Untitled Flashcards Set

Time Periods



Renaissance:

Definition: a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the late 15th to early 17th century (England saw little developments until more than a century later)



Writers: (very male dominated)

  • William Shakespeare 

  • John Donne 

  • Christopher Marlowe

  • Edmund Spenser

  • Thomas Wyatt 

  • Ben Johnson 

  • Francis Bacon



Characteristics:

  • Wit: clever, humor 

  • beauty 

  • Truth 

  • Humanism: belief in self, human value, individual dignity

  • Mythology 

  • Exploration 



Renaissance Sonnets:

Italian (Petrarchan):

  • Octave (eight lines) rhyming abbaabba

  • Sestet (six lines) varying patterns cdecde or cdccdc

  • Increased rapidly

English (Shakespearean):

  • Three quatrains (sections of four lines also called “staves”) : abab cdcd efef








Time Periods

Metaphysical:

Definition: a period when poets in the 17th century England inclined to the personal and intellectual complexity and concentration that is displayed in the poetry of John Donne



Writers:

  • Vaughn, Cleveland, Cowley, Marvell, Herbert, Crashaw



Characteristics:

  • Emotion, intellectual, ingenuity, characterized by conceit or wit

  • Less concerned with expressing feeling than analyzing it with poet exploring the recesses of his consciousness 

Wit: violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled and forced to think through the argument of the poem




Romanticism:

Definition: 

  • 18th/19th centuries in revolt against the Neo classicism of the previous centuries

  • The German poet Friedrich Schlegel (first to use the term romantic to describe literature) defined it as “literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form”



Writers:

  • William Blake 

  • William Wordsworth 

  • Samuel Coleridge 

  • Percy Bysshe Shelley 

  • William Godwin 

  • John Keats 



Characteristics:

  • Focal Points: imagination, emotion, and freedom

  • Other Attributes: subjectivity and an emphasis on individualism, spontaneity, freedom from rules; solitary life rather than life in society

  • The beliefs that imagination is superior to reason and devotion to beauty; love of and worship of nature

  • Fascination with the rest, especially the myths and mysticism of the middle ages





Regency: 1811 -  1820

Definition: 

  • Began in 1811, when King George lll went permanently insane and his George, Prince of Wales, was sanctioned to rule England in his place as Regent 

  • Lasted until 1820 when George IV was crowned

  • Early decades of the 19th century before start of Victoria’s reign in 1837, during which the Prince Regent provided a great deal of support for the development of the arts and sciences that flourished during this period



Writers: 

  • Jane Austen



Characteristics:

  • War with France: ¼ million men serving in the army, pervades Austen’s texts

  • The Landed Gentry: concerns over property, money, and status

  • Though industrialization and urbanization had begun to take hold at the end of the 18th century Landed Gentry was most influential

  • Marriage and Gender Roles: Questions of land ownership and inheritance 

  • Familial Aspirations: women’s increased dependence on marriage for financial survival, courtship was the center of women’s lives 



Victorian: 1820 - 1914

Definition: period of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837 - 1901)

  • Expanding education

  • Question religion and politics

  • New notions of government and science signaled a turn from the idealism of the Romantics to a more empirical worldview 

  • More reading 





Writers: 

  • Charles Dickens

  • Oscar Wilde

  • Matthew Arnold 

  • George Eliot 

  • Thomas Hardy 

  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning 



Characteristics: (Victorian Period)

  • Class - based society 

  • Growing number of people able to vote 

  • A growing state and economy 

  • Britain’s status as the most powerful empire in the world



Modernism:

Definition: any kind of literary production in the interwar period that deals with the modern world 

  • Transformation of traditional society under the pressures of modernity and that breaks down traditional literary forms in doing so

  • Effects of World War l was more devasting

  • Structures of human life had been destroyed or shown up as falsehoods or at best arbitrary, an fragile constructions 



Writers: 

  • Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson 



Characteristics:

  • Construction out of fragments (myth or history, experience or perception, pervious artistics works)

  • Notable for: what it omits, explanations, interpretations, connections 

  • Begin arbitrarily, to advance without explanation and to end without resolution

  • Consists of: vivid segments, juxtaposed without cushioning or integrating transitions







Takeaways from Books:



      Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Mrs. Dalloway



Frankenstein: 

Roles of Woman: 

  • Not super important

  • Only are there to meet men’s pleasures 

  • Disposable 

  • Strengthen male dominance 

  • Powerless (Caroline Beaufort, Margaret Saville, Elizabeth Lavenza)

  • Woman were written as the typical woman during the time and did not mess with the male dominance



Margaret Saville: sister of Robert Walton, connects Robert back home, and readers can not directly see her emotions

Elizabeth Lavenza: gift for Victor’s satisfaction



Feminist Message in Reverse: Including women only for them to represent how woman were less than men



Frankenstein Prominent Themes:

Science: whether science became too strong of a power and if people can have too much power with science

Psychology: The humanity in Victor became non existent: shows that when we lose our innocence we become corrupt and lose all ability to do human like qualities, Victor lives in this false world and in denial, can not escape 

Socioeconomics: unfair gender roles (Justine being wrongly convicted), often times we treat people wrongly when we try to avoid facing ourselves and the real obstacles 

