Why Jonathan Swift wanted to ‘vex the world’ with Gulliver’s Travels

Why Jonathan Swift wanted to ‘vex the world’ with Gulliver’s Travels

Why Jonathan Swift wanted to ‘vex the world’ with Gulliver’s Travels?

Pick up Gulliver’s Travels expecting a children’s book or a novel and you will be unpleasantly surprised. Originally published as “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts … By Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships”, it is one of the great satires in world literature.

Jonathan Swift by Francis Bindon. Swift is pointing to Part IV of the Travels, Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms. Note the horses in the background. Wikimedia
First published in London in 1726, the Travels was a sensational bestseller and immediately recognised as a literary classic. The author of the pseudonymous Travels was the Church-of-Ireland Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, Jonathan Swift. Swift wrote that his satiric project in the Travels was built upon a “great foundation of Misanthropy” and that his intention was “to vex the world”, not entertain it.

The work’s inventive narrative, exuberant fantasy (little people, giants, a flying island, spirits of the dead, senile immortals, talking horses and odious humanoids), and hilarious humour certainly made the work entertaining. In its abridged and reader-friendly form, sanitised of sarcasm and black humour, Gulliver’s Travels has become a children’s classic. In its unabridged form, however, it still has the power to vex readers.

What’s it all about?

In Part 1 of this four-part satire, Gulliver is shipwrecked among the tiny Lilliputians. He finds a society that has fallen into corruption from admirable original institutions through “the degenerate Nature of Man”. Lilliput is a satiric diminution of Gulliver’s Britain in its corrupt court, contemptible party politics, and absurd wars.

In Part II Gulliver is abandoned in Brobdingnag, a land of giants. The scale is now reversed. Gulliver is a Lilliputian among giants, displayed as a freak of nature and kept as a pet. Gulliver’s account of his country and its history to the King of Brobdingnag leads the wise giant to denounce Gulliver’s countrymen and women as “the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth”.

In Part III Gulliver is the victim of piracy and cast away. He is taken up to the flying island of Laputa. Its monarch and court are literally aloof from the people it rules on the continent below, and absorbed in pure science and abstraction.

Technological changes originating in this volatile “Airy Region” result in the economic ruin of the people below and of traditional ways of life. The satire recommends the example of the disaffected Lord Munodi, who is “not of an enterprising Spirit”, and is “content to go on in the old Forms” and live “without Innovation”. Part III is episodic and miscellaneous in character as Swift satirises various intellectual follies and corruptions. It offers a mortifying image of human degeneration in the immortal Struldbruggs. Gulliver’s desire for long life abates after he witnesses the endless decrepitude of these people.

Part IV is a disturbing fable. After a conspiracy of his crew against him, Gulliver is abandoned on an island inhabited by rational civilised horses, the Houyhnhnms, and unruly brutal humanoids, the Yahoos. Gulliver and humankind are identified with the Yahoos. The horses debate “Whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the Face of the Earth”. As in the story of the flood in the Bible, the Yahoos deserve their fate.

The horses, on the other hand, are the satire’s ideal of a rational society. Houyhnhnmland is a caste society practicing eugenics. Swift’s equine utopians have a flourishing oral culture but there are no books. There is education of both sexes. They have no money and little technology (they do not have the wheel). They are authoritarian (there is no dissent or difference of opinion). The Houyhnhnms are pacifist, communistic, agrarian and self-sufficient, civil, vegetarian and nudist. They are austere but do have passions. They hate the Yahoos.

Convinced that he has found the enlightened good life, free of all the human turpitude recorded in the Travels, Gulliver becomes a Houyhnhnm acolyte and proselyte. But this utopian place is emphatically not for humans. Gulliver is deported as an alien Yahoo and a security risk.

Wearing clothes and sailing in a canoe made from the skins of the humanoid Yahoos, Gulliver arrives in Western Australia, where he is attacked by Aboriginal people and eventually, unwillingly, rescued and returned home to live, alienated, among English Yahoos. (Swift’s knowledge of the Aboriginal people derives from the voyager William Dampier, whom Gulliver claimed was his “Cousin”.)

Politics and misanthropy

When it was published, the Travels’ uncompromising, misanthropic satiric anatomy of the human condition seemed to border on blasphemy. The political satire was scandalous, venting what Swift called his “principle of hatred to all succeeding Measures and Ministryes” in Britain and Ireland since the collapse, in 1714, of Queen Anne’s Tory government, which he had served as propagandist.

In its politics the work is pacifist, condemns “Party and Faction” in the body politic, and denounces colonialism as plunder, lust, enslavement, and murder on a global scale. It satirises monarchical despotism yet displays little faith in parliaments. In Part III we get a short view of a representative modern parliament: “a Knot of Pedlars, Pickpockets, Highwaymen and Bullies”.

Gulliver’s Travels belongs to a tradition of satiric and utopian imaginary voyages that includes works by Lucian, Rabelais, and Thomas More. Swift hijacked the form of the popular contemporary voyage book as the vehicle for his satire, though the work combines genres, containing utopian and dystopian fiction, satire, history, science fiction, dialogues of the dead, fable, as well as parody of the travel book and the Robinson Crusoe-style novel.

It’s not a book to be judged by its cover. The frontispiece, title page and table of contents of the original edition gave no hint that this was not a genuine travel account. Swift and his friends reported stories of gullible readers who took this hoax travel book for the real thing.

It is also not reader friendly. The revised 1735 edition of the Travels opens with a disturbing letter from Gulliver in which the reader is arraigned by an irate and misanthropic author convinced that the “human Species” is too depraved to be saved, as evidenced by the fact that his book has had no reforming effect on the world. The book ends with Gulliver, a proud, ranting recluse, preferring his horses to humans, and warning any English Yahoos with the vice of pride not to “presume to appear in my Sight”.

Readers might dismiss the unbalanced Gulliver, but he is only saying what Swift’s uncompromising satire insists is the truth about humankind.

In many ways Jonathan Swift is remote from us, but his satire still matters, and Gulliver’s Travels continues to vex and entertain today.

“Gulliver’s Travels is primarily an adventure story and a fanciful account of strange and wonderful lands, and therein lies its real charm”. Elaborate and illustrate.

A Classic for Young Readers as an Adventure Story

There is no doubt that Gulliver’s Travels is a story of adventure and that it has several elements in it of a fairy tale. Both adventure and fairy-elements in a story appeal greatly to the young mind.

They have some charm even for the adult mind. But it would be an incorrect view to regard Gulliver’s Travels as merely an adventure story or a fairy tale intended for the entertainment and diversion of young people. Gulliver’s tale is an allegorical satire. In other words, there lies below the surface a deeper meaning. Swift’s real purpose was to expose the follies, absurdities, and evils of mankind in general. However, this book has established itself not only as a satire on mankind but also as a classic for the young readers.

