Major trends and authors in British and Irish literature Flashcards
Mistery plays
Medieval literature (until 1509)
short plays inspired by the Bible
e.g. Everyman
**Miracle plays **
Medieval literature (until 1509)
based on the lives of the saints.
Morality plays
Medieval literature (until 1509)
In which the characters are allegories of vices and virtues.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Medieval literature (until 1509)
The best-known medieval writer with his Canterbury Tales (1386-1400), a series of tales told by pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. The pilgrims represent the diversity of society and their stories reflect the changing values of the time.
Revenge tragedies
The Renaissance (1509-1660)
Presented complex intrigues and bloody deeds of revenge: for intance, Sackville and Norton’s Gordobuc (1561) or Webster’s The White Devil (1611).
Christopher Marlowe
The Renaissance (1509-1660)
His plays show hubristic heroes searching for power and glory, e.g. The
Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1588).
Ben Jonson
The Renaissance (1509-1660)
His plays are satires of the vices and follies of his time (avarice, hypocrisy), e.g. Volpone (1606).
William Shakespeare
The Renaissance (1509-1660)
His plays are far more complex and subtle. There are four main types:
- History plays
- Comedies
- Tragedies
- Romances
The sonnet
The Renaissance (1509-1660)
The most popular for of poetry in the second half of the 16th century was the sonnet, adapted from Petrarch. They sung the joys and pains of platonic love or developed the carpe diem theme, e.g. the sonnets of Sidney and Spenser.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609) are far more personal and original, some addressed to a young man, others to a lady.
The Metaphysical poets
The Renaissance (1509-1660)
In the first half of the 17th century, their main representative is John Donne, they wrote intellectual poems, both sensual and religious, based on reasoning and striking unexpected metaphors, called conceits.
John Milton
The Renaissance (1509-1660)
a staunch Puritan who dominated the end of the Renaissance and whose main work, Paradise Lost, is a long epic about Satan’s rebellion and the fall of man.
Heroic plays
The Restoration and the early 18th century (1660-1740)
about love and honour (those of Dryden, for example).
Part of the Restauration Theatre.
Tragedies
The Restoration and the early 18th century (1660-1740)
showing a respect for the three unities of classical drama (Dryden’s All For Love, 1678).
Part of the Restauration Theatre.
Comedies of manners
The Restoration and the early 18th century (1660-1740)
make use of wit and humour to satirize the manners of their time (e.g. Congreve’s The Way of the World, 1700; Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem, 1707; and later in the 18th century, Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, 1773 and Seridan’s The School for Scandal, 1777).
Part of the Restauration Theatre.
The Restauration Theatre
The Restoration and the early 18th century (1660-1740)
The theatres, which had been closed during the Commonwealth, reopened during the Restauration and drama became a favourite court entertainment. There were heroic plays, tragedies and comedies of manners.
The age of reason
The Restoration and the early 18th century (1660-1740)
a reaction against the religious and political divisions of the early 17th century set in during the Restauration, and until the mid 18th century, literature was dominated by the need for balance, dignity, rationality and tolerance. All forms of excess were condemned through satire (in the poetry of Dryden and Pope), and dark irony (for instance in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, 1726).
Daniel Defoe
The second half of the 18th century (1740-1790)
Samuel Richardson
The second half of the 18th century (1740-1790)
His novels are epistolary and portray exemplary, virtuous heroines who are the victims of libertines (Clarissa, 1747-8).
Henry Fielding
The second half of the 18th century (1740-1790)
His novels are picaresque: as the hero travels, he moves from innocence to experience as he meets with hypocrisy and greed, but also genuine instances of charity and love.
Laurence Sterne
The second half of the 18th century (1740-1790)
His works (*Tristram Shandy, 1760-67*) are sentimental and metafictional works, which already parody the conventions of the novel.
Poetry
The second half of the 18th century (1740-1790)
melancholy and gloomy settings in the poetry of Gray and Collins; picturesque nature in the poems of Thomson and Cowper.
Gothic novels
The second half of the 18th century (1740-1790)
explore the workings of fear within the sensitive
minds of innocent heroines who are the victims of wicked relatives and locked up in terrifying castles and abbeys (Mrs Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794; Mary Shelley’s , Frankenstein, 18**18).
William Blake
The Romantic Age (1780-1837)
A pre-romantic poet and a rebel against social, political and religious constraints,
he was a visionary and prophetic poet (Songs of Innocence, 1789, Songs of Experience, 1794).
The first generation of romantic poets
The Romantic Age (1780-1837)
Wordsworth’s poetry celebrates the importance of nature
to reach transcendental insight (The Prelude, 1805). Coleridge’s poetry focuses more on the strange and the supernatural, on the way poetic imagination can transform reality (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798).
The second generation of romantic poets
The Romantic Age (1780-1837)
Although by nature a neo-classicist who made use of
satire and wit, Byron created melancholy, restless and wandering heroes who embodied the Romantic rebels (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 1812). An idealist and a rebel, Shelley rejected all conventions and institutions in his highly lyrical poetry (Prometheus Unbound, 1820). The poetry of Keats tries to reconcile the world of transience and death and the eternal world of beauty and art (Odes, 1820).
