments = WOII

  1. difficult texts
  2. but the difficulty enacts the problems the artist is having in making sense of the world
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9
Q

Two contexts any work can be seen in

A

a genre (or generic) context and a historical context.

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10
Q

Characteristics African-American Literature (8)

A
  1. often characterized by a complex dual relationship between African and European cultural heritage
  2. women’s place in society (double oppression)
  3. postcolonial lit questions traditional order and exposes values (e.g. white male order against those who do not fit the Brit/Am. middle classes (women, poor, ethnic groups))
  4. attention to literature constructing identities and mythologies to become aware that there’s both African-Americanism and American-Africanism
  5. order is CONSTRUCTED
  6. aware of diversity of traditions forming literature (also Black British, Asian British, … writers).
  7. Contemporary literature is more global and attempts to see how the past has ordered (constructed) the present as well as understanding that complex present

= no attempt to create order out of chaos or a new order, as order itself is a constructed problem forming people and their identities

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11
Q

Middle English or Medieval Literature characteristics (7)

A
  1. narrative poems
  2. lyric poetry
  3. drama (miracle and morality plays)
  4. very Christian! (also after medieval period, but slowly disappears e.g. Edmund Spenser 1596, Faerie Queene)
  5. sophisticated
  6. women mystics
  7. pattern: gap between the Christian ideal and the reality of life in this imperfect world
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12
Q

Middle English or Medieval Literature time period

A

ca. 1066-1550

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13
Q

What are postmodernist characteristics (5)?

A
  1. refusal to distinguish between surface level and depth
  2. refusal to distinguish between high and low art
  3. stress on textual nature of events so that history is just another form of narrative
  4. endless playfulness about the writing that draws attention to itself
  5. open endings
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14
Q

Characteristics 18th C time period (5)

A
  1. God is still the only true source of order, but attention more on how people are distracted and tempted by secular concerns
  2. end of 17th C, focus entirely secular
  3. religious poetry replaced by social poetry
  4. rise of the novel (focus on social life, lives of individuals in a complex society and if harmony and balance can be created within society = Richardson and Fielding)
  5. pattern: gap between how things could or should be in society and how they really are
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15
Q

What are the historical periods of literature in English? (10 - 12 incl 2 side literatures)

A
  1. Old English or Anglo-Saxon literature
  2. Middle English or medieval literature
  3. Renaissance literature
  4. 18th C literature
  5. Romantic period literature
  6. Victorian literature
  7. late 19th and 20th C literature
  8. modernist literature
  9. (American literature)
  10. postmodernist literature
  11. postcolonial literature
  12. (African-American literature)
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16
Q

Examples American Literature

A
  1. Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  2. Ralph Waldo Emerson - essays
  3. Walt Whitman
  4. Emily Dickinson
  5. Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
  6. Melville - Moby Dick
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17
Q

What are some major writers/examples of postcolonial literature?

A
  • Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart)
  • Patrick White (The Eye of the Storm)
  • Keri Hulme’s (The Bone People)
  • Doris Lessing (The Grass is Singing)
  • Teju Cole (Open City)
  • …
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18
Q

Victorian literature events

A
  1. massive social reform through industrialization
  2. worldwide expansion trade creating complex society
  3. intellectual change (Darwin’s the Origin of Specis 1859) >< religion and science dominates
  4. Marx, Communis Manifesto + Das Kapital
  5. Freud’s psychoanalysis on the human psyche (and its complex often dark and hidden aspects)
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19
Q

What is a genre/generic context?

A

A genre context is the type or class of literature it is written in

20
Q

Late 19th and 20th C Literature time period

A

Late 19th-20th C (overlap with Victorian literature, but from 1890?s - 1999)

21
Q

renaissance literature or modern literature examples

A
  1. Shakespeare
  2. Marlowe
  3. Donne
  4. Jonson
  5. Milton
22
Q

Late 19th C - 20th C examples

A
  1. Thomas Hardy
  2. Joseph Conrad
  3. James Joyce
  4. Virginia Woolf
  5. Katherine Mansfield
  6. Dorothy Richardson
  7. Lawrence
  8. T.S. Eliot
  9. Yeats
23
Q

Middle English or Medieval literature important events

A

Events show stasis >< turbulent world

  1. Black Death 1348
  2. Peasant’s revolt 1381
  3. overthrow Richard II as king 1399
  4. Wars of the Roses 1455-85
24
Q

difference between American literature and English literature

A
  1. English novel emerged and comments on a society
    • English novel and poetry mostly return to safe, traditional, realistic forms as a reaction to two WO >< English drama discusses the changes
  2. American novel is not immersed in the same way. It takes on a symbolic journey (often into the mind)
    • American novel, poetry and drama all very strong, more experimental and innovating!
    • Often referred to as ‘romances’ because Am. writers move away from society and go into dream, myth and conjecture.
    • closer link with European culture near 20th C
    • after modernist era (1920s), American literature is way more adventurous than Eng. because it was less affected by WOI
    • shift away from fragmentary modernist art (like T.S. Eliot), attempting to find a new pattern when ordering life in postwar era
    • pattern broken again in WOII = further need to rethink ideas about social formation
25
Q

renaissance literature or modern literature events

A

Events present conflict between king’s traditional status and authority opposed to change of social order

  1. Civil War 1642-51
26
Q

18th C literature time period

A

ca. 1660-1790

27
Q

Late 19th C - 20th C literature characteristics (modernists) (4)