Some of the Difficulties Faced by Gulliver in the Course or His Voyages

Let us, then, take a look at Gulliver’s Travels as a tale of adventure which it doubtless is and as a fanciful account of strange and wonderful lands. The book tells us the story of the various voyages of a man called Lemuel Gulliver. Every voyage is an adventure in itself. There is, first of all, the voyage to a country called Lilliput. Gulliver, in the course of his first principal voyage, gets ship-wrecked, and has to swim to the shore to save his life. On the sea-shore he falls into a sound slumber and, when he wakes up, he finds himself a prisoner in chains. In the course of his second voyage, Gulliver’s ship is overtaken by a fierce storm which threatens to wreck the ship and engulf the sailors including Gulliver. However, when, after the storm, the ship casts anchor, and a few sailors including Gulliver himself, are sent to the shore, Gulliver finds himself a captive in the hands of a giant. In the course of his third voyage Gulliver’s ship is overtaken by pirates. The pirates treat Gulliver roughly and, after depriving him of all his belongings, put him on a small boat and set him adrift. Five days later, the boat touches a rocky island where Gulliver gets down, very low in spirits and feeling tired and desolate. In the course of his fourth voyage, Gulliver is attacked by the members of the crew of his own ship and is bound hand and foot. Most of the members of this crew had previously been pirates, and now they threaten to throw Gulliver into the sea if he puts up any resistance. After a few days, the ruffians put Gulliver down on the sea-coast and sail away, leaving him alone to fend for himself. Gulliver finds himself in a new country about which he knows nothing at all.

A Story of Risks and Dangers

The above brief account of the various voyages of Gulliver shows the difficulties and dangers that Gulliver faced in the course of his wanderings. Adventure always implies a risk of life or a danger to life. The man who has the spirit of adventure in him is always ready to face risks and dangers. Gulliver sets out nom a comfortable life at home in order to explore unknown countries, knowing full well that he will face many difficulties and hazards. But every time he goes on a fresh voyage willingly and experiences not only difficulties and hardships but also serious dangers to his life. It is a miracle that each time he returns home safely. Such a story is bound to fascinate the young mind because dangers and difficulties never fail to appeal to young people.

The Amusing Experiences of Gulliver in the Strange Country of Dwarfs

Then there are the strange experiences of Gulliver in various lands. Every land which Gulliver visits is a wonderful land, and Gulliver’s experiences in every land are strange or exciting, or amusing. In Lilliput the people are diminutives or dwarfs, hardly six inches in height. The very idea that there are human beings so small is funny. But more amusing than that is the manner in which Gulliver is fed. Several ladders are applied by the Lilliputians to his sides, and about a hundred of them climb up those ladders in order to carry baskets full of meat and drink and put them close to his mouth. Similarly, it has taken nine hundred Lilliputians three hours to raise Gulliver to the level of a huge carriage by which he is carried to the royal court. In the metropolis, Gulliver becomes an object of curiosity, and people come nom far and near to look at him. He is given the name “man-mountain”. Gulliver here lends his support to the King and the government of Lilliput against the island of Blefuscu which has been hostile to Lilliput, and he cripples the enemy fleet, thus winning the appreciation and admiration of the Lilliputian king. One of the most amusing incidents in this part of the book is Gulliver’s extinguishing a fire in the Empress’s apartment by urinating on it. The Empress feels greatly annoyed with this action of Gulliver and moves nom that apartment to a different location. Some of the customs of the Lilliputians are also a source of amusement. For instance, they bury their dead with the heads of the corpses directly downwards because they hold a belief that after eleven thousand moons the dead would rise from their graves and that during this period the earth would turn upside down so that the dead would, on coming back to life, find themselves standing on their feet. Another comic absurdity of the Lilliputians is their manner of writing which is very peculiar, being neither nom the left to the right, like that of the Europeans; nor from the right to the left like that of the Arabians; nor from up to down like that of the Chinese; nor from down to up like that of the Cascagians; but aslant from one comer of the paper to the other “like the ladies in England”. Gulliver has to go through an ordeal when, on being informed that he will be shortly impeached on several charges, he finds it necessary to make good his escape from this country.

Gulliver’s Exciting Experiences in the Country of Giants

In Part II of the book we find ourselves with Gulliver in another strange and wonderful land. This land is called Brobdingnag. This land is inhabited by monstrous-looking giants who are twelve times the height of Gulliver. By contrast with these huge-looking men, Gulliver thinks himself to be as small as the Lilliputians were by contrast with him. Here too Gulliver becomes an object of curiosity for the inhabitants, though for the opposite reason. When Gulliver is first shown by his captor to his wife (who is as huge in size and proportions as her husband), she screams and runs away as a woman in England might do at the sight of a toad or a spider. In other words, Gulliver looks like an insect to the people here. The youngest son in the family of Gulliver’s captor lifts Gulliver by the legs and holds him so high in the air that Gulliver begins to tremble with fear. Then Gulliver sees a cat which is three times larger than an ox in England, and he feels greatly alarmed by its fierceness. When the lady of the house begins to suckle her child, Gulliver feels thoroughly disgusted on seeing the huge, monstrous breasts of the woman, with their nipples about half of the bigness of Gulliver’s head. When Gulliver wakes up from his sleep, he is attacked by a couple of rats which are of the size of a big dog. When Gulliver is afterwards bought by the Queen, he becomes a favourite with her. As a consequence, the royal dwarf begins to feel jealous of Gulliver and plays much mischief with him. On one occasion, the dwarf makes Gulliver fall into a large bowl of cream. On another occasion, he thrusts Gulliver’s whole body into a bone from which the marrow has been taken out. Gulliver also feels uneasy for another reason. There are too many flies in Brobdingnag. The flies here are very large, like all other creatures, and Gulliver feels much troubled by them as they hum and buzz about his ears. He is also much tormented by the wasps, which are as large as the patridges in England. Referring to the royal kitchen Gulliver says that, if he were to describe the size of the kitchen-grate and the size of the pots and kettles, the reader would perhaps not believe him and think that Gulliver is guilty of exaggeration. There are several mishaps during Gulliver’s stay in Brobdingnag. Once an apple, falling from a tree, hits Gulliver on his back and knocks him down flat on his face, because the apples here are also very large. On another occasion, when Gulliver is standing on a grassy plot, there is a sudden shower of hailstones which are nearly eighteen hundred times as large as those in Europe. Gulliver is badly injured by these hailstones. The royal maids of honour often play with Gulliver as if Gulliver were a toy. On one occasion Gulliver is carried off by a monkey which is also very huge, and he is rescued with great difficulty. Eventually Gulliver is carried off by a huge eagle which drops him into the sea from where he is picked up by a passing ship. This is Gulliver’s last adventure on his second voyage.

