"There will be time... time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions..." -Eliot
Literary Terms & Time Periods
Theme: A central idea. The general topic of discussion. The thesis. Both "theme" and "thesis" imply a predicate of some kind; for example, "human wishes" is an example of a topic or subject, but it is not in itself a "theme". "The vanity of human wishes" could be a theme...
Tone: attitudes toward the subject and toward the audience implied in a literary work. It can be formal, informal, intimate, solemn, somber, playful, serious, ironic, condescending, etc...
Mood: The emotional-intellecutal attitude of the author toward the subject. While tone is the attitude of the author toward the audience, the mood is the attitude of the author toward the subject.
Setting: The background against which the action takes place. Elements that make up setting are: geographical location, topography, scenery, and physical arrangements (where a window is, for example); it can also be the occupations and daily manner of living of the characters, teh time period, the general envrironment of the characters, or religious, mental, moral, social, and emotional conditions.
Plot: A pattern of events; an intellectual formulation about the relations among the incidents, and is therefore the guiding principle for the author and an ordering control for the reader.
Character: Fictional representation of a person.
Protagonist: Pinciple character, the hero.
Antagonist: Character in conflict with the Protagonist; the villain.
Round/Flat: Round are well-developed, flat are not. Flat characters are often stereotypical or sometimes foils. Foils are minor characters who are contrasted with the main character in order to highlight the main character further. Dynamic characters can grow and change over the course of the action; static ones remain unchanged.
Genre: Category of Literature. The main ones are fiction, drama, and story; subgenres include novel, farce, lyric poem, etc. Subgenres are more specific types.
Conflict: Struggle between the opposing forces (protagonist vs. antagonist) in a work of literature. Other conflicts include man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, etc.
Point of View: Perspective from which the story is told. The storyteller can be a character in the story (1st person), someone not in the action (3rd person), know everythign about everyone in the action (omniscient), know only parts (limited omniscient), and rarely you can have a 2nd person narrator (uses "you")... can also be an observor or participant, unreliable narrators are untrustworthy, stupid, or bad... or naive, like children, for example.
Symbol: Person, object, action, or idea who meaning transcends the literal or denotative sense in a complex way. Universal symbols are called archetypes (ex. Grim Reaper), conventional symbols (like flags) evoke a general response from most people.
Motif: a recurrent thematic element in a work (ex. Rain).
Allusion: Reference in LIT to history, myth, etc. that is unacknowledged in teh text but that the author expects the reader to recognize.
Literary Conventions: meanigns so widely understood that authors expect the audience to expect it (like the division of plays into acts).
Literary Criticism: Descriptions, analyses, interpretations, etc. of works of LIT by experts in the field.
Literary Periods:
Greeks & Romans (450 B.C.-A.D. 400)
Our Western critical tradition begins with the Greeks. The works of Plato and Aristotle were among the most influential from the period. Aristotle's "Poetics" offered to us how literature imitates life, how an audience responds to pity and fear in tragedy, and how a well-written play is constructed, generally, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. The works of Homer "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" are some of the oldest written texts.
Old English Period: Lasts from the invasion of England by tribes (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) in 428 until Norman rule around 1100, when William the Conquerer led the Norman French in triumph. Although much writing was in Latin, Christian monks began writing in the vernacular called "Old English" around 700. In the earliest part of the period, poetry was centered on the life of the Germanic tribes and was basically Pagan, with limited Christian elements. The best of the surviving poems are the epic "Beowulf" and "The Seafarer". Under Alfred the Great, much of the Latin LIT was translated into English prose, including Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy" and Bede's "Ecclesiastical History. In 1066, the Norman Conquest put an end to serious literary work in the OE language.
Middle English Period: The period in Engl. LIT between the replacement of French by Middle English as the language of the court and early appearances of definitely Modern English writings. The Age of Chaucer (1340-1400) - the first great English poet- was marked by political and religious unrest. The great cycles of Mystery Plays also flourished, and at the end of the period, there was a preoccupation with the newly founded concept of "morality". Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", "Le Morte D'Arthur", & "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" are among the best of the period.
The religious themes that encompassed much of the literature of the era was partly due to the fact that only the clergy were educated at this time, and for the most part, they believed that the role of literature was to instruct people to lead a vituous life. The '. Morality' and 'Mystery' plays of the time are examples of this. Exceptions to this are teh French romances, which depicted adventures undertaken in the causes of love, and of course, Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales".
