AP English Literature and Composition
Hilltop High School
Mrs. Demangos
Classical Period
1200 BC-455 AD

Homeric or Heroic Period:
Greek legends are passed
along orally, including
Homer’s The Iliad and The
Odyssey. This is a chaotic
period of warrior-princes,
wandering sea traders, and
fierce pirates.
Classical Period

Classical Greek Period (800-200 BC)
Greek writers, playwrights, and
philosophers such as Gorgias, Aesop,
Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Euripides,
and Sophocles. The fifth century is
renowned as the Golden Age f
Greece. This is the sophisticated
period of the polis, or City-State, and
early democracy. Some of the world’s
finest art, drama, architecture, and
philosophy originate in Athens.
Classical Period

Classical Roman Period (200 BC-455 AD) The
Roman Republic was founded in 509 BC. After
nearly 500 years as a Republic, Rome slides into
dictatorship under Julius Caesar and monarchial
empire under Caesar Augustus in 27 AD. This
later period is known as the Roman Imperial
period. Writers include: Ovid, Horace, and Virgil.
Roman philosophers include Marcus Aurelius
and Lucretius. Roman rhetoricians include Cicero
and Quintilian.
Classical Period

Patristic Period (70 AD-455 AD) Early Christian
writing appear such as Saint Augustine,
Tertullian, Saint Cyprian, Saint Ambrose and
Saint Jerome. This is the period in which Saint
Jerome compiles the Bible, when Christianity
spreads across Europe, and the Roman Empire
suffers its dying convulsions. In this period,
barbarians attack Rome in 410 AD and the city
finally falls to them completely in 455 AD.
Medieval Period

 Anglo-Saxon Period (428-1066) The socalled “Dark Ages” occur when Rome
falls and barbarian tribes move into
Europe. Franks, Ostrogoths, Lombards,
and Goths settle in the ruins of Europe
and the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes
migrate to Britain displacing native
Celts into Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.
Early Old English poems such as
Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The
Seafarer originate sometime late in the
Anglo-Saxon period.
Medieval Period

 Middle English Period (1066-1450) In 1066 the Norman
French armies invade and conquer England under William
I. This marks the end of the Anglo-Saxon hierarchy and the
emergence of the Twelfth Century Renaissance. French
chivalric romances—such as works by Chretien de
Troyes—and French fables—such as the works of Marie de
Fance and Jeun de Meun—spread in popularity.
Medieval Period

“High” Medieval Period (12001485)
This often tumultuous period is
marked by the Middle English
writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, the
“Gawain” or “Pearl” Poet, the
Wakefield Master, and William
Langland. Other writers include
the Italian and French authors
like Boccaccio, Petrarch, Dante,
Renaissance

Century,
14th-17th
rebirth of
humanism.
French word
meaning rebirth
used to designate
the period in
European history
beginning in Italy in
the 14th century.
Renaissance

The term originally
described a period of
cultural, technological,
and artistic vitality
during the economic
expansion in Britain in
the late 1500s and early
1600s.
Renaissance

 Thinkers at this time and later saw themselves as
rediscovering and redistributing the legacy of classical
Greco-Roman culture by renewing forgotten studies and
artistic practices, hence the name "renaissance" or
"rebirth."
 They believed they were breaking with the days of
"ignorance" and "superstition" represented by medieval
thinking, and returning to a golden age akin to that of the
ancient Greeks and Romans from centuries earlier--a
cultural idea that will eventually culminate in the
Enlightenment of the late 1600s up until about 1799 or so.
Renaissance

The Renaissance saw the
rise of
new poetic forms in the sonnet
and a flowering of drama in the
plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and
Marlowe.
English Renaissance
 Early Tudor
Period (1485-1558) Martin
Luther’s split with Rome marks the
emergence of Protestantism; Edmund
Spence is a sample poet.
 Elizabethan Period (1558-1603) the years
that "Good Queen Bess" (Queen Elizabeth
I) ruled and saved England from both the
Spanish invasion and internal squabbles at
home. The early works of Shakespeare,
Marlowe, Kydd, and Sidney mark
Elizabeth’s reign.
English Renaissance

Jacobean Period (1603-1625) in which
King James I ruled. (The Latin form of
James is Jacobus, hence the name
Jacobean). Includes Shakespeare’s later
work, Aemilia Lanyer, Ben Jonson,
and John Donne.
Caroline Age (1625-1649): John Milton,
George Herbert, Robert Herrick and
others write during the reign of
Charles I and his Cavaliers.
English Renaissance

 Commonwealth Period or Puritan Interregnum (16491660) Under Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan dictatorship, John
Milton continues to write, but we also find writers like
Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Browne.
Neoclassicism

