English Lit II Final - Vocab

The Windrush Generation

492 Passengers came from Jamaica to England on the ship HMT Empire Windrush after WWII. Refers to thousands of people who came to fulfill Enlgand’s labor shortages, and who were British subjects, but faced systemic discrimination.

Nation Language

Coined by poet Kamau Brathwaite to describe Caribbean Creole influenced by African models and shaped by colonial history as a legitimate, artistic medium of resistance rather than just a dialect.

Stream of Consciousness

A narrative technique as used by Virginia Woolf that captures the continuous, unfiltered flow of the characters’ thought, emotions, and sensations, bypassing traditional logic. Mimics chaotic nature of the human brain using free associations.

Allusion

A passing but illuminating reference within a literary text to another well known literary text, often biblical or classical. As seen with T.S. Eliot.

Shell shock

Describes the psychological trauma experienced by WWI soldiers. Caused physical symptoms such as shaking and blindness, as well as extreme anxiety. Often treated with rest or brutal shock therapy.

Modernism

Driven by industrialization and global conflict after WWI, focused on experimentation, abstraction, and individualism, prioritizing subjective experience, urban life, and new technical materials as it strayed away from tradition and the “sublime”.

Bunbury

The concept of living a double life.

Aestheticism and decadence

Implies art is its own reality that occupies its own space. We are not meant to directly relate what we read to our world, it refers to itself within itself. It has its own logic.

Aestheticism (art for art’s sake)

Promoted the idea that art should exist solely for its own beauty and not serve a moral, didactic, or useful purpose.

Decadence

Thrives on artificiality (luxury/self-indulgence), morbid curiosity, sensuality, and an overt rejection of conventional societal, religious, and sexual norms.

Fin de siècle

Refers to the end of the cultural, artistic, and social climate towards the end of the nineteenth century. Dominated by symbolism, decadence, aestheticism, and art nouveau.