Literary History: From the Romantic Period to the Twenty-First Century

Flashcards covering essential vocabulary, literary terms, movements, and key concepts spanning British and Irish literary history from 1789 to the 21st century.

"Two Nations"

A phrase later popularized by Benjamin Disraeli to describe the sharp economic and social division between the wealthy landowners/industrialists and the poor working class in 19th-century Britain.

Lyrical Ballads

A landmark 1798 poetry collection by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge that marked a shift from Augustan rationality toward Romantic emotion, nature, individual experience, and the real language of men.

"Mind-forg'd manacles"

William Blake's famous metaphor in his poem London describing how oppressive social, industrial, and rationalist systems regiment and mentally enslave individuals.

Byronic Hero

A literary archetype popularized by Lord Byron featuring a passionate, solitary, melancholy outcast who defies social conventions, is burdened by guilt, and creates their own moral code.

Synaesthesia

A literary technique employed by John Keats involving the blending of sensory descriptions, such as describing a sound or emotion using the sense of taste.

Free Indirect Speech

A narrative technique pioneered and refined by Jane Austen that embeds a character's internal speech and perspective directly into third-person narration without formal quotation marks or speech markers.

Victorian Compromise

The double standards of the Victorian era, characterized by national prosperity, technical progress, and public philanthropy existing alongside social exploitation, imperial domination, and private hypocrisy.

Dramatic Monologue

A poetic form perfected by Robert Browning in which a single speaker addresses an implied listener, unintentionally revealing their own psychological state, morality, and inner character.

Inscape

Gerard Manley Hopkins's term for the unique, intrinsic inner pattern or spiritual identity present in every created object and individual.

Sprung Rhythm

An innovative poetic rhythm created by Gerard Manley Hopkins designed to echo natural speech by structuring poetic lines around a set number of stressed syllables regardless of the number of unstressed syllables.

"Cup and saucer" Dramas

Realistic plays introduced in the 1860s by T.W. Robertson (such as Society and Caste) that brought authentic, everyday domestic settings and contemporary middle-class social issues to the stage.

Imagism

A short-lived early 20th-century poetic movement launched by Ezra Pound's 1914 anthology Des Imagistes that replaced verbose Victorian verse with hard, condensed, and precise visual imagery.

Half-rhyme

A technique developed by First World War poet Wilfred Owen (e.g., "tall/toil") using imperfect rhyming sounds to evoke the dissonance, incompleteness, and tragedy of trench warfare.

Celtic Twilight

An Irish cultural and literary renaissance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led by figures like W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge that drew on Irish folklore, myth, and regional identity to resist English cultural dominance.

Gyres

Interlocking, spiral-like geometric symbols used by W.B. Yeats to represent his cyclical theory of history, human development, and the resolution of opposing forces.

Stream of Consciousness

A Modernist narrative technique developed by writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to render the continuous, unedited flow of subjective thoughts, memories, and associations in a character's mind.

Kailyard School

A late 19th-century movement of Scottish provincial novelists, including J.M. Barrie, whose works presented sentimental, romanticized, and parochial depictions of small-town rural life.

Synthetic Scots (Lallans)

A literary dialect created in the 1920s by Hugh MacDiarmid combining historic 15th-century Scots vocabulary and regional dialects to forge a national literary language distinct from standard English.

Auden Group

A circle of 1930s politically engaged poets including W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender who used accessible language and modern industrial imagery to address social issues and rising fascism.

"Greeneland"

The distinctive world and atmosphere found in Graham Greene's fiction, characterized by intense anxiety, betrayal, guilt, moral ambiguity, and spiritual decay.

Dialogism

A literary concept derived from Mikhail Bakhtin describing the novel as a multi-voiced structure containing a collage of different speech styles and perspectives without a single dominant authorial voice.

Theatre of the Absurd

A post-WWII dramatic movement exemplified by Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot that expressed existential futility and the human condition through minimal plots, circular structures, and fragmented dialogue.

Comedy of Menace

A theatrical genre associated with Harold Pinter in which everyday domestic settings, repetitive dialogue, and long silences mask underlying power struggles, insecurity, and latent violence.

Kitchen-sink Realism

A 1950s movement in British theater and novel writing (initiated by John Osborne's Look Back in Anger) that focused on raw working-class life, regional dialects, and social discontent.

The Movement

A 1950s group of English poets including Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis who rejected Modernist obscurity and Romantic emotionalism in favor of clarity, irony, logic, and realistic social observation.

"Martian" School of Poetry

A late 1970s poetic trend associated with Craig Raine that defamiliarized everyday human objects and activities by describing them through an alien or detached perspective.

Campus Novel

A sub-genre of academic comic fiction popularized by authors like Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge that explores cultural clashes, career ambition, and personal relationships within a university setting.

"Rotten Englishes"

A term derived from Ken Saro-Wiwa referring to non-standard, post-colonial, or hybrid varieties of English (such as London Caribbean English) employed in literature to assert local identities.

Tartan Noir

A sub-genre of contemporary Scottish crime fiction pioneered by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin that uses gritty detective plots to explore themes of duality and modern Scottish social realities.

"In-Yer-Face" Theatre

A provocative wave of 1990s British drama spearheaded by playwrights like Sarah Kane that used shock value, explicit violence, and intense imagery to confront audiences directly.

Verbatim Theatre

A 21st-century form of political documentary drama constructed entirely from the actual transcribed words of real people recorded during public inquiries, interviews, or news events.