Gulliver’s Account of the Life in Laputa, Lagado, Etc.

Laputa, the voyage to which is described in Part III of the book, is another wonderful land. Laputa is an island which keeps flying at a height of about two miles from the earth over the continent of Balnibarbi. This in itself is a miracle. The people of Laputa have strange shapes and faces. Their heads are all reclined either to the right or to the left, one of their eyes being turned inward and the other directly up to the zenith. Many of the Laputans are followed by flappers who carry in their hands blown bladders fastened to the ends of short sticks. The function of these flappers is to draw the attention of their masters to anything that might need their attention, because the minds of their masters are so occupied with intense speculations that they can neither speak nor listen to others without being roused by some external action. Another strange feature of life on Laputa is that mutton, beef, pudding, and other eatables are given geometrical shapes or the shapes of musical instruments. When these people want to praise the beauty of a woman or any other animal they do so in geometrical or musical terms. The men on this island are so busy in their cogitations that their wives feel compelled to make love to strangers instead of to their husbands. When Gulliver goes to Lagado, he witnesses the many experiments which are in progress at the Academy of Projectors. There is a project for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, a project for restoring human excrement to its original food, a new method for building houses by beginning at the roof and working downwards to the foundation, and so on. There are several schemes being developed at the school of political projects also. These are all very amusing and impractical schemes. Gulliver’s visit to the island of Glubbdubdrib is also very interesting because Gulliver here finds himself in a place where ghosts and spirits are in attendance upon the governor and where Gulliver is enabled to hold conversations with the spirits of such great men of the past as Alexander, Hannibal, Aristotle, Homer, and Brutus. Gulliver also sees a group of immortal people in this place. These immortals are feeling wretched and miserable because they long for death which does not come to them.

The Charm of These Accounts

The appeal of all the first three voyages for the young reader is manifest from the above summary. There is plenty of fun and mirth in the accounts of these three voyages. Indeed, some of the episodes are bound to give rise to boisterous laughter among the readers. In other words, the description of some of the incidents is really hilarious. No wonder that one of the early commentators called Gulliver’s Travels a merry work. It is evident, too, that improbability is the keynote of most of the incidents. The grown-up readers, for instance, will not even believe in the existence of Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians. But the young readers are bound to feel excited by descriptions of these strange people and their doings, and will not doubt the existence of pigmies and giants. For them the accounts of these people’s life will have a charm of their own.

Yet Another Wonderland in Part IV of the Book

The country of the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms, described in Part IV, is also a wonderland. This is a country in which human beings are no better than beasts, while the horses show themselves to be superior to human beings. The horses or the Houyhnhnms are the noblest conceivable animals. They are wholly governed by reason; they have a language of their own which they are able even to teach to a human being like Gulliver; they have their own excellent customs and methods of government; they are guided mainly by the principles of benevolence and kindness. These strange or marvellous beings are free from all kinds of evil, so much so that there is no word in their language for lying or falsehood. They hold a periodical assembly to discuss their affairs and to take necessary action to rectify things which have gone wrong; they have their methods to control their population; and they do not marry for love or for the pleasures of sex but only to reproduce and yet to keep their members under check. The Yahoos, who symbolize human beings, are on the contrary despicable creatures who arouse our disgust and abhorrence. This part of the story is not likely to appeal to the young mind very much because it is replete with symbolism, the understanding of which is essential for the appreciation of the entire part. In this part, Swift’s message is more important than the adventurous elements or the element of wonder and enchantment.

Not Enough to Describe the Book as an Adventure Story

Finally, it must be pointed out that it is not enough to describe Gulliver’s Travels merely as an adventure story or a tale of wonder. We must recognize that in it Swift has lashed human institutions and human passions. It is a satiric masterpiece in which Swift exposes human follies and absurdities, and the consequences of human irrationality.

The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer General points

The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer General points

                              The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer                                                                             General points

1. Chaucer is the real founder of English poetry and is rightly called the Father of English poetry .
2. Chaucer made a fresh beginning in English poetry.
3. Chaucer's education as a poet was two-fold: a part of it came from French and Italian literature and the other part of it came from life.
4. Chaucer was not merely bookish and least visionary man. Like Shakespeare and Milton he was a man of worldly affairs.
5. "Canterbury Tales" is Chaucer's remarkable and famous work which is a collection of stories related by the pilgrims on their way to the shrines of Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
6. These pilgrims represent different sections of the contemporary society of England. 
7. The description of these characters shows Chaucer's narrative power as a poet
8. All these characters are individualized yet their thoroughly typical qualities give a unique value to Chaucer's picture of men and manners in England of his time.
9. "Canterbury Tales" is a land mark in the history of English poetry because here Chaucer enriches the English language and meter to such an extent that now it could be conveniently used for any purpose.
10. By introducing a variety of highly finished characters into a single action and engage them in an intimated dialogue, Chaucer fulfilled every requirement of a dramatist.11. By drawing finished and various portraits in verse, Chaucer showed the way to the novelists to portray characters.
12. Chaucer's work fall into three periods:
in first period he imitated FRENCH models .
in second period he imitated Italian models 
in third period he imitated English models 
13. Chaucer's third period may be called English period because in it he threw off foreign influences and showed native originality.
14." Canterbury Tales” is his greatest poetic achievement which places him in the heart of London. Here we find his gentle, kind humor, which is Chaucer's greatest quality, at its very best.
15. among his chief characteristics are his delightful freshness and simplicity, his roguish genital humor ---------------he was full of quaint fun, his heart felt love of nature. his tender pathos , his knowledge of women ,his love for his dear old books, his power of life like portraiture ,his admirable way of  story-telling and perfection of his verses 
16. During his Italian period Baccaccio alone exercised a deep influence on Chaucer's art 
17. The main difference between Chaucer and Baccaccio is that Chaucer emphasizes characters rather than passions while Baccaccio emphasis passion 
18. Chaucer's skill in characterization is well pronounced in the Prologue and each one of his characters comes to our view in full form exhibiting the particularities of his or her class.
19. Various features of Chaucer's poetry are
story telling 
narrative poet
a novelist 
dramatic approach 
descriptive poet
realistic poet
humorist
humorous irony 
20 Chaucer’s imagery is of simplest kind .he takes similes and comparisons from real life