The novel
The Romantic Age (1780-1837)
Although written in the first two decades of the 19th century, Jane Austen’s novels of manners partake more of the spirit of the 18th century with their detached, ironic portrayal of the gentry and their emphasis on control and morality (Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Emma, 1816).
Walter Scott’s historical romances are set in the past of Scotland during periods of transition when the heroes have to make a choice between idealism and the changing social order (Waverley, 1814).
Dramatic monologues
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
used by Browning, among others, to allow us to hear the voices of
troubled and complex minds.
Jane Austen
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
Although written in the first two decades of the 19th century, her novels of manners **partake more of the spirit of the 18th century with their detached, ironic portrayal of the gentry and their emphasis on control and morality (Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Emma, 1816).
Walter Scott
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
His historical romances are set in the past of Scotland during periods of transition
when the heroes have to make a choice between idealism and the changing social order (Waverley, 1814).
Brontë sisters
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
The tales of violent, passionate love (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 1847).
Charles Dickens
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
His novels use both pathos and humour to condemn the social evils of his
time and reform society (Oliver Twist, 1838; Great Expectations, 1861).
William Thackeray
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
His novels of manners reflect his disillusionment about human nature and condemn the selfishness, vanity and corruption of the upper classes (Vanity Fair, 1848).
George Eliot
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
His novels are concerned with the moral and spiritual development of heroines and the way their character is shaped by their environment (rural and provincial life in her novels) (The Mill on the Floss, 1860).
Realistic novels
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
The realistic novels of such novelists as Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South, 1855) deal with the social problems of the time, the poor working conditions, utilitarianism or the abyss which separates the rich from the poor.
Aestheticism
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
the art for art’s sake movement (Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891). He
also wrote witty comedies of manners which criticize conventional Victorian morality and values (The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895).
Exoticism and novels of adventure
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
Kipling’s portrayal of Indian life and of imperialism in his
novels (Kim, 1901), stories and poetry; Stevenson’s works (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886, a Gothic tale about a dual personality).
Nonsense literature
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
the British love of eccentricity and the flexibility of the English language,
which lends itself to puns and wordplay, are reflected in this type of literature (Lewis Caroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865).
Dark naturalism
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
In Hardy’s novels, particularly, characters are the victims of their economic and
social environment and mere puppets in the hands of an ironic and indifferent fate (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1891).
The War poets
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
denounced the absurdity and meaninglessness of the conflict (Wilfried Owen,
Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas).
William Butler Yeats
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
He is the poet of the Irish Renaissance. He used symbolism and Irish folklore in his
early poetry, then became more direct in his defence of Irish nationalism.
Thomas Stearns Eliot
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
a modernist poet who used collage, multiple voices, clear images and a network of
allusions to convey the chaos, fragmentation and loss of faith of modern society (The Waste Land, 1922).
The Thirties poets
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
the poetry of Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender is
concerned with the social and political problems of the time: social changes, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Fascism.
Dylan Thomas
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
The Welsh poet celebrates the natural world and cycles of life and death in lyrical,
dense and inventive poetry.
Joseph Conrad
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
His novels are mostly set in exotic countries and explore the inner tensions and moral courage of lonely characters in the face of extreme danger. His novels are modernist, too, in their experimentation with multiple points of view and time dislocations (Lord Jim, 1900).
The Bloomsbury Group
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
an influential group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, the best known members of which included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Edward Morgan Forster and Lytton Strachey.
Edward Morgan Forster
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
a member of the Bloomsbury Group, rejected conventions and taboos to celebrate
friendship and loyalty (A Passage to India, 1924).
David Herbert Lawrence
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
His characters are torn between nature and culture, between instincts and social
and moral conventions. Only by freeing himself sexually and emotionnaly can man find his wholeness again (Women in Love, 1920).
Stream of consciousness
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
Virginia Woolf (To the Lightouse, 1927) and James Joyce (Ulysses, 1922) tried to convey a stream of consciousness, the flow of thoughts, impressions and feelings which occurs at prespeech level.
Graham Greene
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
His heroes often transgress but are tormented beings whose knowledge of good
and evil eventually leads them to salvation (The Power and the Glory, 1940).
Dystopia
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
The dystopias of Huxley (Brave New World, 1932) and Orwell (1984, 1948) convey the fear of totalitarianism.
The Irish Renaissance
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
a movement linked to the fight for independence: Synge (The Playboy of
the Western World, 1907), O’Casey (Juno and the Paycock, 1924).
George Bernard Shaw
The early 20th century (1901-1945)
His plays are didactic, criticizing conventional Victorian values and exploring
social concerns with wit and originality in his problem plays.
Counter-poetry of the thirties
After World War II (1945-2005)
Reacting against the politically commited poetry of the thirties, John Betjeman and Philip Larkin wrote more detached, ironic and terse verse combining criticism and compassion.
Ted Hughes
After World War II (1945-2005)
His poetry explores the beauty and violence of the natural world.
Seamus Heaney
After World War II (1945-2005)
an Irish poet, he celebrates the Irish land and the links between memory, the past
and present “Troubles” in northern Ireland.
