Literary Terms #8 Literary Movements

1. Literary Terms #8Literary Movements AP English Literature and Composition Hilltop High School Mrs. Demangos

2. Classical Period 1200 BC-455 AD • Homeric or Heroic Period: Greek legends are passed along orally, including Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. This is a chaotic period of warrior-princes, wandering sea traders, and fierce pirates.

3. Classical Period • Classical Greek Period (800-200 BC) Greek writers, playwrights, and philosophers such as Gorgias, Aesop, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Euripides, and Sophocles. The fifth century is renowned as the Golden Age f Greece. This is the sophisticated period of the polis, or City-State, and early democracy. Some of the world’s finest art, drama, architecture, and philosophy originate in Athens.

4. Classical Period • Classical Roman Period (200 BC-455 AD) The Roman Republic was founded in 509 BC. After nearly 500 years as a Republic, Rome slides into dictatorship under Julius Caesar and monarchial empire under Caesar Augustus in 27 AD. This later period is known as the Roman Imperial period. Writers include: Ovid, Horace, and Virgil. Roman philosophers include Marcus Aurelius and Lucretius. Roman rhetoricians include Cicero and Quintilian.

5. Classical Period • Patristic Period (70 AD-455 AD) Early Christian writing appear such as Saint Augustine, Tertullian, Saint Cyprian, Saint Ambrose and Saint Jerome. This is the period in which Saint Jerome compiles the Bible, when Christianity spreads across Europe, and the Roman Empire suffers its dying convulsions. In this period, barbarians attack Rome in 410 AD and the city finally falls to them completely in 455 AD.

6. Medieval Period • Anglo-Saxon Period (428-1066) The so-called “Dark Ages” occur when Rome falls and barbarian tribes move into Europe. Franks, Ostrogoths, Lombards, and Goths settle in the ruins of Europe and the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes migrate to Britain displacing native Celts into Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Early Old English poems such as Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer originate sometime late in the Anglo-Saxon period.

7. Medieval Period • Middle English Period (1066-1450) In 1066 the Norman French armies invade and conquer England under William I. This marks the end of the Anglo-Saxon hierarchy and the emergence of the Twelfth Century Renaissance. French chivalric romances—such as works by Chretien de Troyes—and French fables—such as the works of Marie de Fance and Jeun de Meun—spread in popularity.

8. Medieval Period • “High” Medieval Period (1200-1485) This often tumultuous period is marked by the Middle English writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, the “Gawain” or “Pearl” Poet, the Wakefield Master, and William Langland. Other writers include the Italian and French authors like Boccaccio, Petrarch, Dante, and Christine de Pisan.

9. Renaissance • 14th-17th Century, rebirth of humanism. • French word meaning rebirth • used to designate the period in European history beginning in Italy in the 14th century.

10. Renaissance • The term originally described a period of cultural, technological, and artistic vitality during the economic expansion in Britain in the late 1500s and early 1600s.

11. Renaissance • Thinkers at this time and later saw themselves as rediscovering and redistributing the legacy of classical Greco-Roman culture by renewing forgotten studies and artistic practices, hence the name "renaissance" or "rebirth." • They believed they were breaking with the days of "ignorance" and "superstition" represented by medieval thinking, and returning to a golden age akin to that of the ancient Greeks and Romans from centuries earlier--a cultural idea that will eventually culminate in the Enlightenment of the late 1600s up until about 1799 or so.

12. Renaissance • The Renaissance saw the rise of new poetic forms in the sonnet and a flowering of drama in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe.

13. English Renaissance • Early Tudor Period (1485-1558) Martin Luther’s split with Rome marks the emergence of Protestantism; Edmund Spence is a sample poet. • Elizabethan Period (1558-1603) the years that "Good Queen Bess" (Queen Elizabeth I) ruled and saved England from both the Spanish invasion and internal squabbles at home. The early works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kydd, and Sidney mark Elizabeth’s reign.

14. English Renaissance • Jacobean Period (1603-1625) in which King James I ruled. (The Latin form of James is Jacobus, hence the name Jacobean). Includes Shakespeare’s later work, AemiliaLanyer, Ben Jonson, and John Donne. • Caroline Age (1625-1649): John Milton, George Herbert, Robert Herrick and others write during the reign of Charles I and his Cavaliers.

15. English Renaissance • Commonwealth Period or Puritan Interregnum (1649-1660) Under Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan dictatorship, John Milton continues to write, but we also find writers like Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Browne.