Geoffrey Chaucer, 1340-1400

Geoffrey Chaucer, 1340-1400

Geoffrey Chaucer, 1340-1400
 Before William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer was the pre-eminent English poet, and he remains in the top tier of the English canon. He was also the most significant poet to write in Middle English. Chaucer was born in the early 1340s to a fairly rich, well-to-do, though not aristocratic family. His father, John Chaucer, was a vintner and deputy to the king's butler. His family's financial success came from work in the wine and leather businesses, and they had considerable inherited property in London. Little information exists about Chaucer's education, but his writings demonstrate a close familiarity with a number of important books of his contemporaries and of earlier times (such as Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy). Chaucer likely was fluent in several languages, including French, Italian, and Latin. Sons of wealthy London merchants could receive good educations at this time, and there is reason to believe that, if Chaucer did not attend one of the schools on Thames Street near his boyhood home, then he was at least well-educated at home. Certainly his work showcases a passion for reading a huge range of literature, classical and modern. Chaucer first appears in public records in 1357 as a member of the house of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster. This was a conventional arrangement in which sons of middle-class households were placed in royal service so that they could obtain a courtly education. Two years later, Chaucer served in the army under Edward III and was captured during an unsuccessful offensive at Reims, although he was later ransomed. Chaucer served under a number of diplomatic missions. By 1366 Chaucer had married Philippa Pan who had been in service with the Countess of Ulster. Chaucer married well for his position, for Philippa Chaucer received pension from the queen consort of Edward III. Philippa's sister Katherine de Roet was John of Gaunt's mistress for twenty years before becoming the Duke's wife. Through this connection, John of Gaunt was Chaucer's “kinsman.” Chaucer himself secured an annuity as yeoman of the king and was listed as one of the king's esquires. Chaucer's first published work was The Book of the Duchess, a poem of over 1,300 lines, supposed to be an elegy for Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, addressed to her widower, the Duke. For this first of his important poems, which was published in 1370, Chaucer used the dream-vision form, a genre made popular by the highly influential 13th-century French poem of courtly love, the Roman de la Rose, which Chaucer translated into English. Throughout the following decade, Chaucer continued with his diplomatic career, traveling to Italy for negotiations to open a Genoa port to Britain as well as military negotiations with Milan. During his missions to Italy, Chaucer encountered the work of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, which were later to have profound influence upon his own writing. In 1374 Chaucer was appointed comptroller of the customs and subsidy of wool, skins, and tanned hides for the Port of London, his first position away from the British court. Chaucer's only major work during this period was House of Fame, a poem of around 2,000 lines in dream-vision form, which ends so abruptly that some scholars consider it unfinished. In October 1385, Chaucer was appointed a justice of the peace for Kent, and in August 1386 he became knight of the shire for Kent. Around the time of his wife's death in 1387, Chaucer moved to Greenwich and later to Kent. Changing political circumstances eventually led to Chaucer falling out of favor with the royal court and leaving Parliament, but when Richard II became King of England, Chaucer regained royal favor. During this period Chaucer used writing primarily as an escape from public life. His works included Parlement of Foules, a poem of 699 lines. This work is a dream-vision for St. Valentine's Day that makes use of the myth that each year on that day the birds gather before the goddess Nature to choose their mates. This work was heavily influenced by Boccaccio and Dante. Chaucer's next work was Troilus and Criseyde, which was influenced by The Consolation of Philosophy, which Chaucer himself translated into English. Chaucer took some the plot of Troilus from Boccaccio's Filostrato. This 8,000-line rime-royal poem recounts the love story of Troilus, son of the Trojan king Priam, and Criseyde, widowed daughter of the deserter priest Calkas, against the background of the Trojan War. (Compare Shakespeare's version in Troilus and Cressida.) The Canterbury Tales secured Chaucer's literary reputation. It is his great literary accomplishment, a compendium of stories by pilgrims traveling to the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. Chaucer introduces each of these pilgrims in vivid, brief sketches in the General Prologue and intersperses the twenty-four tales with short dramatic scenes with lively exchanges. Chaucer did not complete the full plan for the tales, and surviving manuscripts leave some doubt as to the exact order of the tales that remain. However, the work is sufficiently complete to be considered a unified book rather than a collection of unfinished fragments. The Canterbury Tales is a lively mix of a variety of genres told by travelers from all aspects of society. Among the genres included are courtly romance, fabliaux, saint's biography, allegorical tale, beast fable, and medieval sermon. Information concerning Chaucer's descendants is not fully clear. It is likely that he and Philippa had two sons and two daughters. Thomas Chaucer died in 1400; he was a large landowner and political officeholder, and his daughter, Alice, became Duchess of Suffolk. Little is known about Lewis Chaucer, Geoffrey Chaucer's youngest son. Of Chaucer's two daughters, Elizabeth became a nun, while Agnes was a lady-in-waiting for the coronation of Henry IV in 1399. Public records indicate that Chaucer had no descendants living after the fifteenth century.

Romantic age (1798-1824)

Romantic age (1798-1824)

Romantic age (1798-1824)
1- It was a revolt against classical school of thought.
2- Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley & Keats belong to this period.
3- Romanticism started with the publication of "lyrical ballads" in 1798, a book on the nature and scope of poetry by Wordsworth.
4- Unlike classicism simplicity of style & diction became the order of the day.
5- they started to depend on poetic imagination instead of fancy.
*they used common language in poetry- a language used by rustics.
* they disliked artificial way of town life, talked about common and rustic people. 
Rustic means rural or resembling country people.

Literary Movements and Periods

Literary Movements and Periods

Literary Movements and Periods :-

Literature constantly evolves as new movements emerge to speak to the concerns of different groups of people and historical periods.

*Absurd, literature of the (c. 1930–1970):* A movement, primarily in the theater, that responded to the seeming illogicality and purposelessness of human life in works marked by a lack of clear narrative, understandable psychological motives, or emotional catharsis. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is one of the most celebrated works in the theater of the absurd.

*Aestheticism (c. 1835–1910):* A late-19th- century movement that believed in art as an end in itself. Aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater rejected the view that art had to posses a higher moral or political value and believed instead in “art for art’s sake.”

*Angry Young Men (1950s–1980s):* A group of male British writers who created visceral plays and fiction at odds with the political establishment and a self-satisfied middle class. John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1957) is one of the seminal works of this movement.

*Beat Generation (1950s–1960s):* A group of American writers in the 1950s and 1960s who sought release and illumination though a bohemian counterculture of sex, drugs, and Zen Buddhism. Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac (On The Road) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl) gained fame by giving readings in coffeehouses, often accompanied by jazz music.

*Bloomsbury Group (c. 1906–1930s):* An informal group of friends and lovers, including Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes, who lived in the Bloomsbury section of London in the early 20th century and who had a considerable liberalizing influence on British culture.