Renaissance: (1500-1660, approximately). This is the age of Shakespeare (and Milton). It was a period of transition from the Medieval to the Modern world and is characterized by an impact of classical learnign and foreign literature, and some release from church authority. The period is broken up into the Early Tudor, the Elizabethan, and the Jacobean and Caroline ages. Drama and poetry attained great heights during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It was also a time of individualism.
Enlightenment: (18th century, 17th century movement) particularly in France, but also in much of Europe and America. It celebrated reason, the scientific method, and human beings' ability to perfect themselves and their society. It grew out of intellectual attainments including Newton's discoveries and the philosophy of Descartes, Bacon, and Locke. The major champions of its beliefs were called the Philosophes, and they believed in the faith of human rationality and the existence of discoverable and universally valid principles governing humans, nature, and society. They opposed intolerance, restraint, spiritual authority, and revealed religion; they were deists. The leading writers of the time were Voltaire (France), Swift and Pope (England) and in America, the works of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. The Enlightenment paved the way for the French and American revolutions, and its ideas are reflected in the "Declaration of Independence" and "The Constitution".
Romanticism: (19th c, 1800's movement) that marked the reaction to formal orthodoxy. Victor Hugo described it as "liberalism in literature"- the freeing of the writer from restraints and rules suggesting that phase of individualism marked by the spirit of revolution. It stressed imagination over reason and provided an escape from reality. Aspects of it included sensibility, primitivism, love of nature, interest in the past, and individualism. It has roots in the 18th c but is fully realized in the 19th c with the works of the great Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats... and with Jane Austen and like writers in LIT. It took form in America with the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman and Dickinson. It tends to place the individual at the center of ALL life and in art, making LIT valuable as an expression of feelings and attitudes. It seeks to find the absolute, the ideal, by transcending the actual (whereas Realism would find its value in the actual, and Naturalism in scientific laws).
Victorian Period: (1837-1901) is named for the period of LIT written during the reign of Queen Victoria and to suggest a certain complacency, hypocrisy, or squeamishness assumed to characterize Victorian attitudes. Prudery led to an exaggeration in costume, furnishings, and architecture in this period that was characterized by pride in England's growing powers, optimism from new science, the dominance of Puritan ideals held by teh middle class, and the example fo a royal court seemingly adhering to high standards of decency. This produced a spirit of moral earnestness linked with self-satisfaction, all of which was protested against both at that time and with generations to follow, as being hypocritical, false, narrow, smug and mean. Mid-Vic writers were prone to treat matters such as profanity and sex in a very cautious manner, which made the term "Victorian" stand for false modesty, empty respectability, and callous complancency.
The period did see a rise in publication, a new middle class, industrialization, and other changes in society. Writers like Oscar Wilde (England) and Baudelaire & the Symbolists (France) retreated to a world of art and denied connection with anything else. They attempted to connect their writing with a spiritual world they believed existed but was not accessible by science or the constraints of the new "modern" society. Darwin also was influential in the period.
Modernism: (the period that we will study most in this class) begins with WWI in 1914 and ends around 1965. The era is marked by the strenunousness of the experience of war and a flowering of talent and experiment that grew out of it. The period saw the economic boom of the 1920's and the fall, the economic depression of the 1930's. The years of WWII were profoundly negative and were followed by a period of great uncertainty. A new fiction in the experimental examination of the inner self came about (Viginia Woolf, James Joyce). Others protested against the nature of modern society (D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley), while the short story was practiced with distinction (Hemingway). The greatest changes came with poetray; Yeats, Eliot, and Pound are the most distinguished of the Modern Poets. Eliot's "The Waste Land" was the most significant publication of the time. Modernism implies historical discontinuity, alienation, loss and despair. It rejects history, traditional values and assumptions, and elevates the individual and the inward over the social and the outward. It is preoccupied with the unconscious (Freud and Jung) in reaction to realism. Existentialism is the schema within much of modern temper can see a reflection of its attitudes and assumptions.
Postmodernism: (1965-??): The literature experienced a shift during a time of anger and protest. People began to deal with emotions outwardly rather than rely solely on self-reflection. It embraces experimentation and takes the assumptions of Modernism to new heights. There is a denial of order, presentation of the universe as chaos, a sense of play, chance, anarchy, the process and participation of art, and a disordering. The dissatisfaction is very much there but manifested differently.
