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Literature - State Exam
Set of very broad questions related to literature movements and authors
22
Literature
Undergraduate 1
08/03/2016

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Term
Enlist some of the main trends in BritLit of the 2nd half of the 20th Century
Definition
Angry Young Men, the Movement Poetry, theatre of the absurd, working class novel, British poetry from Auden to Harris
Term
Characterize Angry Young Men.
Definition
Movement named after John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger; group of writers, college educated, dissatisfied with social stratification and indifference of middle-aged generation. Frustrated by the discrepancy between their ambition and actual possibilities. Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim (1954). John Braine: Room at the Top (1967)
Term
Working Class Novel: Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
Definition
Arthur keeps a string of girlfriends, drinks a lot. Later he is beaten by one of his gf's husband.
Term
American War Novel
Definition
Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead; Joseph Heller - Catch 22
Term
Literature of the American South
Definition
Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man Is Hard to Find; Carson McCullers - The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
Term
American Jewish Literature
Definition
Bernard Mallamud - The Assistant; Philip Roth - American Pastoral, The Human Stain, Portnoy's Complaint...; Henry Roth - Call it Sleep;
Term
American Postmodernism
Definition
Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow, V., The Crying of Lot 49; William Gaddis - Recognitions; Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5
Term
American War Novel
Definition
Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead; Joseph Heller - Catch 22
Term
Literature of the American South
Definition
Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man Is Hard to Find; Carson McCullers - The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
Term
American Jewish Literature
Definition
Bernard Mallamud - The Assistant; Philip Roth - American Pastoral, The Human Stain, Portnoy's Complaint...; Henry Roth - Call it Sleep;
Term
American Postmodernism
Definition
Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow, V., The Crying of Lot 49; William Gaddis - Recognitions; Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5
Term
New Literatures in English (writers and works):
Definition
Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things; Anita Desai - The Village by the Sea; R.K.Narayan - The English Teacher, The Financial Expert; J. M. Coetzee - Disgrace, Life and Times of Michael K; Chinua Achebe - Things fall apart; Keri Hulme - The Bone people; Alice Munro - short stories (The Beggar Maid); Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin; Thomas Keneally - Schindler's Ark, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
Term
Verbatim Theatre
Definition
Verbatim theatre is a form of documentary theatre in which plays are constructed from the precise words spoken by people interviewed about a particular event or topic. Talking to terrorists - Robin Soans
Term
Theatre of the Absurd in UK
Definition
Beckett - Waiting for Godot, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Term
British Theatre in the first half of the 20th Century
Definition
Formed by Irish playwrights. Shaw, Yates and Synge. Ibsen a major influence - seriousness. Shaw - turned theatre into place of serious discussion - many of his plays have socially satirical undertones. Auden and T.S.Eliot - poetic drama.
Term
British drama of the 2nd half of the 20th century
Definition
Kitchen sink realism, 'comedy of menace' - Harold Pinter (The Birthday Party), Tom Stoppard, Verbatim theatre, Caryl Churchill, Mark Ravenhill,
Term
Outline the development of fictional genres in British literature
Definition
Chaucer --> early novels: Swift, Defoe --> historical novel: Walter Scott --> Victorian period: Dickens, Bronte sisters /the development of realism/, Thomas Hardy --> Rudyard Kipling, A.C.Doyle --> Modernism: E.M.Forster, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D.H.Lawrence --> British postmodernism: John Fowles, A.S.Byatt
Term
Outline the development of fictional genres in American literature
Definition
First, the foundational myths: John Smith, Wiliam Bradford --> James Fenimore Cooper --> Hawthorne, Melville --> Frederick Douglass --> Mark Twain --> Henry James --> Theodore Dreisser --> Jack London --> Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLilo
Term
Outline the development of dramatic genres in American Theatre
Definition
First, political satire: Androborus by Robert Hunter (1714). Satire strong during War years: Mercy Ottis warren = The Group. Royall Tyler - The Contrast: a comedy of manners. 19th century: spread of melodrama: frontier melodrama, temperance play, melodramatic comedy. Slowly, ascent of realism: James Herne - Margaret Fleming. Langdon Mitchell - The New York Idea. --> Then O'Neill - Strange Interlude, The Hairy Ape, Long Day's Journey into Night, Williams, Albee, Mamet...
Term
Compare iambic pentameter, blank verse, heroic couplet, alexandrine
Definition
An alexandrine (French pronunciation: ​[alɛksɑ̃dʁin]) is a line of poetic meter comprising 12 syllables. Iambic pentameter is a five-foot verse. Blank verse is the use of, predominantly, iambic pentameter in an unrhymed pattern. A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales,[1] and was perfected by John Dryden in the Restoration Age.
Term
Outline the development of genres of poetry in British literature
Definition
Beowulf --> Chivalrous epic --> Rennaisance: influence of Petrarca - sonnets. Shakespeare --> 17th century: Metaphysical poets (conceits, surprising similes), Cavalier poets(very formal and light-hearted), John Milton, Dryden (heroic couplet and alexandrine) --> Augustan period: ideally imitate the ancient Greek and Latin predecessors --> Robert Burns and others: shift to subjective notions of nature --> Lake poets, romanticism: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake: subjective aesthetics, more common language, inclination towards philosophy --> Victorian poets: development in dramatic monologue: Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson --> paved way for modernism --> Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot --> W.H.Auden rejecction of strict experimentation --> The Movement poetry: Philip Larkin
Term
Outline the development of genres of poetry in American literature
Definition
Puritan beginnings: Edward Taylor <-- connection to Metaphysical poets --> Revolutionary era patriotic poetry --> Philip Freneau: The Rising Glory of America --> Romanticism: to be as good as the British, but then to better them. Progressive forces: Longfellow (of the Fireside poets), Whitman and Dickinson. --> abolitionist poetry: Longfellow - The poems of slavery, George Moses Horton: The Hope of LIberty(first southern black poet) --> Transcendentalists --> Whitman, Dickinson --> Poe, Melville --> Regionalism: Robert Frost --> Modernists --> Beats --> Confessionalists = counterposition to detached modernism, as well as subversive force to the mainstream narrative of family stability
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