ENGL 331: Literary Theory, Romanticism, and Critical Frameworks
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Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering critical theory, poetic forms, aesthetic definitions, and literary analysis from the ENGL 331 lecture notes.
91 Terms
The Sublime (Burke)
The aesthetic category defined as being productive of the strongest emotion that the mind is capable of feeling, often arising when danger or pain are observed from certain distances and with modifications.
Beauty (Burke)
The qualities in objects that induce a sense of affection, tenderness, or similar passions, distinguished from the society of sex because it contains no mixture of lust and has its foundation in positive pleasure.
Society of Sex (Burke)
A form of society identified by Edmund Burke where the corresponding passion is called love, contains an admixture of lust, and takes the beauty of women as its object.
Philia
A classical form of love defined as affection, friendship, fondness, or liking.
Eros (Oxford English Dictionary)
A mode of love defined in general usage as sexual love or desire.
Eros (John Alan Lee)
A style of loving defined by the search for a partner whose physical presentation of self embodies an idealized mental image or physical type already held by the lover.
Race (Dorothy Roberts)
A political system that governs people, regulated historically by legal rulings and institutional shifts, rather than an innate biological category.
Captivity Narrative
A widely read colonial and antebellum American genre recounting nonfictional experiences of white individuals held as prisoners in the wilderness, contrasting with voluntary exploratory or aesthetic pursuits of nature.
Sonnet Form (Lisa L. Moore)
A poetic structure whose material mechanics (rhyme, rhythm, and repetition) frequently exceed or contradict syntax, featuring an octave-sestet divide that mirrors desire between women.
Possessive Spectatorship (Nina Auerbach)
A critical term describing Fanny Price's role in Mansfield Park, where she asserts her singularity through private, isolated observation rather than integrating neatly into conventional comedic marriage structures.
Colonial Order in Mansfield Park (Edward Said)
The postcolonial argument that Sir Thomas Bertram's overseas plantation wealth establishes domestic social status, moral authority, and values to which characters like Fanny Price ultimately conform.
Friend of the Abolition (Brian Southam)
A historicist reading arguing that Mansfield Park, through Fanny Price's question about the slave trade, aligns Jane Austen against plantation slavery rather than supporting the plantocracy.
Orientalism (Edward Said)
A Western representational framework consisting of tropes like oriental despotism, cruelty, sensuality, and splendor, used to domesticate Eastern knowledge and cultures for European appropriation.
Male Homosocial Bonding (Eve Sedgwick)
Social ties between men that, within modern patriarchal arrangements, are structured alongside intense homophobia and anxiety regarding homosexuality.
Desire (Eve Sedgwick)
The affective social glue or relational structure that organizes human bonds, including dynamics that manifest through hostility, rivalry, or hatred.
Object of Desire (Lauren Berlant)
A cluster of promises projected onto a person, thing, concept, institution, or norm that an individual relies on to provide a sense of life possibility.
Cruel Optimism (Lauren Berlant)
A condition in which an attachment to an object or scene of desire actively threatens an individual's flourishing, yet cannot be discarded because the attachment provides basic existential continuity.
Cognitive Mapping (Fredric Jameson)
A Marxist critical theory stating that local subjective experience in the metropole is bound up with and determined by the broader, geographically distant colonial network of empire.
Linguistic Assimilation and Race (Frantz Fanon)
The postcolonial concept that colonized subjects are compelled to master the colonizer's language as a prerequisite for being perceived as human and socially white.