16. Neoclassicism • Restoration—18th Century, order & reason • Enlightenment: the philosophical and artistic movement growing out of the Renaissance and continuing until the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment was an optimistic belief that humanity could improve itself by applying logic and reason to all things.

17. Neoclassicism • It rejected untested beliefs, superstition, and the "barbarism" of the earlier medieval period, and embraced the literary, architectural, and artistic forms of the Greco-Roman world. Enlightenment thinkers were enchanted by the perfection of geometry and mathematics, and by all things harmonious and balanced.

18. Neoclassicism • Restoration Period (1660-1700) This period marks the restoration of Charles II after a long period of Puritan domination in England led by Oliver Cromwell. Dominance of French and Classical influences on poetry and drama is evident. Writers include: John Dryden, John Lock, Sir William Temple, Samuel Pepys, and AphraBehn in England. Abroad, representative authors include Jean Racine and Molière.

19. Neoclassicism • The Augustan Age (1700-1750) This period is marked by the imitation of Virgil and Horace’s literature in English letters. The principal English writers include Addison, Steele, Swift, and Alexander Pope. Abroad, Voltaire is the dominant French writer.

20. Neoclassicism • The period's poetry, as typified by Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and others, attempted to create perfect, clockwork regularity in meter. Typically, these Enlightenment writers would use satire to ridicule what they felt were illogical errors in government, social custom, and religious belief.

21. Neoclassicism • In America, this period is called the Colonial Period. It includes colonial and revolutionary writers like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine.

22. Neoclassicism • The Age of Johnson (1750-1790) This period marks the transition toward Romanticism. Major writers include Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and Edward Gibbon, all who represent Neoclassical tendencies, while writers like Robert Burns, Thomas Gray, Cowper, and Crabbe show movement away from the Neoclassical ideal.

23. Romanticism • 18th—19th century • Imagination over reason

24. Romanticism • the artistic philosophy prevalent during the first third of the nineteenth century (about 1800-1830). Romanticism rejected the earlier philosophy of the Enlightenment, which stressed that logic and reason were the best response humans had in the face of cruelty, stupidity, superstition, and barbarism. Instead, the Romantics asserted that reliance upon emotion and natural passions provided a valid and powerful means of knowing and a reliable guide to ethics and living.

25. Romanticism • The Romantic movement typically asserts the unique nature of the individual, the privileged status of imagination and fancy, the value of spontaneity over "artifice" and "convention," the human need for emotional outlets, the rejection of civilized corruption, and a desire to return to natural primitivism and escape the spiritual destruction of urban life. Their writings often are set in rural, pastoral or Gothic settings and they show an obsessive concern with "innocent" characters--children, young lovers, and animals.

26. Realism • Verisimilitude • Am elastic and ambiguous term with two meaining. • First, it refers generally to any artistic or literary portrayal of life in a faithful, accurate manner, unclouded by false ideals, literary conventions, or misplaced aesthetic glorification and beautification of the world.

27. Realism • It is a theory or tendency in writing to depict events in human life in a matter-of-fact, straightforward manner. It is an attempt to reflect life "as it actually is"--a concept in some ways similar to what the Greeks would call mimesis.

28. Realism • Typically, "realism" involves careful description of everyday life, "warts and all," often the lives of middle and lower class characters in the case of socialist realism. • In general, realism seeks to avoid supernatural, transcendental, or surreal events. It tends to focus as much on the everyday, the mundane, and the normal as events that are extraordinary, exceptional, or extreme.

29. Realism • Secondly and more specifically, realism refers to a literary movement in America, Europe, and England that developed out of naturalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

30. Realism • Although realism and the concern for aspects of verisimilitude have been components of literary art to one degree or another in nearly all centuries, the term realism also applies more specifically to the tendency to create detailed, probing analyses of the way "things really are," usually involving an emphasis on nearly photographic details, the author's inclusion of in-depth psychological traits for his or her characters, and an attempt to create a literary facsimile of human existence unclouded by convention, cliché, formulaic traits of genre, sentiment, or the earlier extremes of naturalism.

31. Naturalism • Extreme Realism • A literary movement seeking to depict life as accurately as possible, without artificial distortions of emotion, idealism, and literary convention. The school of thought is a product of post-Darwinian biology in the nineteenth century. It asserts that human beings exist entirely in the order of nature.

32. Naturalism • Human beings do not have souls or any mode of participating in a religious or spiritual world beyond the biological realm of nature, and any such attempts to engage in a religious or spiritual world are acts of self-delusion and wish-fulfillment.

