ENGL 3316 Literature of the Victorian Age Keywords

A collection of vocabulary flashcards covering key terms from the Victorian Age literature course.

Atavism

Tendency to revert to something primitive or ancestral; the reappearance of a trait or character that was present in ancestral forms but had fallen out in intervening generations.

Dramatic Monologue

Poem consisting entirely of words spoken by a single person who is not the poet, revealing the speaker’s temperament and psychology.

Cognitive Estrangement

Effect whereby speculative fiction extends a scientifically plausible framework in order to challenge our assumptions about reality.

Gothic

Literary mode in which something that has been forgotten, or hidden, or repressed returns with a vengeance.

Heterotopia

An ‘other space’ within the existing world that offers, in microcosm, a vision of another way of living or being.

Medievalism

Modern Western fascination with the European Middle Ages.

Orientalism

Modern Western fascination with 'Eastern' cultures, especially during the heyday of Western imperialism.

Uncanny

The experience of re-encountering something familiar in an unfamiliar place or form.