 Restoration—18th Century, order &
reason
 Enlightenment: the philosophical
and artistic movement growing out
of the Renaissance and continuing
until the nineteenth century. The
Enlightenment was an optimistic
belief that humanity could improve
itself by applying logic and reason
to all things.
Neoclassicism

It rejected untested beliefs, superstition, and the
"barbarism" of the earlier medieval period, and
embraced the literary, architectural, and artistic
forms of the Greco-Roman world. Enlightenment
thinkers were enchanted by the perfection of
geometry and mathematics, and by all things
harmonious and balanced.
Neoclassicism

 Restoration Period (1660-1700)
This period marks the restoration of Charles II after a
long period of Puritan domination in England led by
Oliver Cromwell. Dominance of French and Classical
influences on poetry and drama is evident. Writers
include: John Dryden, John Lock, Sir William Temple,
Samuel Pepys, and Aphra Behn in England. Abroad,
representative authors include
Jean Racine and Molière.
Neoclassicism

 The Augustan Age (1700-1750) This period is marked
by the imitation of Virgil and Horace’s literature in
English letters. The principal English writers include
Addison, Steele, Swift, and Alexander Pope. Abroad,
Voltaire is the dominant French writer.
Neoclassicism

The period's poetry, as
typified by Alexander Pope,
John Dryden, and others,
attempted to create perfect,
clockwork regularity in
meter. Typically, these
Enlightenment writers would
use satire to ridicule what
they felt were illogical errors
in government, social custom,
and religious belief.
Neoclassicism

 In America, this period is called the Colonial Period.
It includes colonial and revolutionary writers like
Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine.
Neoclassicism

 The Age of Johnson (1750-1790)
This period marks the transition toward Romanticism. Major
writers include Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and Edward
Gibbon, all who represent Neoclassical tendencies, while
writers like Robert Burns, Thomas Gray, Cowper, and Crabbe
show movement away from the Neoclassical ideal.
Romanticism

 18th—19th century
 Imagination over reason
Romanticism

 the artistic philosophy prevalent during
the first third of the nineteenth century
(about 1800-1830). Romanticism rejected
the earlier philosophy of the
Enlightenment, which stressed that logic
and reason were the best response humans
had in the face of cruelty, stupidity,
superstition, and barbarism. Instead, the
Romantics asserted that reliance upon
emotion and natural passions provided a
valid and powerful means of knowing and
a reliable guide to ethics and living.
Romanticism

 The Romantic movement typically asserts the
unique nature of the individual, the privileged
status of imagination and fancy, the value of
spontaneity over "artifice" and "convention," the
human need for emotional outlets, the rejection of
civilized corruption, and a desire to return to
natural primitivism and escape the spiritual
destruction of urban life. Their writings often are
set in rural, pastoral or Gothic settings and they
show an obsessive concern with "innocent"
characters--children, young lovers, and animals.
Realism

 Verisimilitude
 Am elastic and ambiguous term
with two meaining.
 First, it refers generally to any
artistic or literary portrayal of life in
a faithful, accurate manner,
unclouded by false ideals, literary
conventions, or misplaced aesthetic
glorification and beautification of
the world.
Realism

 It is a theory or tendency in
writing to depict events in
human life in a matter-offact, straightforward
manner. It is an attempt to
reflect life "as it actually
is"--a concept in some
ways similar to what the
Greeks would call mimesis.
Realism

 Typically, "realism" involves careful
description of everyday life, "warts and
all," often the lives of middle and lower
class characters in the case of socialist
realism.
 In general, realism seeks to avoid
supernatural, transcendental, or surreal
events. It tends to focus as much on the
everyday, the mundane, and the normal
as events that are extraordinary,
exceptional, or extreme.
Realism

 Secondly and more specifically, realism refers to a
literary movement in America, Europe, and England
that developed out of naturalism in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
Realism

 Although realism and the concern for aspects of
verisimilitude have been components of literary art to
one degree or another in nearly all centuries, the term
realism also applies more specifically to the tendency to
create detailed, probing analyses of the way "things
really are," usually involving an emphasis on nearly
photographic details, the author's inclusion of in-depth
psychological traits for his or her characters, and an
attempt to create a literary facsimile of human existence
unclouded by convention, cliché, formulaic traits of
genre, sentiment, or the earlier extremes of naturalism.
Naturalism

 Extreme Realism
 A literary movement
seeking to depict life as
accurately as possible, without
artificial distortions of emotion,
idealism, and literary
convention.
The school of thought is a product of post-Darwinian
biology in the nineteenth century. It asserts that human
beings exist entirely in the order of nature.
Naturalism

 Human beings do not have
souls or any mode of
participating in a religious or
spiritual world beyond the
biological realm of nature, and
any such attempts to engage in
a religious or spiritual world
are acts of self-delusion and
wish-fulfillment.
Naturalism