A
  1. not even the novel can confront life anymore
  2. life is overwhelmingly confusing and complicated, impossible to make sense of
  3. still decline of religious faith and thus no secure perspective or framework
  4. innovative/experimenting in poetry, novel (music, painting) through rapid change and alteration of society’s structure

= Events - WOI (14-18) –> tragic, terrifying and pure chaos

28
Q

Examples of modernists (part of late 19th -20th C literature)

A
  1. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (fractured society - poet that can find no order or consolation)
  2. Woolf
  3. Joyce

All are:

  1. innovative
  2. experimental
  3. fragmented
29
Q

Important events during Romantic Literature period that influenced its form

A

Events were mostly rebellious against the old order of things

  1. French Revolution 1789
  2. political reform in England ca. 1760
30
Q

Characteristics of Romantic Literature (5)

A
  1. reaction against the social focus of 18th C literature with its stress on social manners and regulation
  2. God nor society is source of order
  3. romantics want to find harmony in life which is at one with a pattern of the natural world
  4. stress on imagination, where source of order is internalized and the mind interacts with what is seen in nature (Wordsworth)
  5. life remains disordered and puzzling
31
Q

Renaissance literature or modern literature characteristics (4)

A
  1. 1600 onwards, language resembles our language
  2. focus on individuality and inwardness (// today)
  3. pattern: gap between Christian ideals and a new rapidly changing, dynamic society with self-interest of a new worldly-wise person (hergeboorte)
  4. tension between traditional order and disruption of that order (Hamlet, King Lear - Shakespeare, Paradise Lost - Milton)
32
Q

When is Postcolonial lit situated?

A

ca. 1970s

33
Q

Postcolonial literature?

A

General definition

all those literatures and cultures affected by the experience of colonisation

  1. (African nations
  2. Australia
  3. Canada
  4. Caribbean
  5. India
  6. Pakistan
  7. New Zealand
  8. islands of the Pacific
  9. Malaysia)
34
Q

Victorian literature characteristics (6)

A
  1. develops from (not reacting against) romantic literature
  2. romantic’s idea of autonomy of their own imagination disappears
  3. feeling of confusion
  4. despair, life is fragmented and too painful and no order can be found
  5. confidence in faith disappears completely (!)
  6. great age of the (Victorian) novel as it could expand enough to cope with the complexities of society and idea that novel can confront the whole of life (disappears with 19th/20th C lit)
35
Q

Examples of African-American literature?

A
  1. Alice Walker
  2. Toni Morrison
  3. James Baldwin
  4. Ralph Ellison
36
Q

American literature time period

A

Period really comes to life ca. 1850 (American independence 1776)

37
Q

Examples of Romantic Literature writers

A
  1. Jane Austen (although anomaly, as she primarily wrote realistic novels keeping at heart social order of 18th C lit)
  2. Blake
  3. Wordsworth
  4. Coleridge
  5. Keats
  6. Byron
  7. Shelly
38
Q

What are the characteristics of Postcolonial Literature (5)?

A
  1. mythic search for a new order different and distinctive from that of their imperial British colonizers
  2. awareness of the complex relationship with Britain
  3. need to use language in new ways to wrest control away from the colonizer
  4. gap between two cultures/values/ideas (// Englihs Renaissance) (colonizer-colonised), but also races (black-white, esp. SA lit)
  5. critique of too much of a Eurocentric orientation in African creative writing (e.g. writing in English, loss of cultural identity through extended associations with Britain)
39
Q

What are Anglo-Saxon/Old English literature examples

A
  1. Beowulf
    1. (king’s hall threatened by monster Grendel, Beowulf kills monster and its mother, fifty years later, dragon attacks his own kingdom, Beowulf kills it but dies himself)
  2. the prose Chronicles
  3. Christian poems such as ‘The Dream of the Rood’ and ‘The Battle of Maldon’
40
Q

Time period of Romantic literature

A

Period ca. 1790-1830

41
Q

What is a mode?

A

A mode is a recognised type or kind of work within a genre (such as a sonnet or the realistic novel)

42
Q

Postmodernist literature time period

A

ca. around the 1970s

43
Q

Middle English or Medieval Literature examples

A
  1. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
    • He’s a comic poet (!) and he enjoys and is amused by humanities imperfections against the ideals of Christianity
  2. Julian of Norwich (women mystics), Revelations of Divine Love.
    • The inward (more individual) need to understand God’s love in the face of doubt and evil, achieving stasis >< turbulent world
44
Q

What is a genre and what are the main divisions (before and now)?

A

It is a type or class of literature including works that have a great deal in common

the current main generic division is into poetry, drama and the novel (3)

It used to be epic, tragedy, lyric, comedy and satire (5)

45
Q

Examples 18th C Literature

A
  1. John Dryden
  2. Alexander Pope
  3. Samuel Richardson
  4. Henry Fielding
46
Q

Anglo-Saxon/Old English literature characteristics (3)

A
  1. Language resembles more German than English.
  2. Major mode in Old English literature is the narrative poem (specifically epic or tragic)
  3. larger meaning and pattern: tension between ideas of order and disorder. Trying to establish and maintain order in a threatening and disordered world
47
Q

examples of postmodernist literature

A
  1. Salman Rushdie
  2. D.M. Thomas
  3. Ian McEwan

Literary Terms and Criticism (5 decks)

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