*Commedia dell’arte (1500s–1700s):* Improvisational comedy first developed in Renaissance Italy that involved stock characters and centered around a set scenario. The elements of farce and buffoonery in commedia dell’arte, as well as its standard characters and plot intrigues, have had a tremendous influence on Western comedy, and can still be seen in contemporary drama and television sitcoms.

*Dadaism (1916–1922):* An avant-garde movement that began in response to the devastation of World War I. Based in Paris and led by the poet Tristan Tzara, the Dadaists produced nihilistic and antilogical prose, poetry, and art, and rejected the traditions, rules, and ideals of prewar Europe.

*Enlightenment (c. 1660–1790):* An intellectual movement in France and other parts of Europe that emphasized the importance of reason, progress, and liberty. The Enlightenment, sometimes called the Age of Reason, is primarily associated with nonfiction writing, such as essays and philosophical treatises. Major Enlightenment writers include Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, René Descartes.

*Elizabethan era (c. 1558–1603):* A flourishing period in English literature, particularly drama, that coincided with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and included writers such as Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser.

*Gothic fiction (c. 1764–1820):* A genre of late-18th-century literature that featured brooding, mysterious settings and plots and set the stage for what we now call “horror stories.” Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, set inside a medieval castle, was the first major Gothic novel. Later, the term “Gothic” grew to include any work that attempted to create an atmosphere of terror or the unknown, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories.

*Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918–1930):* A flowering of African-American literature, art, and music during the 1920s in New York City. W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk anticipated the movement, which included Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro, Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the poetry of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.

*Lost Generation (c. 1918–1930s):* A term used to describe the generation of writers, many of them soldiers that came to maturity during World War I. Notable members of this group include F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway, whose novel The Sun Also Rises embodies the Lost Generation’s sense of disillusionment.

*Magic realism (c. 1935–present):* A style of writing, popularized by Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, and others, that combines realism with moments of dream-like fantasy within a single prose narrative.

*Metaphysical poets (c. 1633–1680):* A group of 17th-century poets who combined direct language with ingenious images, paradoxes, and conceits. John Donne and Andrew Marvell are the best known poets of this school.

*Middle English (c. 1066–1500):* The transitional period between Anglo-Saxon and modern English. The cultural upheaval that followed the Norman Conquest of England, in 1066, saw a flowering of secular literature, including ballads, chivalric romances, allegorical poems, and a variety of religious plays. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is the most celebrated work of this period.

*Modernism (1890s–1940s):* A literary and artistic movement that provided a radical breaks with traditional modes of Western art, thought, religion, social conventions, and morality. Major themes of this period include the attack on notions of hierarchy; experimentation in new forms of narrative, such as stream of consciousness; doubt about the existence of knowable, objective reality; attention to alternative viewpoints and modes of thinking; and self-referentiality as a means of drawing attention to the relationships between artist and audience, and form and content. •

*High modernism (1920s):* Generally considered the golden age of modernist literature, this period saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

*Naturalism (c. 1865–1900):* A literary movement that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. Leading writers in the movement include Émile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane.

*Neoclassicism (c. 1660–1798):* A literary movement, inspired by the rediscovery of classical works of ancient Greece and Rome that emphasized balance, restraint, and order. Neoclassicism roughly coincided with the Enlightenment, which espoused reason over passion. Notable neoclassical writers include Edmund Burke, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift.

*Nouveau Roman (“New Novel”) (c. 1955–1970):* A French movement, led by Alain Robbe-Grillet, that dispensed with traditional elements of the novel, such as plot and character, in favor of neutrally recording the experience of sensations and things.

*Postcolonial literature (c. 1950s–present):* Literature by and about people from former European colonies, primarily in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. This literature aims both to expand the traditional canon of Western literature and to challenge Eurocentric assumptions about literature, especially through examination of questions of otherness, identity, and race. Prominent postcolonial works include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) provided an important theoretical basis for understanding postcolonial literature.

*Postmodernism (c. 1945–present):* A notoriously ambiguous term, especially as it refers to literature, postmodernism can be seen as a response to the elitism of high modernism as well as to the horrors of World War II. Postmodern literature is characterized by a disjointed, fragmented pastiche of high and low culture that reflects the absence of tradition and structure in a world driven by technology and consumerism. Julian Barnes, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, and Kurt Vonnegut are among many who are considered postmodern authors.

*Pre-Raphaelites (c. 1848–1870):* The literary arm of an artistic movement that drew inspiration from Italian artists working before Raphael (1483–1520). The Pre-Raphaelites combined sensuousness and religiosity through archaic poetic forms and medieval settings. William Morris, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Charles Swinburne were leading poets in the movement.

*Realism (c. 1830–1900):* A loose term that can refer to any work that aims at honest portrayal over sensationalism, exaggeration, or melodrama. Technically, realism refers to a late-19th-centu ry literary movement—primarily French, English, and American—that aimed at accurate detailed portrayal of ordinary, contemporary life. Many of the 19th century’s greatest novelists, such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Leo Tolstoy, are classified as realists. Naturalism ( see above ) can be seen as an intensification of realism.

*Romanticism (c. 1798–1832):* A literary and artistic movement that reacted against the restraint and universalism of the Enlightenment. The Romantics celebrated spontaneity, imagination, subjectivity, and the purity of nature. Notable English Romantic writers include Jane Austen, William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. Prominent figures in the American Romantic movement include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, and John Greenleaf Whittier.

*Sturm und Drang (1770s):* German for “storm and stress,” this brief German literary movement advocated passionate individuality in the face of Neoclassical rationalism and restraint. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is the most enduring work of this movement, which greatly influenced the Romantic movement (see above).

*Surrealism (1920s–1930s):* An avant-garde movement, based primarily in France, that sought to break down the boundaries between rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, through a variety of literary and artistic experiments. The surrealist poets, such as André Breton and Paul Eluard, were not as successful as their artist counterparts, who included Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and René Magritte.

*Symbolists (1870s–1890s):* A group of French poets who reacted against realism with a poetry of suggestion based on private symbols, and experimented with new poetic forms such as free verse and the prose poem. The symbolists—Stép hane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine are the most well known—were influenced by Charles Baudelaire. In turn, they had a seminal influence on the modernist poetry of the early 20th century.

*Transcendentalism (c. 1835–1860):* An American philosophical and spiritual movement, based in New England, that focused on the primacy of the individual conscience and rejected materialism in favor of closer communion with nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden are famous transcendentalist works.