Leaving reality and parting with people leads to more destruction than good







Pride and Prejudice:

Elizabeth: 

Traits: bold, intelligent, independent, witty sense of humor, open minded (after learning her pride gets in the way sometimes), rushes to conclusions

Intentions: wants to marry for love, wise enough to look for a man’s character



Jane:

Traits: kind, patient, always sees the best in people, most beautiful in the Bennett family 

Intentions: wants a happy life and marriage based purely off of love



Lydia: 

Traits: silly, immature, attractive, charismatic, impulsive

Intentions: Looks for anything to enjoy, whether that be men, money, or balls, does not think too hard about life



Mrs. Bennett:

Traits: power hungry, foolish, beauty is the most important in a woman, does not care about independence in women

Intentions: wants her daughters to get married 



Mr. Bingley:

Traits: handsome, friendly, wealthy, persuaded easily, well mannered 

Intentions: Important for the plot and serves to contrast Mr. Darcy



Mr. Collins:

Traits: intelligent, selfish, only cares about what others think of him

Intentions: mostly cares about gaining the Bennett estate and will do anything to do that including marrying Elizabeth



Mr. Darcy:

Traits: proud, arrogant, unapproachable, looks down on others of lower class, he is actually kind

Intentions: Wants to marry Elizabeth and represents how not everyone is as they seem





Wickam:

Traits: charismatic, opportunist, manipulative, obsessed with money

Intentions: get more money by marrying a rich woman and wants financial security because of debts from being a part of military



Relationships: 

Wickam: related to the Bennett family by marrying Kitty Elizabeth was interested at first, related to Mr. Darcy through father

Mr. Darcy: friend of Mr. Bingley, grew up some with Wickham, marries Elizabeth 

Jane: marries Mr. Bingley and is the sister of Elizabeth

Elizabeth, sister of Jane and Lydia, becomes interested in Mr. Darcy through Mr. Bingley, dad’s favorite

Lydia: sister to Jane and Elizabeth, youngest in the Bennett family 

Mrs. Bennett: Elizabeth’s mom, encourages Elizabeth to marry Mr. Collins, 

Mr. Collins: cousins of Bennetts 



How Class Impacts Connections and Perceptions of the Bennetts and Bingleys:

  • Bennetts: less wealthy making their status in society not high

  • makes finding men harder because men want wealthy woman



  • Bingleys: very wealthy and at the top in society

  • Many woman are attracted to them 

  • Look down on women in lower classes 

  • Money driven 




The Picture of Dorian Gray:



Influence of Lord Henry on Dorian:

  • Acted as a devil (most powerful source of evil in the book)

  • Always persuaded Dorian to lose his innocence

  • Talk him out of saying anything that would limit Dorian’s gain of sins and emotions

  • Guides Dorian along in the wrong ways and teach him that youth is forever

  • With the deaths he talked Dorian through it telling him that it was ok and that they were insignificant




Influence of Basil on Dorian:

  • He was the innocent character 

  • Tried to help Dorian go back to his old ways 

  • Wants Dorian to live a happy life through good actions and decisions

  • His Death: made Dorian further immersed in his false sense of youth is forever and Dorian continued to ignore the reality of death but his portrait worsening



Role of Woman:

  • Insignificant in the novel (men were dominant)

  • Seen as too emotional

  • Men only saw them if they were pretty and successful

  • They only saw life to meet what men wanted and could not be independent 

  • They needed men to make purpose in life



Themes Conveyed:

  • Youth is not forever 

  • You will catch up to your sins 

  • Humanity can become corrupt

  • Consequences of actions and focusing too much on beauty 

  • Evil covers up good

  • Sins result in loss of innocence



How Dorian Tries to Redeem Himself

  • Destroying the portrait 

  • Killing himself 


 

Mrs. Dalloway:



Literary Devices Used:

  • Imagery 

  • Stream of Consciousness 

  • Allusion

  • Foreshadowing

  • Irony 

  • Metaphor

  • Interior Monologue 



Messages about Mental Health:

  • Mental illness should matter and more people show know about them

  • Reality is not perfect and with mental illnesses can make it darker

  • Lower classes have a harder time with getting the help they need with illnesses 

and makes the condition worse 

  • Higher classes were not aware of illnesses



Messages about WWll:

  • PTSD is a problem from war 

  • Septimus has this and feels like no one understand him

  • Society is not aware and does not help him like they should

  • When no one understand the illness it makes the illness worse 



Character Foil Between Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus: 

  

At the park: 

Mrs. Dalloway: recalls her former lover (Peter Walsh)

Septimus: experiences flashbacks that he wants to escape from (loses his friend Evan)



Mrs Dalloway: thinks deeply about life, full of life despite setbacks, a part of the upper class 

Septimus: does not feel, no interactions, suffers in his own world and illnesses, working class 





How Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus’s Discontentment in their lives are similar:

  • Both have a part of their life that they want changed 

  • Mrs. Dalloway wishes she had her husband 

  • Septimus wishes he could forget the trauma from war 



  • They see the flaws in their lives and turns those into thoughts

  • Their realities are not perfect

  • See death in similar ways