Historical Time Period - AO3 Flashcards
What year did the Medieval period start & end?
1066-1485
What was the content of the Medieval Period?
- Plays that instruct the illiterate masses in morals & religion
- Chivalric code of honour/romances
- Religious devotion
What was the styles/genres in Medieval Period?
- Folk Ballads
- Mystery & Miracle plays
- Morality plays
- Stock epithets
- Kennings
- Frame Stories
- Moral Tales
What effect did the Medieval Period have on society?
- Church instructs its ppl through the morality & miracle plays
- An illiterate population is able to hear & see the literature
What happened during the Medieval Period?
- Crusades bring the development of a money economy for the first time in Britain
- Trading increases dramatically as a result of the Crusades
- William the Conqueror crowned king in 1066
- Henry III crowned king in 1154 brings a judicial system, royal courts, juries, and chivalry to Britain
What year did The Renaissance period start & end?
1485-1660
The Elizabethan Period - reign of Elizabeth I, 1586-1603
Jacobean Period - reign of James I of England, 1603-1625
What is the content for The Renaissance?
- World view shifts from religion & after life to one stressing the human life on earth
- Popular theme: development of human potential
- Popular theme: many aspects of love explored
- Unrequited Love
- Constant Love
- Timeless love
- Courtly love
- Love subject to change
What is the Style/Genres for The Renaissance?
- Poetry
- The sonnet
- Metaphysical Poetry
- Elaborate & unexpected metaphors called conceits
- Drama
- Written in verse
- Supported by royalty
- Tragedies, Comedies, Histories,
What is the effect of The Renaissance?
- Commoners welcomed at some play productions (like ones a t the Globe) while conservatives try to close the theatres on the grounds that they promote brazen behaviours
- Not all middle-class embrace the metaphysical poets & their abstract conceits
What happened during The Renaissance period?
- War of Roses ends in 1485 & political stability arrives
- Printing press helps stabilize English as a lang & allows more ppl to read a variety of literature
- Economy changes from farm-based to one of international trade
What year did the Neoclassical Period start and end?
1660-1798
The Restoration: the reign of Charles II, 1630-1660 (after his restoration to the thrown in 1630 following the English Civil War & Cromwell)
The Age of Enlightenment (the Eighteenth Century)
What’s the content for The Neoclassical Period?
- Emphasis on reason & logic
- Stresses harmony, stability, wisdom
- Locke: a social construct exists between the government & the ppl. The government governs guaranteeing “natural lights” of life, liberty, & property
What’s the style/genres for The Neoclassical Period?
- Satire
- Poetry
- Essays
- Letters, diaries, biographies
- Novels
What is the effect of The Neoclassical Period?
- Emphasis on the individual
- Belief that humanity is basically evil
- Approach to life: “the world as it should be”
What happened during The Neoclassical Period?
- 50% of males are functionally literate (a dramatic rise)
- Fenced enclosures of land cause demise of traditional village life
- Factories began to spring up as industrial revolution begins
- Impoverished masses begin to grow as farming life declines & factories build
- Coffee houses – where educated men spend evenings with literary & political associates
What year did the Romantic Period start & end?
1798-1832
What is the content for The Romantic Period?
- Human knowledge consists of impressions & ideas formed in the individual’s mind
- Introduction of Gothic elements & terror/horror stories & novels
- In nature one can find comfort & peace that the man-made urbanised towns & factor environments cannot offer
What are the Style/Genres of The Romantic Period?
- Poetry
- Lyrical Ballads
What are the effects of The Romantic Period?
- Evil attributed to society not to human nature
- Human beings are basically good
- Movement of protest: a desire for personal freedom
- Children seen as hapless victims of poverty and exploitation
What happened during The Romantic Period?
- Napoleon rises to power in France & opposes England military & economically
- Tory philosophy that government should NOT interfere with private enterprise
- Middle class gains representation in British parliament
- Railroads begin to run
What year did The Victorian Period start and end?
1832-1900
What is the content for The Victorian Period?
- Conflict between those in power & the common masses of labourers & the poor
- Shocking life of workhouses & urban poor is highlighted in literature to insist on reform
- Country verses city life
- Sexual discretion (or lack of it)
- Strained coincidences
- Romantic triangles
- Heroines in physical danger
- Aristocratic villains
- Misdirected letters
- Bigamous marriages
What is the styles/genres of The Victorian Period?
- Novel becomes popular for the first time
- Bildungsroman
- Political novels
- Detective novels
- Serialised novels
- Elegies
- Poetry: easier to understand
- Dramatic monologues
- Drama: comedies of manners
- Magazines offer stories to the masses
What is the effect of The Victorian Period?
- Literature begins to reach the masses
What happened during The Victorian Period?
- Paper becomes cheap; magazines & novels cheap to mass produce
- Unprecedented growth of industry & business in Britain
- Unparalleled dominance of nations, economies & trade abroad
What year did The Modern Period start and end?
1900- subject to debate
What is the content of The Modern Period?
- Breakdown of social norms
- Separation of meanings & senses from the context
- Despairing individual behaviours in the face of an unmanageable future
- Spiritual loneliness
- Alienation
- Frustration when reading the text
- Disillusionment
- Rejection of history
- Rejection of outdated social systems
- Objection to traditional thoughts & traditional moralities
- Objection to religious thoughts
- Substitution of a mythical past
- Two world wars effects’ on humanity
What is the styles/genres of The Modern Period?
- Poetry: free verse
- Epiphanies began
- Speeches
- Memoirs
- Novels
- Stream of consciousness
What is the effect of The Modern Period?
- Literature attempts to search for ‘truthes’ & discover the deep ideas & meanings behind
What happened during The Modern Period?
- British Empire loses 1 million soldiers to WW1
- Winston Churchill leads Britain through WW II, & Germans bomb England directly
- British colonies demand independence
What year did Post Modern Period start & end?
1945-present
- Assumption postmodernism started after WW2
What’s the difference between Modernism & Postmodernism?
- Modernism: places faith in ideas, values, beliefs, culture& norms of the West
- Postmodernism: Rejects Western values/beliefs
- Modernism: reveal profound truths of experience & life
- Postmodernism: suspicious of being “profound” because ideas are western value systems
- Modernism: to find depth & interior meaning beneath the surface of objects/events
- Postmodernism: dwell on the exterior images & avoids drawing conclusions or suggest underlying meanings associated with the interior of objects/events
- Modernism: focuses on central themes & united vision in a particular piece of literature
- Postmodernism: sees human exp as unstable, internally contradictory, ambiguous, inconclusive, indeterminate, unfinished, fragmented, with no specific reality possible.
- Modernism: authors guide & control the reader’s response to their work
- Postmodernism: creates an “open” work in which the reader must supply his own connections, work out alternative meanings, & provide his own interpretation.
When was World War 2?
1939-1945
When was World War I?
1914-1918
How did World War 2 impact English Literature?