*Victorian era (c. 1832–1901):* The period of English history between the passage of the first Reform Bill (1832) and the death of Queen Victoria (reigned 1837–1901). Though remembered for strict social, political, and sexual conservatism and frequent clashes between religion and science, the period also saw prolific literary activity and significant social reform and criticism. Notable Victorian novelists include the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy, while prominent poets include Matthew Arnold; Robert Browning; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and Christina Rossetti. Notable Victorian nonfiction writers include Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and Charles Darwin, who penned the famous On the Origin of Species (1859). Literary theory and literary criticism are interpretive tools that help us think more deeply and insightfully about the literature that we read. Over time, different schools of literary criticism have developed, each with its own approaches to the act of reading.

LITERARY FORMS AND MOVEMENTS, SHORT ANSWERS

LITERARY FORMS AND MOVEMENTS, SHORT ANSWERS

LITERARY FORMS AND MOVEMENTS, SHORT ANSWERS
What is round character ?
A round character is a complex and dynamic. In this character improvement and change occurs during the course of work .
What is a soliloquy?
Soliloquy is a device use in drama in which a character speaks to himself or herself (thinking loud) by showing his feelings or thoughts to audience.
What is a Lyric?
Lyric is a short poem in which poet’s own feelings and emotions are expressed normally having musical quality to sing.
What is heroic couplet?
A rhyming couplet written in iambic pentameter and it is traditionally used in epic and narrative poetry.
What is Neo-classicism?
Neo-classicism is a eighteenth century western movement of art, literature and architecture. They got inspiration from ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
What is a mock-epic?
Mock-epic is a poem in which satire, exaggeration, irony and sarcasm is used to mock the subject or used the epic style for the trivial subject etc.
What is a complex plot?
A complex plot according to Aristotle is that have ‘peripeteia’ (reversal) and ‘anagnorisis’ (denouement) without these is a simple plot.
What is novella?
Novella is a narrative fictional work longer than story and shorter than novel.
What is interior monologue?
Interior monologue is the expression of internal thought, feelings and emotions of a character in dramatic or narrative form.
What is blank verse?
Blank verse is a form of poetry that written in iambic pentameter but un-rhymed.
What is Art for Arts’ sake?
“Art for Arts’ sake” is nineteenth century literary movement which gives importance to aesthetic pleasure instead of moral, didactic or utilitarian function of literature.
What is Epistolary novel?
Epistolary novel is a narrated work. In this type of novel the story is narrated through letters sent by the observer or by those who participating in the events. Example: 18th century’s novel ‘Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa etc.
Differentiate between novel and novella.
Difference between novel and novella is length of the narrative work. Novella is shorter than novel and longer than short story but novel is long narrated work.
Define sonnet? What is the structure of Shakespearian sonnet?
Sonnet is a fourteen line poetry written in iambic pentameter having some rhyming scheme. Shakespearian sonnet consists of three quatrains and final couplet with rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg.
What is the difference between “Open form poetry” and “Closed form poetry”?
Close form poetry used the fix pattern of stanza, rhyme and meter etc. For example: sonnet, limerick, haiku and sestina etc. Open form poetry does not use these fix patterns.
What is the structure of Spenserian stanza?
Spenserian stanza consist of nine lines, eight lines are in iambic pentameter and followed by single line in iambic hexameter. The last line is called Alexandrine.
Differentiate between ‘Blank verse’ and ‘Free verse’.
‘Blank verse’ follows the fix meter like iambic pentameter and un-rhymed but ‘Free verse’ is also un-rhymed and does not follow the fix meter.
How can you define “Pastoral elegy”?
Pastoral elegy is a poem about death. In this poem poet expresses his grief for the dead in rural setting or about the shepherds.
What is ‘Point of View’?
‘Point of view’ is an opinion, judgment or attitude on a matter. It may be against are in favor.
Define plot. What are its various elements?
Plot is a logical arrangement of events in a story or play. The exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution are the elements of plot.
What is conflict?
Conflict is a problem or struggle in a story or play. It occurs in rising action, climax and falling action. It creates suspense and excitement in the story or play.
How can you explain catharsis?
Term catharsis used by Aristotle in the definition of tragedy. It is the release of emotions of pity and fear.
Define black comedy.
Black comedy is a humorous work in which human suffering regards as absurd and funny.
What is comedy of manners?
Comedy of manners is a humorous work in which the manners of society or class satirized. For example: “The importance of being Ernest” by Oscar Wilde.
What do you mean by Theater of the absurd?
Theater of the absurd is one kind of drama in which absurdity emphasized and lack realistic and logical structure. For example: “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett.
How can you differentiate between flat and round characters?
A round character is a complex and dynamic. In this character improvement and change occurs during the course of work but flat character are uncomplicated and remains unchanged through the course of work.
What was the Oxford movement?
Oxford movement starts in 1833 and for the revival of Catholic doctrine in Anglican Church. It is against the conventional understanding of the religion.
Define Puritanism?
Puritanism is the religious movement starts in sixteen century and the goal of the movement is to purify the church of England from its Catholic practices.
What is Imagism?
Imagism is a movement of Anglo-American poets started in early nineteenth century in which they emphasize the use of clear images and simple and sharp language.
What is meant by Stream of Consciousness?
Stream of Consciousness is a technique of narration in which the series of thoughts in the mind of the character are presented. “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf is one example.
What is your understanding about the word Renaissance?
Renaissance is a French word means rebirth. It is a literary movement of fourteenth century to sixteenth century the revival of literature takes place in this period. The Renaissance writers are Shakespeare, Christopher Marlow etc.
What is meant by Gothic Novel?
Gothic Novel is one type of novel. In this type the cruel passions and supernatural terror is presented. Example: Monastery or Haunted Castle etc.
What is Metaphysical Poetry?
Metaphysical poetry is a highly intellectualized poetry with the use of wit, imagery, conceits and paradox etc. It is obscure and rigid. For example: “John Donne’s poetry