33. Naturalism • Humanity is thus a higher order animal whose character and behavior are entirely determined by two kinds of forces, hereditary and environment. The individual's compulsive instincts toward sexuality, hunger, and accumulation of goods are inherited via genetic compulsion and the social and economic forces surrounding his or her upbringing.

34. Naturalism • Naturalistic writers--including Zola, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser--try to present their subjects with scientific objectivity.

35. Naturalism • They often choose characters based on strong animal drives who are "victims both of glandular secretions within and of sociological pressures without" . • Typically, naturalist writers avoid explicit emotional commentary in favor of medical frankness about bodily functions and biological activities that would be almost unmentionable during earlier literary movements like transcendentalism, Romanticism, and mainstream Victorian literature.

36. Naturalism • The end of the naturalistic novel is usually unpleasant or unhappy, perhaps even "tragic," though not in the cathartic sense Aristotle, Sophocles, or Elizabethan writers would have understood by the term tragedy. • Naturalists emphasize the smallness of humanity in the universe; they remind readers of the immensity, power, and cruelty of the natural world, which does not care whether humanity lives or dies.

37. Examples of this include Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat," which pits a crew of shipwrecked survivors in a raft against starvation, dehydration, and sharks in the middle of the ocean, and Jack London's "To Build a Fire," which reveals the inability of a Californian transplant to survive outside of his "natural" environment as he freezes to death in the Alaskan wilderness.

38. Existentialism • Human inadequate to explain the complex world • A twentieth-century philosophy arguing that ethical human beings are in a sense cursed with absolute free will in a purposeless universe. Therefore, individuals must fashion their own sense of meaning in life instead of relying thoughtlessly on religious, political, and social conventions. These merely provide a façade of meaning according to existential philosophy. Those who rely on such conventions without thinking through them deny their own ethical responsibilities.

39. Existentialism • The basic principles of existentialism are: (1) a concern with man's essential being and nature, (2) an idea that existential "angst" or "anguish" is the common lot of all thinking humans who see the essential meaninglessness of transitory human life, (3) the belief that thought and logic are insufficient to cope with existence, and (4) the conviction that a true sense of morality can only come from honestly facing the dilemma of existential freedom and participating in life actively and positively.

40. Existentialism • The ethical idea is that, if the universe is essentially meaningless, and human existence does not matter in the long run, then the only thing that can provide a moral backdrop is humanity itself, and neglecting to build and encourage such morality is neglecting our duty to ourselves and to each other.

41. Magical Realism • Begins real, gets weird • In 1925, Franz Roh first applied the term "magic realism" (magischerRealismus in German) to a group of neueSaqchlichkeit painters in Munich. These painters blended realistic, smoothly painted, sharply defined figures and objects--but in a surrealistic setting or backdrop, giving them an outlandish, odd, or even dream-like quality.

42. Magical Realsim • In the 1940s and 1950s, the term migrated to the prose fiction of various writers including Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, Gabriel Garcia Márquez in Colombia, and AlejoCarpentier in Cuba. The influence also spread later to Günter Grass in Germany and John Fowles in England.

43. Magical Realism • These postmodern writers mingle and juxtapose realistic events with fantastic ones, or they experiment with shifts in time and setting, "labyrinthine narratives and plots" and "arcane erudition", and often they combine myths and fairy stories with gritty Hemingway-esque detail. This mixture create truly dreamlike and bizarre effects in their prose.

44. An example of magic realism would be Gabriel Garcia Márquez's short story, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," a narrative in which a fisherman discovers a filthy, lice-ridden old man trapped face-down in the muddy shore of the beach, weighed down by enormous buzzard wings attached to his back. A neighbor identifies the old man as an angel who had come down to claim the fisherman's sick and feverish child but who had been knocked out the sky by storm winds during the previous night. Not having the heart to club the sickly angel to death, the protagonist decides instead to keep the supernatural being captive in a chicken coop. The very premise of the story reveals much of the flavor of magic realism.

45. Expressionism • Objectify inner experience • In literature, expressionism is often considered a revolt against realism and naturalism, seeking to achieve a psychological or spiritual reality rather than record external events in logical sequence. In the novel, the term is closely allied to the writing of Franz Kafka and James Joyce (see stream of consciousness).

46. Sources • expressionism: In Literature | Infoplease.comhttp://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/entertainment/expressionism-in-literature.html#ixzz2yEtOxBoB • http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_A.html