 Humanity is thus a higher order animal whose
character and behavior are entirely determined by
two kinds of forces, hereditary and environment.
The individual's compulsive instincts toward
sexuality, hunger, and accumulation of goods are
inherited via genetic compulsion and the social and
economic forces surrounding his or her upbringing.
Naturalism

 Naturalistic writers--including Zola, Frank Norris,
Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser--try to present
their subjects with scientific objectivity.
Naturalism

 They often choose characters based on strong
animal drives who are "victims both of glandular
secretions within and of sociological pressures
without" .
 Typically, naturalist writers avoid explicit
emotional commentary in favor of medical
frankness about bodily functions and biological
activities that would be almost unmentionable
during earlier literary movements like
transcendentalism, Romanticism, and mainstream
Victorian literature.
Naturalism

 The end of the naturalistic novel is usually
unpleasant or unhappy, perhaps even "tragic,"
though not in the cathartic sense Aristotle,
Sophocles, or Elizabethan writers would have
understood by the term tragedy.
 Naturalists emphasize the smallness of humanity
in the universe; they remind readers of the
immensity, power, and cruelty of the natural
world, which does not care whether humanity
lives or dies.
Examples of this include Stephen
Crane's "The Open Boat," which
pits a crew of shipwrecked
survivors in a raft against
starvation, dehydration, and
sharks in the middle of the ocean,
and Jack London's "To Build a
Fire," which reveals the inability of
a Californian transplant to survive
outside of his "natural"
environment as he freezes to
death in the Alaskan wilderness.
Existentialism

 Human inadequate to explain the complex world
 A twentieth-century philosophy arguing that
ethical human beings are in a sense cursed with
absolute free will in a purposeless universe.
Therefore, individuals must fashion their own
sense of meaning in life instead of relying
thoughtlessly on religious, political, and social
conventions. These merely provide a façade of
meaning according to existential philosophy. Those
who rely on such conventions without thinking
through them deny their own ethical
responsibilities.
Existentialism
 The basic principles of existentialism are:

(1) a concern with man's essential being and nature,
(2) an idea that existential "angst" or "anguish" is the
common lot of all thinking humans who see the
essential meaninglessness of transitory human life,
(3) the belief that thought and logic are insufficient to
cope with existence, and
(4) the conviction that a true sense of morality can
only come from honestly facing the dilemma of
existential freedom and participating in life actively
and positively.
Existentialism

 The ethical idea is that, if the
universe is essentially meaningless,
and human existence does not
matter in the long run, then the
only thing that can provide a moral
backdrop is humanity itself, and
neglecting to build and encourage
such morality is neglecting our
duty to ourselves and to each other.
Magical Realism

 Begins real, gets weird
 In 1925, Franz Roh first applied the
term "magic realism" (magischer
Realismus in German) to a group of
neue Saqchlichkeit painters in Munich.
These painters blended realistic,
smoothly painted, sharply defined
figures and objects--but in a
surrealistic setting or backdrop, giving
them an outlandish, odd, or even
dream-like quality.
Magical Realsim

 In the 1940s and 1950s, the
term migrated to the
prose fiction of various writers including Jorge Luis
Borges in Argentina, Gabriel Garcia Márquez in
Colombia, and Alejo Carpentier in Cuba.
The influence also spread later
to Günter Grass in Germany
and John Fowles in England.
Magical Realism

 These postmodern writers mingle and juxtapose
realistic events with fantastic ones, or they
experiment with shifts in time and setting,
"labyrinthine narratives and plots" and "arcane
erudition", and often they combine myths and
fairy stories with gritty Hemingway-esque detail.
This mixture create truly dreamlike and bizarre
effects in their prose.

An example of magic realism would be Gabriel Garcia Márquez's
short story, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," a narrative
in which a fisherman discovers a filthy, lice-ridden old man
trapped face-down in the muddy shore of the beach, weighed
down by enormous buzzard wings attached to his back. A
neighbor identifies the old man as an angel who had come down
to claim the fisherman's sick and feverish child but who had been
knocked out the sky by storm winds during the previous night.
Not having the heart to club the sickly angel to death, the
protagonist decides instead to keep the supernatural being captive
in a chicken coop. The very premise of the story reveals much of
the flavor of magic realism.
Expressionism

 Objectify inner experience
 In literature, expressionism is often
considered a revolt against realism and
naturalism, seeking to achieve a
psychological or spiritual reality rather than
record external events in logical sequence. In
the novel, the term is closely allied to the
writing of Franz Kafka and James Joyce (see
stream of consciousness).
Sources

 expressionism: In Literature | Infoplease.com
http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/entertai
nment/expressionism-inliterature.html#ixzz2yEtOxBoB
 http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_A.html