IMPORTANT QUESTIONS PART 1

IMPORTANT QUESTIONS PART 1

IMPORTANT QUESTIONS PART 1
Paper (1): Classical Poetry
1. Chaucer’s art of characterization
2. Irony and satire in the prologue
3. Treatment of Ecclesiastical characters
4. Chaucer’s style and narrative skill
5. The Prologue as a picture gallery
6. Critical Appraisals of characters: Knight, WIB, Pardoner, Summonor, Parson, Friar and Prioress
7. Wyatt’s Contribution/ Wyatt as poet or sonneteer
8. Surrey’s Contribution/ Surrey as poet or sonneteer
9. Critical Appraisals: The Long Love that in my thought I harbor, Is it possible? Madam Withouten many words, Wyatt’s Death, Prisoned in Windsor, Love that doth reign and lived in within my heart
10. Donne as a metaphysical poet
11. Donne as a love poet
12. Critical Appraisals of select poems: Death be not proud, The Sun Rising, A Valediction: forbidding Mourning, The Good Morrow, Twicknam Garden
13. Milton’s Grand Style
14. Paradise as a Renaissance Epic
15. Hero of Paradise Lost: Satan or Adam
16. Main Theme in PL: Justifying the ways of God
17. The Rape of the Lock as a Mock-Epic
18. The Role and Function of Machinery in ROL
19. Character of Belinda
20. ROL as a Social Satire.
Paper (2): Classical Drama
21. Oedipus’s Fate-Action/ Hamartia of Oedipus: hubris
22. Oedipus as a tragedy
23. Dramatic Irony in Oedipus Rex
24. Main Theme: Relationship between man and gods.
25. Dr. Faustus as an over-reacher/ Faustus as Icarus
26. The real sin of Doctor Faustus
27. Dr. Faustus as a tragic Hero
28. Renaissance Elements in Dr. Faustus
29. Othello as a tragic hero.
30. Othello as a (domestic) tragedy
31. Theme of Jealousy in Othello
32. Iago’s motives and Othello’s cause of destruction
33. Winter’s Tale as a tragic-comedy
34. Theme of Jealousy in Winter’s Tale
35. Pastoral elements in Winter’s Tale.
36. Importance of Being Earnest: theme of love, money, marriage and social status.
37. IBE: The title – its significance and value
38. A trivial comedy for serious people/ IBE as comedy
39. Oscar Wilde’s style: pun, wit, paradox & verbatism
40. IBE as a social satire
Paper (3): Novel
41. Pride and Prejudice: Title and significance
42. Character of Elizabeth in P&P
43. Theme of love and marriage in P&P
44. Jane Austen’s Irony
45. A Tale of Two Cities: Title and its value
46. The theme of resurrection & renunciation in ATC
47. Symbolism in A Tale of Two Cities
48. ATC is a social novel in political background
49. Sydney Carton and his sacrifice in ATC
50. Adam Bede and Psychological Realism
51. George Eliot’s art of characterization
52. Hetty’s suffering; its cause and redemption
53. Education and regeneration of Adam Bede
54. The Return of the Native as a tragedy
55. Egdon Heath as a character in TRN
56. Chance and Fate – Hardy as a novelist
57. The Cause of Eustacia or Clym’s tragedy in TRN
Paper (4): Prose
58. Bacon as an essayist/ his style and contribution
59. Bacon as a moralist
60. Swift as a satirist
61. Swift as a misanthrope
62. Describe the first and the last voyage G-Travels.
63. Popularity of Gulliver’s Travels
64. Seamus Heaney’s justification, functions and redressing effects of poetry.
65. What is culture and what is imperialism and how does Edward Said relate the two?
66. Why does Edward Said refer to various novelists to prove his thesis of imperialism?
67. Bertrand Russell as an essayist.
Paper (5): American Literature
68. John Ashbery as a modern poet
69. Major themes in Ashbery and Richard Wilbur
70. Major Themes in Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath
71. Adrienne Rich as a poet
72. Critical Appraisals: Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers, Diving into the Wreck, The Painter, Melodic Trains, Still Citizen Sparrow, After the Last Bulletins, You are! Ariel, Arrival of the Bee box and Final Notations
73. The Crucible: its title and significance
74. John Proctor as a tragic hero
75. Mass Hysteria and theme of evil in the Crucible
76. Relationship between individual & society in The Crucible/ Individual commitment in society
77. Character of Abigail Williams
78. For Whom the Bell Tolls: Main theme
79. Robert Jordon as a tragic hero
80. Justify Robert Jordon’s sacrifice
81. Robert Jordon as a code hero
82. Hemingway’s style – Fictional technique
83. Symbolic Significance of the title Jazz
84. City as a character in Jazz
85. Major themes in Jazz
86. Mourning Becomes Electra as a tragedy

LITERARY PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

LITERARY PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

LITERARY PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

450-1066: Old English (or Anglo Saxon) Chaucer, drama ,romance and verse
1066-1500: Middle English Period

1500-1660: The Renaissance ==>A period of reibirth...William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne
1558-1603: Elizabethan Age
1603-1625: Jacobean Age
1625-1649: Caroline Age
1649-1660: Commonwealth Period
1660-1785: The Neoclassical Period==> The Regency Period in England...Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Horace Walpole, Oliver Goldsmith, Edward Young
1660-1700: The Restoration
1700-1745: The Augustan Age (or Age of Pope)
1745-1785: The Age of Sensibility (or Age og Johnson)
1785-1830: The Romantic Period (includes the Gothic Period) ==>Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Ann Radcliffe
1832-1901: The Victorian Period The Great Age of the English Novel: realistic, thickly plotted and long.Emily Bronte, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Browning
1901-1914: The Edwardian Period Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence
1910-1936: The Georgian Period

1914-1945: The Modern Period

1945-Present: Postmodern Period Ted Hughes, Samuel Beckett, John Osborne

*Literary Movements and Periods :-

*Literary Movements and Periods :-

Literature constantly evolves as new movements emerge to speakto the concerns of different groups of people and historical periods.

*Absurd, literature of the (c. 1930–1970):* 

A movement, primarily in the theater, that responded to the seeming illogicality and purposelessness of human life in works marked by a lack of clear narrative, understandable psychological motives, or emotional catharsis. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is one of the most celebrated works in the theater of the absurd.

*Aestheticism (c. 1835–1910):* 

A late-19th- century movement that believed in art as an end in itself. Aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater rejected the view that art had to posses a higher moral or political value and believed instead in “art for art’s sake.”

*Angry Young Men (1950s–1980s):* 

A group of male British writers who created visceral plays and fiction at odds with the political establishment and a self-satisfied middle class. John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1957) is one of the seminal works of this movement.

*Beat Generation (1950s–1960s):*

 A group of American writers in the 1950s and 1960s who sought release and illumination though a bohemian counterculture of sex, drugs, and Zen Buddhism. Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac (On The Road) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl) gained fame by giving readings in coffeehouses, often accompanied by jazz music.

*Bloomsbury Group (c. 1906–1930s):* 

An informal group of friends and lovers, including Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes, who lived in the Bloomsbury section of London in the early 20th century and who had a considerable liberalizing influence on British culture.

*Commedia dell’arte (1500s–1700s):* 

Improvisational comedy first developed in Renaissance Italy that involved stock characters and centered around a set scenario. The elements of farce and buffoonery in commedia dell’arte, as well as its standard characters and plot intrigues, have had a tremendous influence on Western comedy, and can still be seen in contemporary drama and television sitcoms.

*Dadaism (1916–1922):*

An avant-garde movement that began in response to the devastation of World War I. Based in Paris and led by the poet Tristan Tzara, the Dadaists produced nihilistic and antilogical prose, poetry, and art, and rejected the traditions, rules, and ideals of prewar Europe.

