Frontloading Literary Periods

Question 1

Medieval Literature

500s AD - 14/15th century

Answer 1

Characterists:

• Mostly Religious
• Full of Allegory

Authors:
-Geoffrey Chaucer
-Margery Kompe
Poets:
-Geoffrey Chaucer
-John Gower

Question 2

Renaissance Literature

14th - 17th century

Answer 2

Characteristics:

• Development of humanistic ideas, dignity of man
• platonic ideas

Authors/Poets:

• William Shakespeare
• Nicholas Machiavelli
• Christopher Marlowe

Question 3

The Enlightenment Period

17th - early 19th century

Answer 3

Characteristics:

• Emphasis on reason
• free skepticism

Authors:
-Thomas Hobbes
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Poets:
-Alexander Pope
-John Milton

Question 4

Romanticism

end of 18th century

Answer 4

Characteristics:

• celebration of nature
• focus on the individual and spirituality
• isolation and melancholy

Authors/Poets:

• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Immanuel Kant

Question 5

Gothic Literature

late 1700s

Answer 5

Characteristics:

• Mystery and Fear
• Huge focus on atmosphere and setting

Authors/Poets:

• Edgar Allan Poe
• Mary Shelley
• Bram Stoker
• Victor Hugo

Question 6

Transcendentalism

Answer 6

Characteristics
-characterized by equality, Individualism, Self-Reliance, Integrity, and Optimism

Authors/Poets:

• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Walt Whitman

Question 7

The Victorian Period

1837-1901

Answer 7

Characteristics:

• Class and status counscious
• idealization of difficult lives where perseverance wins in the end

Authors/poets:

• Charles Dickens
• George Elliot
• Alfred Tennyson
• Charlotte Brontë

Question 8

Realism

1865-1900

Answer 8

Characters:

• life without perfection
• characters usually poor or middle class

Authors/poets

• Mark Twain
• Stephen Crane
• Machado de Assis
• Henrik Ibsen

Question 9

Naturalism

1865-1900

Answer 9

Characteristics:

• Novels
• Determinism
• Social Environment

Authors:

• Émile Zola
• Stephen Crane
• John Steinbeck
• Theodore Dreiser

Question 10

The Beat Generation

1950s

Answer 10

Characteristics:

• rejection of formalism in poetry and materialism in society
• belief it should be personal and accessible

Authors/Poets:

• Herbert Huncke
• Ginsberg
• Burroughs

Question 11

Harlem Renaissance

1918 - 1930s

Answer 11

Characteristics:

• Intellectual, social, and artistic explosion centered in Harlem, NYC
• aka the “New Negro Movement”
• promotion of progressive ideas and racial and social integration

Authors/Poets:

• Aaron Douglas
• Jacob Lawrence
• Augusta Savage

Question 12

Postcolonial Literature

1950s and 1990s

Answer 12

Characteristics:

• themes around ‘cultural dominance,’ ‘racism,’ ‘quest for identity,’ ‘inequality’
• often political

Authors/Poets:

• Salman Rushdie
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
• Derek Walcott
• George Lamming

Question 13

Modernism

late 19th and early 20th centuries

Answer 13

characteristics:

• Individualism
• Experimentation
• Absurdity
• Symbolism
• Formalism

Authors/Poets:

• Jorge Amado
• Mário de Andrade
• Oswald de Andrade
• Anna Akhmatova

Question 14

Postmodernism Literature

late 20th-century

Answer 14

Characteristics:

• Use of metafiction
• unreliable narration
• self-reflexivity
• intertextuality
• often political

Authors/Poets:

• Thomas Pynchon
• Don DeLillo
• Kurt Vonnegut
• David Foster Wallace