20th and 21st Century British Literature Lecture Notes

Flashcards covering key authors, literary movements, and terminology from 20th and 21st-century British literature lecture notes.

C.S. Lewis

Author of "The Chronicles of Narnia," known for blending magical and moral themes in a Christian allegory combined with Greek and Roman mythology.

John Ronald Tolkien

The father of "high fantasy" and author of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," who used his WWI experience to inspire his world-building of Middle-earth.

Philip Pullman

Author of "His Dark Materials" trilogy, which retells Milton’s "Paradise Lost" and challenges the authority of the Church as a source of oppression.

Daemon

A term from Philip Pullman’s fiction referring to an individual's inner self embodied in an animal.

Soma

A happiness-inducing drug used for psychological manipulation in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World."

Newspeak

A fictional language in George Orwell's "1984" designed to limit freedom of thought.

The Omegas

The name given to the last people to be born on Earth in P.D. James’s dystopia "The Children of Men."

Literature of Moral Concern

A literary movement formed by writers who reached maturity after WWII, exploring complex moral dilemmas and the boundaries of humanity.

Graham Greene

A writer concerned with Catholic guilt, espionage, and moral ambiguity, often testing the teachings of the Church in works like "The Power and the Glory."

William Golding

Nobel Prize winner and author of "Lord of the Flies" whose works explore the darkness of human nature and the corruption of man.

Unselfing

A concept by Iris Murdoch involving turning one's attention outward, away from the self, towards others with love and attention.

George Bernard Shaw

A giant of British drama and 1925 Nobel Prize winner who championed rationalism, feminism, and socialism through "debated drama."

Theatre of the Absurd

A mid-20th-century dramatic style giving expression to the senselessness of existence through meaningless dialogue and incomprehensible behavior.

Samuel Beckett

A leading figure in the Theatre of the Absurd known for minimalist settings, circular plots, and the theme of language failing to fully express thought.

Pinteresque Pauses

Long silences used by Harold Pinter to create tension, uncertainty, and a sense of menace in his dialogue.

Pastiche

A technique used by Tom Stoppard that involves mixing different styles, genres, or cultural references in a single work.

Edward Bond

A playwright of political theatre whose work "Saved" was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in Britain.

Angry Young Men

A group of 1950s British writers with radical political views whose sardonic works featured alienated, working-class heroes.

Kitchen Sink Realism

A style of drama and film portraying the working-class with domestic realism, often set in industrial areas of Northern England.

Campus Novel

A genre popularized since the 1950s that satirizes the follies of academic life and intellectual ambitions within a university setting.

Postmodernism

A movement characterized by irony, fragmentation, and a skepticism of grand narratives like history, religion, and progress.

Metafiction

Fiction that self-consciously reflects on its own storytelling process, such as John Fowles’s "The French Lieutenant’s Woman."

Historiographic Metafiction

A postmodern style that rewrites history with fiction, blurring the lines between truth and language-constructed narratives.

Peter Ackroyd

A postmodern author who explores the interaction of time and space, often treating the city of London as a living character.

Doris Lessing

Author of "The Golden Notebook" whose work explores fragmented identity, gender politics, and communism.

Sufism

A mystical movement within Islam that influenced Doris Lessing’s experimental narratives concerning inner lives and divine love.

Angela Carter

A feminist writer known for using magic realism and rewriting myths and fairytales with strong, active heroines.

Wolfenden Report

A 1957 report that recommended the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults in private.

Alan Hollinghurst

A contemporary stylist whose fiction, such as "The Line of Beauty," explores gay identity across British history and the impact of the AIDS crisis.

Jeanette Winterson

Author of "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," known for an experimental style that brought lesbian experience into mainstream literature.

Sarah Waters

A writer of historical fiction whose narratives, such as "Affinity," center on lesbian characters within Victorian or post-WWI settings.

W.H. Auden

An anti-Romantic poet of the Oxford group who explored moral issues in social and political contexts through technical virtuosity.

Philip Larkin

A librarian poet associated with "The Movement" whose work is known for traditional form and themes of rural decay and urban poverty.

Ted Hughes

A Poet Laureate fascinated by the natural world, often depicting a mixture of beauty and violence in the animal kingdom.

British Nationality Act of 1948

Legislation that created the status of "Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies," facilitating mass migration from Commonwealth nations.

Empire Windrush

A ship that arrived in Britain in 1948 carrying Caribbean passengers, becoming a symbol of the mass migration that helped rebuild post-war Britain.

James Kelman

A postcolonial writer who uses Scots dialect to resist the dominance of Standard English and highlight class struggle.

Sam Selvon

Author of "The Lonely Londoners" who used Caribbean dialect and Trinidadian English to humanize Black immigrants in postwar London.

Kazuo Ishiguro

A Nobel Prize winner whose dystopian novels like "Never Let Me Go" explore how advances in technology change the sense of what it is to be human.

Monica Ali

Author of "Brick Lane," a novel exploring the adaptation of Bangladeshi immigrants and the rise of xenophobia following 9/11.

Diaspora

The dispersion of a population from their native land, particularly relevant to migrants from former colonies of the British Empire.