Literary Periods

Question 1

Heroic or Homeric Period (Classical Period)

Answer 1

Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey, Greek legends passed along orally
Warrior princes, wandering sea traders, fierce pirates

Question 2

Classical Greek Period

Answer 2

Plato, Aesop, Socrates, Aristotle

Sophisticated age of the polis, or ind. city-state, and early democracy

Question 3

Classical Roman Period

Answer 3

Ovid, Horace, Virgil; Marcus Aurelius, Lucretius

Question 4

Patristic Period

Answer 4

early Christian writings by saints; period in which Saint Jerome first compiles the Bible, when Christianity spread across Europe

Question 5

Old English (Anglo Saxon) Period

Answer 5

so-called Dark Ages; includes early old English epics like Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer

Question 6

Middle English Period

Answer 6

French chivalric romances and French fables spread in popularity

Question 7

Late or High Medieval Period

Answer 7

Chaucer, the Gawain, Wakefield Master, William Langland, Petrarch, Dante

Question 8

Renaissance and Reformation

Answer 8

late 15th through early 17th c. in Britain

Question 9

METAPHYSICAL POETRY

Answer 9

(1633-1680)
Highly intellectual style, which is witty, subtle, and somewhat fantastic
Ex: Donne, Hebert, Marvell, Cowley, Cleveland, Crashaw, Trahane, Vaughan

Question 10

GOTHIC FICTION

Answer 10

(1764-1820)
Brooding, mysterious settings and plots
Walpole’s Castle of Ontranto

Question 11

ROMANTICISM

Answer 11

(1790-1830)
Nature, imagination, individuality, fancy, freedom, emotion, wildness, beauty of natural world, rights of individual, nobility of common man
William, Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Austen

Question 12

TRANSCENDENTALISM

Answer 12

(1830-1850)
American/New England-based; primacy of ind. conscience and rejected materialism in favor of closer communion with nature
Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and Thoreau’s Walden

Question 13

REALISM

Answer 13

(1830-1900)
19th-c. reaction to Romanticism; novel gained popularity during this time; true-to-life approach to subject matter; focus on everyday life
da Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Twain

Question 14

NATURALISM

Answer 14

(1865-1900)
Used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character
Sought to identify underlying cause for person’s actions or beliefs
Ex: Wharton, Norris, Zola, Crane, London, Steinbeck, Glasgow, Wright, Dreiser

Question 15

SYMBOLISM

Answer 15

(1870-1890)
Aimed to evoke, indirectly and symbolically, an order of being beyond material world of five senses
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Yeats, Joyce, Eliot

Question 16

MODERNISM

Answer 16

(1890-1940)
Experimentation and realization that knowledge is not absolute; common themes are loss of sense of tradition and dominance of technology
Attack on notions of hierarchy; stream of consciousness; doubt about objective reality; alternative viewpoints and ways of thinking
Draw attention to relationships between artist and audience, and form and content
Yeats, Woolf, Frost, O’Connor, Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Faulkner

Question 17

SURREALISM

Answer 17

Elements of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions, and non sequitur
Aimed to free people from false rationality and restrictive customs and structures

Question 18

EXISTENTIALISM

Answer 18

19th and 20th c.
Individual existence, freedom, and choice; no objective, rational basis for moral choice
Ex: Kierkegaard, Pascal, Nietzsche, Sartre