Term
| Name (author/title) two books and two scientific theories (scientist/theory) that made important contributions to the creation of modernism. |
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Definition
Sigmund Freud- Interpretation of Dreams
Sir James Frazier- Golden Bough
Max Planck’s quantum theory
Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity |
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Term
| What were some of the defining elements of modernism, both in terms of social innovation and ideological change from the Victorian period? |
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Definition
Woman’s suffrage
empirical explanations weakened organized religion |
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Term
| What were the dates and characteristics of the Edwardian and Georgian periods, respectively. |
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Definition
1901-1910 when Edward VII held the throne was the Edwardian period. the social and economic stabilities of the Victorian age—country houses with numerous servants, a flourishing and confident middle class, a strict hierarchy of social class—remained unimpaired, though on the level of ideas a sense of change and liberation existed.
1910-1914 when the war broke out was the Georgian period. The lull before the storm of World War 1. |
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Term
| What is the British Commonwealth? |
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Definition
| Largely independent nations such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were known as the British Commonwealth, an association of self-governing countries. |
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Term
| What was the red decade and what event brought it to an end? |
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Definition
| The 1930s because only the left seemed to offer any solution in various forms of socialism, communism, and left liberalism. The outbreak of WWII in Spetember 1939—following shortly on Hitler’s pact with the Soviet Union, which so shocked and disillusioned many of the young left-wing writers that they subsequently moved politically to the center—marked the sudden end of the red decade. |
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Term
| What social and cultural changes have occurred within Britain itself as a result of the end of the empire? |
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Definition
| Waves of Caribbean migrants journeyed to and settled in “the motherland.” Regional dialects and multicultural accents were created. |
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Term
| When was Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister and what were the outcomes of her period in office? |
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Definition
| In 1979, pursuing a vision of a “new,” more productive Britain, she curbed the power of unions and began to dismantle the “welfare state,” privatizing nationalized industries and utilities in the interests of an aggressive free-market economy. |
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Term
| What were the major outcomes of Tony Blair’s time as prime minister? |
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Definition
| He offered Scotland its own parliament and Wales its own assembly. |
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Term
| Which two schools of poetry did T.S. Eliot draw from in his reshaping of English verse? And to which innovative musical composition did he compare his own poems? |
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Definition
| The English Metaphysics and the French Symbolists. The Rite of Spring |
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Term
| Describe The New Apocalypse and The Movement. |
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Definition
The New Apocalypse group had a direct and humane voice, using imagistic audacity and rhetorical violence.
The Movement group used a neutral tone, a purity of diction, in which to render an unpretentious fidelity to mundane experiences. |
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Term
| How did the end of empire affect poetry written in English? |
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Definition
| The former colonies produced poets who expanded the range of possibilities in English-language poetry by hybridizing traditions of the British Isles with their indigenous images and speech rhythms, creoles and genres. |
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Term
| What are the three main sub-periods in twentieth-century English fiction and what are the defining characteristics of each? Give an example of a work (author/title) from each. |
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Definition
high modernism celebrating personal and textual inwardness, complexity and difficulty
the reaction against modernism involving a return to social realism, moralism, and assorted documentary endeavors
The period after the collapse of the British Empire in which the fictional claims of various realisms are asserted alongside , but also through, a continuing self-consciousness about language and form and meaning that is, in effect, the enduring legacy of modernism. |
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Term
| How did the end of empire affect fiction written in English? |
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Definition
| The postcolonial novelists were energetically claiming for literature in English untold histories, hybrid identities, and vibrantly creolized vocabularies. |
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Term
| What was the significance of the Royal Court Theatre from the mid-1950s on? |
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Definition
| They provided a venue and a vision that provoked and enabled a new wave of writers. The plays were politically conscious. Counterculture |
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Term
| What were the provisions of the Theatres Act of 1843 and what were the outcomes of the change to that law in 1968? |
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Definition
| Since the act in 1843, writers for the public stage had been required to submit their playscripts to the Lord Chamberlain’s office for state censorship, but in 1968, a new Theatre’s act abolished that office. |
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Term
| How did the end of empire affect drama written in English? |
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Definition
Different accents and styles, more international in its bearings and vision than ever before.
