how to answer unseen poetry, literary periods

unseen question: Separation

• keep it short/simple

• love across TIME - types of love are diff bc of time

• romantic love, sex, loss, social conventions, love through ages - history + time, individual lives (young/maturing love), jealousy + guilt, truth/deception, distance, marriage, approval.

• if unseen authors same period - sometimes dramatically diff even 50 years apart.

• same as gatspo structure/gospstreet: 4 paragraphs, 2 on poem 1, 2 on poem 2

• YOU DON’T KNOW HISTORICAL CONTEXT, don’t do it in every paragraph, don’t use unless it is relevant/don’t infer, will know the literary periods - so that should be included e.g. postmodernism, modernism

• cool on the devices, still need to use them obvs - but don’t need to be using excessive devices - looking at 3 words in extreme detail - just state the facts sometimes. keep in short&sweet

literary periods

medieval literature (1300s-1550s): UNLIKELY earliest that will come up is who so lyst which is at cusp of medieval/just after

• in British isles, often about either politics/society or religion e.g. Canterbury Tales

• probably about Christianity, journey of character towards/away from god, Christian sins/temptations

renaissance (1550s-1700s): MOST LIKELY TO COME UP

• Rebirth of classical literature from ancient Greece/Rome + ancient ideas

• ancient ideas: non-religious ideas, anything really, can also be religion

• not specific features of Renaissance, if in that time period it is probably Renaissance, otherwise we wouldn’t be reading it

Romanticism (1800s): MIGHT come up

• “Transcendentalism” in US

• sublime

• keats, blake, Wordsworth, colleridge, byron, shelley

victorian (1830s-1901):

• society, taboos, social commentaries

• porphyria’s lover - sexual perversion underneath society

• civilisation - the state of the world, war, the poor, social justice

modernism (1910s-1950s):

• Modernist, not modern poem

• rejects objectivity

postmodernism (1970s-???):

• postmodernism is more extreme than modernism

• base it off is it before/after 1960 when working out whether it is modernism/postmodernism - modernism is probs safer choice

• fragmentation, things falling apart - thematically and literally

• subjectivity

• depressing