*Enlightenment (c. 1660–1790):* An intellectual movement in France and other parts of Europe that emphasized the importance of reason, progress, and liberty. The Enlightenment, sometimes called the Age of Reason, is primarily associated with nonfiction writing, such as essays and philosophical treatises. Major Enlightenment writers include Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, René Descartes.

*Elizabethan era (c. 1558–1603):* 

A flourishing period in English literature, particularly drama, that coincided with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and included writers such as Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser.

*Gothic fiction (c. 1764–1820):* 

A genre of late-18th-century literature that featured brooding, mysterious settings and plots and set the stage for what we now call “horror stories.” Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, set inside a medieval castle, was the first major Gothic novel. Later, the term “Gothic” grew to include any work that attempted to create an atmosphere of terror or the unknown, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories.

*Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918–1930):*

A flowering of African-American literature, art, and music during the 1920s in New York City. W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk anticipated the movement, which included Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro, Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the poetry of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.

*Lost Generation (c. 1918–1930s):* 

A term used to describe the generation of writers, many of them soldiers that came to maturity during World War I. Notable members of this group include F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway, whose novel The Sun Also Rises embodies the Lost Generation’s sense of disillusionment.

*Magic realism (c. 1935–present):* 

A style of writing, popularized by Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, and others, that combines realism with moments of dream-like fantasy within a single prose narrative.

*Metaphysical poets (c. 1633–1680):* A group of 17th-century poets who combined direct language with ingenious images, paradoxes, and conceits. John Donne and Andrew Marvell are the best known poets of this school.

*Middle English (c. 1066–1500):* 

The transitional period between Anglo-Saxon and modern English. The cultural upheaval that followed the Norman Conquest of England, in 1066, saw a flowering of secular literature, including ballads, chivalric romances, allegorical poems, and a variety of religious plays. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is the most celebrated work of this period.

*Modernism (1890s–1940s):*

A literary and artistic movement that provided a radical breaks with traditional modes of Western art, thought, religion, social conventions, and morality. Major themes of this period include the attack on notions of hierarchy; experimentation in new forms of narrative, such as stream of consciousness; doubt about the existence of knowable, objective reality; attention to alternative viewpoints and modes of thinking; and self-referentiality as a means of drawing attention to the relationships between artist and audience, and form and content. •

*High modernism (1920s):*

Generally considered the golden age of modernist literature, this period saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

*Naturalism (c. 1865–1900):*

A literary movement that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. Leading writers in the movement include Émile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane.

*Neoclassicism (c. 1660–1798):*

A literary movement, inspired by the rediscovery of classical works of ancient Greece and Rome that emphasized balance, restraint, and order. Neoclassicism roughly coincided with the Enlightenment, which espoused reason over passion. Notable neoclassical writers include Edmund Burke, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift.

*Nouveau Roman (“New Novel”) (c. 1955–1970):* 

A French movement, led by Alain Robbe-Grillet, that dispensed with traditional elements of the novel, such as plot and character, in favor of neutrally recording the experience of sensations and things.

*Postcolonial literature (c. 1950s–present):* 

Literature by and about people from former European colonies, primarily in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. This literature aims both to expand the traditional canon of Western literature and to challenge Eurocentric assumptions about literature, especially through examination of questions of otherness, identity, and race. Prominent postcolonial works include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) provided an important theoretical basis for understanding postcolonial literature.

*Postmodernism (c. 1945–present):*

A notoriously ambiguous term, especially as it refers to literature, postmodernism can be seen as a response to the elitism of high modernism as well as to the horrors of World War II. Postmodern literature is characterized by a disjointed, fragmented pastiche of high and low culture that reflects the absence of tradition and structure in a world driven by technology and consumerism. Julian Barnes, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, and Kurt Vonnegut are among many who are considered postmodern authors.

*Pre-Raphaelites (c. 1848–1870):* 

The literary arm of an artistic movement that drew inspiration from Italian artists working before Raphael (1483–1520). The Pre-Raphaelites combined sensuousness and religiosity through archaic poetic forms and medieval settings. William Morris, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Charles Swinburne were leading poets in the movement.

*Realism (c. 1830–1900):* A loose term that can refer to any work that aims at honest portrayal over sensationalism, exaggeration, or melodrama. Technically, realism refers to a late-19th-centu ry literary movement—primarily French, English, and American—that aimed at accurate detailed portrayal of ordinary, contemporary life. Many of the 19th century’s greatest novelists, such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Leo Tolstoy, are classified as realists. Naturalism ( see above ) can be seen as an intensification of realism.

*Romanticism (c. 1798–1832):*

A literary and artistic movement that reacted against the restraint and universalism of the Enlightenment. The Romantics celebrated spontaneity, imagination, subjectivity, and the purity of nature. Notable English Romantic writers include Jane Austen, William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. Prominent figures in the American Romantic movement include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, and John Greenleaf Whittier.

*Sturm und Drang (1770s):* 

German for “storm and stress,” this brief German literary movement advocated passionate individuality in the face of Neoclassical rationalism and restraint. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is the most enduring work of this movement, which greatly influenced the Romantic movement (see above).

*Surrealism (1920s–1930s):* 

An avant-garde movement, based primarily in France, that sought to break down the boundaries between rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, through a variety of literary and artistic experiments. The surrealist poets, such as André Breton and Paul Eluard, were not as successful as their artist counterparts, who included Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and René Magritte.

*Symbolists (1870s–1890s):*

A group of French poets who reacted against realism with a poetry of suggestion based on private symbols, and experimented with new poetic forms such as free verse and the prose poem. The symbolists—Stép hane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine are the most well known—were influenced by Charles Baudelaire. In turn, they had a seminal influence on the modernist poetry of the early 20th century.

*Transcendentalism (c. 1835–1860):* 

An American philosophical and spiritual movement, based in New England, that focused on the primacy of the individual conscience and rejected materialism in favor of closer communion with nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden are famous transcendentalist works.

*Victorian era (c. 1832–1901):*

The period of English history between the passage of the first Reform Bill (1832) and the death of Queen Victoria (reigned 1837–1901). Though remembered for strict social, political, and sexual conservatism and frequent clashes between religion and science, the period also saw prolific literary activity and significant social reform and criticism. Notable Victorian novelists include the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy, while prominent poets include Matthew Arnold; Robert Browning; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and Christina Rossetti. Notable Victorian nonfiction writers include Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and Charles Darwin, who penned the famous On the Origin of Species (1859). Literary theory and literary criticism are interpretive tools that help us think more deeply and insightfully about the literature that we read. Over time, different schools of literary criticism have developed, each with its own approaches to the act of reading.