Theme: A central idea. The general topic of discussion. The thesis. Both "theme" and "thesis" imply a predicate of some kind; for example, "human wishes" is an example of a topic or subject, but it is not in itself a "theme". "The vanity of human wishes" could be a theme...
Tone: attitudes toward the subject and toward the audience implied in a literary work. It can be formal, informal, intimate, solemn, somber, playful, serious, ironic, condescending, etc...
Mood: The emotional-intellecutal attitude of the author toward the subject. While tone is the attitude of the author toward the audience, the mood is the attitude of the author toward the subject.
Setting: The background against which the action takes place. Elements that make up setting are: geographical location, topography, scenery, and physical arrangements (where a window is, for example); it can also be the occupations and daily manner of living of the characters, teh time period, the general envrironment of the characters, or religious, mental, moral, social, and emotional conditions.
Plot: A pattern of events; an intellectual formulation about the relations among the incidents, and is therefore the guiding principle for the author and an ordering control for the reader.
Character: Fictional representation of a person.
Protagonist: Pinciple character, the hero.
Antagonist: Character in conflict with the Protagonist; the villain.
Round/Flat: Round are well-developed, flat are not. Flat characters are often stereotypical or sometimes foils. Foils are minor characters who are contrasted with the main character in order to highlight the main character further. Dynamic characters can grow and change over the course of the action; static ones remain unchanged.
Genre: Category of Literature. The main ones are fiction, drama, and story; subgenres include novel, farce, lyric poem, etc. Subgenres are more specific types.
Conflict: Struggle between the opposing forces (protagonist vs. antagonist) in a work of literature. Other conflicts include man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, etc.
Point of View: Perspective from which the story is told. The storyteller can be a character in the story (1st person), someone not in the action (3rd person), know everythign about everyone in the action (omniscient), know only parts (limited omniscient), and rarely you can have a 2nd person narrator (uses "you")... can also be an observor or participant, unreliable narrators are untrustworthy, stupid, or bad... or naive, like children, for example.
Symbol: Person, object, action, or idea who meaning transcends the literal or denotative sense in a complex way. Universal symbols are called archetypes (ex. Grim Reaper), conventional symbols (like flags) evoke a general response from most people.
Motif: a recurrent thematic element in a work (ex. Rain).
Allusion: Reference in LIT to history, myth, etc. that is unacknowledged in teh text but that the author expects the reader to recognize.
Literary Conventions: meanigns so widely understood that authors expect the audience to expect it (like the division of plays into acts).
Literary Criticism: Descriptions, analyses, interpretations, etc. of works of LIT by experts in the field.
Literary Periods:
Greeks & Romans (450 B.C.-A.D. 400)
Our Western critical tradition begins with the Greeks. The works of Plato and Aristotle were among the most influential from the period. Aristotle's "Poetics" offered to us how literature imitates life, how an audience responds to pity and fear in tragedy, and how a well-written play is constructed, generally, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. The works of Homer "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" are some of the oldest written texts.
Old English Period: Lasts from the invasion of England by tribes (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) in 428 until Norman rule around 1100, when William the Conquerer led the Norman French in triumph. Although much writing was in Latin, Christian monks began writing in the vernacular called "Old English" around 700. In the earliest part of the period, poetry was centered on the life of the Germanic tribes and was basically Pagan, with limited Christian elements. The best of the surviving poems are the epic "Beowulf" and "The Seafarer". Under Alfred the Great, much of the Latin LIT was translated into English prose, including Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy" and Bede's "Ecclesiastical History. In 1066, the Norman Conquest put an end to serious literary work in the OE language.
Middle English Period: The period in Engl. LIT between the replacement of French by Middle English as the language of the court and early appearances of definitely Modern English writings. The Age of Chaucer (1340-1400) - the first great English poet- was marked by political and religious unrest. The great cycles of Mystery Plays also flourished, and at the end of the period, there was a preoccupation with the newly founded concept of "morality". Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", "Le Morte D'Arthur", & "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" are among the best of the period.
The religious themes that encompassed much of the literature of the era was partly due to the fact that only the clergy were educated at this time, and for the most part, they believed that the role of literature was to instruct people to lead a vituous life. The '. Morality' and 'Mystery' plays of the time are examples of this. Exceptions to this are teh French romances, which depicted adventures undertaken in the causes of love, and of course, Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales".