Plays about Caribbean history. |
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Term
| Where was Kipling born? Where educated? And where did he spend his adult life? |
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Definition
He was born in Bombay, British India
He was educated at the United Services College
He spent his adult life in the United States |
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Term
| With what two firsts is Kipling associated? |
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Definition
| The first English author to own an automobile and the first to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature |
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Term
| 3. What were the two major influences on the style and rhythm of Kipling's poetry? |
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Definition
| The Protestant hymn and the songs of the music hall |
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Term
| What is “Wessex” in Hardy’s writing? |
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Definition
| the area of southwest England that his novels took place in |
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Term
| Describe Hardy’s prevailing view of life and the universe? |
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Definition
| He was unable to believe in the government of the world by a benevolent God, he believed the waste and frustration made up human life, and recognized the insistent irony in moral and metaphysical questions. |
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Term
| What does Yeats mean by “Spiritus Mundi”? |
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Definition
| The transnationalism of the collective storehouse of images |
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Term
| What happened at Easter 1916 and why was it important to Yeats? |
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Definition
| The Easter Rising led by men and women he had long known, some of whom were executed or imprisoned by the British. His culturally nationalist work had helped inspire the poet revolutionaries, and so he asked himself, “did my work send out certain men the English shot? |
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Term
| To what political movement was Yeats drawn during the 1930s, and why? |
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Definition
| Fascism. His late interest in authoritarian politics arose in part from his desire for a feudal, aristocratic society that, unlike middle-class culture, in his view, might allow he imagination to flourish. |
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Term
| What was the Bloomsbury Group? |
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Definition
| It was a group of writers, artists and philosophers who met in Bloomsbury for informal discussions. Their intelligence was equaled by their frankness, notably on sexual topics, and the sexual life of Bloomsbury provided ample material for discussion and contributed to Woolf’s freedom of thinking about gender relations. |
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Term
How did Woolf see the task of the novelist in representing human experience
and what feature of her fiction performs this function? |
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Definition
| As a fiction writer Woolf rebelled against what she called “materialism” of novelists such as her contemporaries Bennet and Galsworthy who depicted suffering and social injustice through gritty realism, and she sought to render more delicately those aspects of consciousness in which she felt the truth of human experience lay. In her novels she abandoned linear narratives in favor of interior dialogues and stream of consciousness narration. |
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Term
| What was unusual about Lawrence’s class origins and how did they affect his writing? |
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Definition
| His father was a miner and he grew up in a mining community. In much of his later work, he sets the deadening restrictiveness of the middle-class conventional living against the forces of liberation that are often represented by an outsider. The reoccurring theme of his short stories is the distortion of love by possessiveness or gentility or a false romanticism or a false conception of the life of the artist and the achievement of a living relation between man and a woman against the pressure of class-feeling or tradition or habit or prejudice. |
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Term
| What is the central theme of Lawrence’s poetry and fiction? |
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Definition
| He seeks to express the deep-rooted, the elemental, the instinctual in people and nature. |
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Term
| What was Eliot’s assessment of the state of English poetry in the early twentieth century and how did he set out to revive it? |
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Definition
| He saw poetry in English as exhausted, with no verbal excitement or original craftsmanship. He sought to make poetry more subtle, more suggestive, and at the same time more precise. |
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Term
| What rewriting of English literary history did Eliot seek to achieve through his critical work? |
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Definition
| He saw the late-seventeenth-century “dissociation of sensibility”—the segregation of intellect and emotion—as determining the course of English poetry throughout the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries. |
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Term
| Where were W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Salman Rushdie, respectively, educated? |
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Definition
Auden- Christ Church, Oxford
Thomas- Swansea Grammar School
Rushdie- King’s College |
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Term
| Which countries are Nadine Gordimer and Alice Munro from? |
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Definition
Gordimer- South Africa
Munro- Canada |
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Term
| 3. What is the subject of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and what happened as a result of his publishing The Satanic Verses? |
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Definition
| Those who were born—two months later than the author—around midnight on August 15,1947, when the independent state of India was born. Because of The Satanic Verses riots broke out and he the government called for his death because they believed he blasphemed Mohammed. He had to go into hiding. |
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