Genres and Literary Movements
Aesthetic Movement
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
Augustan
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
Elizabethan
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
Fin de Sicele
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
Harlem Renaissance
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
Humanism
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
Imagism
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
Magical Realism
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
Neoclassicism
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
Neoplatonism
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
Pre-Raphaelitism
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
Reformation
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
Restoration
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
Victorian
- French for “end of the century,” this term may involve both the end of an era and the onset of another. It is a term often used to refer to the characteristic world-weary mood of European culture in the 1880’s and 1890’s, when writers and artists like Wilde and the French Symbolists under the slogan “art for art’s sake” (used in the aesthetic movement), adopted a decadent rejection of any moral or social function for art. Reacting against realism and naturalism, they sought a pure beauty entirely removed from the imperfections of nature and from the drabness of contemporary society. That the expression is in French probably comes from the fact that the fin de siècle is particularly associated with certain late 19th-century French-speaking circles in Paris and Brussels, exemplified by artists like Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Debussy, movements like Symbolism, and in works like Oscar Wilde's Salomé (originally written in French and premiered in Paris)—which connects the idea of the fin de siècle also to the Aesthetic movement. Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content. Thomas Hardy and George Moore addressed sexual desire head on in novels such as Jude the Obscure (1895) and Esther Waters (1894). Arguments for and against the New Woman did not always follow obvious lines. Many men found the idea of women making their own way in the world both sensible and desirable, while many women – the novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote under her married name Mrs Humphry Ward, being a notable example – were passionately against female emancipation and the threat it posed to the status quo of marriage and motherhood. Key Authors: Wilde, Mallarme, Symbolist movement etc.
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary, artistic, cultural, intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Although the center of the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, New York, its influence spread throughout the nation and beyond and included philosophers, artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, movie makers and institutions that “attempted to assert…a dissociation of sensibility from that enforced by the American culture and its institutions.” Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experiences of modern black life in the urban North. Key Authors: Langston Hughes (Theme for english B, Harlem), Nella Larsen Passing, (, Jean Toomer (Cane), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes were Watching God, The Gilded Six-Bits), Claude McKay (America, If we must die) etc.
The revival/adaptation of classical taste and style. A term especially used in French and English literature to describe the spirit underlying much work during the 17th and 18th centuries. Examples: Racine, Voltaire (Candide), Addison, Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, parody of a travel book), Pope (Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem). These works were formal and structured and relied on reason and rationality rather than emotions, following the classical model, and they were also often satirical and focused their art on humanity. Neoclassicism is opposed to Romanticism.
A 19th century European movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art and decorative arts. The arts should provide refined, sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Art should only need to be beautiful, not didactic. Its main point was to bring beauty into everyday life. It is a post-romantic and pre-modern movement. Wilde was the public face of aestheticism. Famous quote associated with aesthetic movement by French Poet Gautier “Art for art’s sake.” Developed by Baudelaire in France and Walter Pater in England.
-(16th- Early 17th Century): Was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England and saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in Poetry (as a new sonnet sequence was developed) and Drama. The Italian renaissance had rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman Theater, and therefore a new form of drama emerged out of this discovery (movement away from the old mystery/miracle plays of the middle ages). The Elizabethan age was an age of violence (embodied in Machiavelli’s The Prince), expansion and exploration. Many works reflected classical humanism, as well as the medieval tragic sense of life focusing on death. Key Authors: Shakespeare (also in the Jacobean age), Marlowe (tragedy of Dr. Faustus), Spencer etc.
This was a period during the mid to late 19thc during the reign of Victoria, from 1837-1901. This era is characterized as a long period of peace and economic, social, and industrial consolidation, though it may be divided into two phases, each roughly thirty years long. The first was charactertized by gradual political reforms, the rapid growth of industry, an enormous population increase, and the rise of the middle class, whose struggles with the working class and the aristocracy were to form the dominant theme of Victorian literature; and the second phase marked by declining birth rate, an increasingly jingoistic nationalism, mass unemployment and economic crisis, new science undermining religious conviction (Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859), and a growing disillusionment with traditional moral values seen in much of the literaure. An example of a Victorian writer would be Dickens (A Christmas Carol), or Elizabeth Barret Browning “A Musical Instrument” or Tennyson Lady of Shallot, who wrote Oliver Twist, exploring the plight of the poor, before writers like Tennyson celebrated the accomplishments of the age. By the last decade of the 19thc, the old verities were being assaulted by writers like Butler, Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, and others.
This term was introduced by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist who saw in magical realism the capacity to enrich our idea of what is “real” by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in myth, magic, and religion. This Latin American mode has since influenced writers around the world. Elements include shifts in time, surreal descriptions, surprise, abrupt shock, the horrific, and the inexplicable. Cien Años De Soledad Marquez, Julio Cortazar Bestiario.