Renaissance: (1500-1660, approximately). This is the age of Shakespeare (and Milton). It was a period of transition from the Medieval to the Modern world and is characterized by an impact of classical learnign and foreign literature, and some release from church authority. The period is broken up into the Early Tudor, the Elizabethan, and the Jacobean and Caroline ages. Drama and poetry attained great heights during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It was also a time of individualism.
Enlightenment: (18th century, 17th century movement) particularly in France, but also in much of Europe and America. It celebrated reason, the scientific method, and human beings' ability to perfect themselves and their society. It grew out of intellectual attainments including Newton's discoveries and the philosophy of Descartes, Bacon, and Locke. The major champions of its beliefs were called the Philosophes, and they believed in the faith of human rationality and the existence of discoverable and universally valid principles governing humans, nature, and society. They opposed intolerance, restraint, spiritual authority, and revealed religion; they were deists. The leading writers of the time were Voltaire (France), Swift and Pope (England) and in America, the works of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. The Enlightenment paved the way for the French and American revolutions, and its ideas are reflected in the "Declaration of Independence" and "The Constitution".
Romanticism: (19th c, 1800's movement) that marked the reaction to formal orthodoxy. Victor Hugo described it as "liberalism in literature"- the freeing of the writer from restraints and rules suggesting that phase of individualism marked by the spirit of revolution. It stressed imagination over reason and provided an escape from reality. Aspects of it included sensibility, primitivism, love of nature, interest in the past, and individualism. It has roots in the 18th c but is fully realized in the 19th c with the works of the great Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats... and with Jane Austen and like writers in LIT. It took form in America with the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman and Dickinson. It tends to place the individual at the center of ALL life and in art, making LIT valuable as an expression of feelings and attitudes. It seeks to find the absolute, the ideal, by transcending the actual (whereas Realism would find its value in the actual, and Naturalism in scientific laws).
Victorian Period: (1837-1901) is named for the period of LIT written during the reign of Queen Victoria and to suggest a certain complacency, hypocrisy, or squeamishness assumed to characterize Victorian attitudes. Prudery led to an exaggeration in costume, furnishings, and architecture in this period that was characterized by pride in England's growing powers, optimism from new science, the dominance of Puritan ideals held by teh middle class, and the example fo a royal court seemingly adhering to high standards of decency. This produced a spirit of moral earnestness linked with self-satisfaction, all of which was protested against both at that time and with generations to follow, as being hypocritical, false, narrow, smug and mean. Mid-Vic writers were prone to treat matters such as profanity and sex in a very cautious manner, which made the term "Victorian" stand for false modesty, empty respectability, and callous complancency.
The period did see a rise in publication, a new middle class, industrialization, and other changes in society. Writers like Oscar Wilde (England) and Baudelaire & the Symbolists (France) retreated to a world of art and denied connection with anything else. They attempted to connect their writing with a spiritual world they believed existed but was not accessible by science or the constraints of the new "modern" society. Darwin also was influential in the period.
Modernism: (the period that we will study most in this class) begins with WWI in 1914 and ends around 1965. The era is marked by the strenunousness of the experience of war and a flowering of talent and experiment that grew out of it. The period saw the economic boom of the 1920's and the fall, the economic depression of the 1930's. The years of WWII were profoundly negative and were followed by a period of great uncertainty. A new fiction in the experimental examination of the inner self came about (Viginia Woolf, James Joyce). Others protested against the nature of modern society (D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley), while the short story was practiced with distinction (Hemingway). The greatest changes came with poetray; Yeats, Eliot, and Pound are the most distinguished of the Modern Poets. Eliot's "The Waste Land" was the most significant publication of the time. Modernism implies historical discontinuity, alienation, loss and despair. It rejects history, traditional values and assumptions, and elevates the individual and the inward over the social and the outward. It is preoccupied with the unconscious (Freud and Jung) in reaction to realism. Existentialism is the schema within much of modern temper can see a reflection of its attitudes and assumptions.
Postmodernism: (1965-??): The literature experienced a shift during a time of anger and protest. People began to deal with emotions outwardly rather than rely solely on self-reflection. It embraces experimentation and takes the assumptions of Modernism to new heights. There is a denial of order, presentation of the universe as chaos, a sense of play, chance, anarchy, the process and participation of art, and a disordering. The dissatisfaction is very much there but manifested differently.