(Late 17th century) Period of English literature beginning with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne in 1660 (the latter part of the seventeenth century is often referred to as the Restoration). Fashionable literature of the time reflects the reaction against Puritanism. Characterized by peace and openness along with the reopening of the theater, which led to numerous new works by Dryden and others. The comedy of manners was developed during this period, as was the heroic drama. Epic poetry also came into its own as shown by Milton’s Paradise Lost. Considered to have ended with the death of Dryden in 1700. Earl of Rochester’s sodom
During the Renaissance, this combined Platonic thought with Christian symbolism and Jewish mysticism into a single philosophical system (credit Plotinus, ancient philosopher during the 3rdc). Neoplatonism contributed to the idea of platonic, or spiritual, love, which allows for a closeness to God unlike purely physical love. Examples include Spenser (The Faerie Queene) and Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella). The fundamental concept of neoplatonism is unity, and it is based on the concept that there is truth as well as the idea that man can return to God through reason. Neoplatonism asserts three levels of reality, inspired by Aritstotle’s equation of being with intelligence: non-being (Nature, vegetative existence, sensible things); Being (intellect); and Beyond Being (The One, The Good). Union can be achieved with the last, most “real” level. These ideas were found highly congenial by the developing Christian philosophy • Platonism- This is based on the ideas of 4th century BC Athenian philosopher Plato, who argued the universe is divided into two realms of existence: perceptible reality which is not intelligible and reality which is not perceptible but is intelligible. The physical is an imperfect imitation of the world of external form, merely a copy of reality, while literature is an imitation of the physical and therefore is twice removed from reality. Plato’s core philosophy deals with the doctrine of ideas and the belief that, through the soul, the mediator between ideas and appearances, one may obtain knowledge. Ex. Plato’s Symposium and republic
Established in 1848 to protest against the prevailing conventions of painting (Italian artist Raphael painted realistically, academic painting, but the PRB claimed this was not how reality looked but merely how painting was “supposed” to look. They added an element of spirituality and luminosity, often derived from literature) and led to a literary movement, primarily in poetry. The poetry of the Brotherhood, most notably that of Christina Rossetti, tended to treat medieval or mystical themes in a sensuous, symbolic narrative verse, rich in pictorial detail. Dante Rosetti (The House of Life) and Thomas Wollner (Pygmalion and My Beautiful Lady)
The literature of this 16thc period was profoundly influenced by the religious result of the Renaissance, and the term most commonly describes the Protestant reform of 16thc European Christianity. Martin Luther was a major figure during the Reformation, along with John Calvin. The era involved questioning the role of the Church as a mediator between the individual and God and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the individual and the divine. Instructional pamphlets required widespread literacy and, as a result, transformed the audience and the subject matter of literature in early modern Europe.
Is a theory of poetry coined by Ezra Pound at the beginning of the 20th century (think: In a Station at the Metro) focusing on precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century and yet as Rene Taupin remarked 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principle' or as has so aptly said of it 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development. Imagism greatly influenced trends in modern poetry and was influenced by medieval philosophy, the aesthetics of Henri Bergson, and Japanese poetry (Haiku), yet was primarily a reaction against the stultified forms and bucolic sentimentality of the Georgians. Another example: William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow). Key Authors: Ezra Pound (in a station of the metro), Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams etc
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in Europe of the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. This school of thought and attitude of the mind was the heart of the Renaissance in the 16th century and took its name from the studia humanitatis, or studies in grammar, poetry, moral philosophy, rhetoric, and history thought to possess human value and the ability to make man “higher,” thus elevated above lower animals. Humanism used ideals of the European Renaissance which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. It developed a positive perspective of man and inspired revival of Greek and Roman history, art and philosophy. Petrarch was identified as the first Renaissance humanist, as he believed that “the centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age of Darkness". According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this situation was the careful study and imitation of the great classical authors, such as Cicero. The return to favor of the pagan classics stimulated the philosophy of secularism, the appreciation of worldly pleasures, and above all intensified the assertion of personal independence and individual expression. Zeal for the classics was a result as well as a cause of the growing secular view of life. Key Authors/texts- Petrarch (Petrarchan Sonnet 134, Ascent of Mont Ventoux)
Originally a period during the Roman emperor Augustus from 27BC to 14AD. Virgil, Horace and Ovid are well known poets from the time. Notable period of high culture during which the perfection of letters and learning were of great importance (Ovid, Virgil, and Horace). The Augustan period lasted from the ascension of Queen Anne to the throne in 1702, to the deaths of Pope and Swift in 1744-45. The Augustans wrote in conscious emulation of Romans, adopted their literary form (ex. Epistle and satire), and aimed to create a similarly sophisticated urban literary milieu. Characteristics preference was writing about the public affairs and coffee-house gossip of London. Wit and intellectual conceits shaped the tone of much Augustan writing (following on from the clever arguments of the metaphysical poets). Satire had already been a feature of Restoration literature, prior to the Augustan era, but at that time it was more circumscribed due to threat of prosecution for defamation. In the eighteenth century, satire and parody were more widely used across the spectrum of prose, poetry and dramatic works. Poets also bantered and argued over what should be the proper modes of poetic expression, and which topics were worthy of the art form. One such debate was about the role of the pastoral, for example.
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