English History

• Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch, is remembered for her long and successful reign, as well as her defeat of the Spanish Armada.
• PICARESQUE/ADVENTURE NOVELS focus on the adventures of a rogue character, usually of lower class, who travels from place to place in order to survive.
• Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders – her life from birth to redemption (1722) are examples of Picaresque/Adventure Novels.
• SENTIMENTAL NOVELS are based on human emotion, usually written by women.
• “Pamela or Virtue Rewarded” (1740) by Samuel Richardson is an example of a Sentimental Novel, telling the story of a young servant named Pamela who resists the advances of her master.
• EPISTOLARY NOVELS are novels written in a series of letters.
• “Pamela” is an example of an Epistolary Novel.
• GOTHIC NOVELS are European Romantic pseudo medieval fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror.
• Characteristics of Gothic Novels include dark setting, emotion over reason, supernatural elements, mystery, suspense, romance, women in distress.
• “The Caste of Otranto” (1764) by Horace Walpole, “The Mysteries of Udolpha” (1794), “The Monk” (1796) are examples of Gothic Novels.
• NOVEL OF MANNERS re-creates a social world, conveying with detailed observation the complex of customs, values, and mores of a stratified society.
• DOMESTIC NOVEL depicts the domestic life of young, usually middle-class women learning to make their way in the world.
• Jane Austen “Sense and Sensibility” is an example of a Domestic Novel.
• COURTSHIP NOVEL in courtship novels of the Victorian period from the late 1840s through the 1890s, we see increasing complexity in the portrayal of the safety-danger-protection issue for courting couples.
• This complexity reflects both recognition and significant questioning of established gender ideology.
• Language is transparent and mimetic.
• The central idea of modernity is order.
• Modernity is the pursuit of order, and modern societies are on guard of any signs of otherness.
• For modernists, a fragmented view of humanity is a tragic view, a loss.
• Creating categories of order and disorder is to help achieve stability.
• Postmodernism does not lament the idea of fragmentation but celebrates it.
• The knowledge produced by science is truth and is universal and eternal.
• Reason is the ultimate judge of what’s true.
• The Marxist Narratives are the historical interpretation of history as a class struggle, leading to the eventual overthrow of capitalism and establishment of a communist society.
• Totality and order are maintained in modern societies through the means of grand narratives or master narratives.
• The Enlightenment basic ideas include a stable, coherent, knowable self that knows the world through reason, produces science, and views science as neutral and objective.
• The American dream is the belief that hard work and determination will lead to success and upward social mobility.
• The Enlightenment narrative is the idea that history is a progressive movement towards reason, science, democracy.
• The world is meaningless, and art does not make meaning but plays with nonsense.
• Modernists uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity, coherence and unity that has been lost in modern life.
• In painting, Magritte subverts the viewer’s natural inclination to associate the image of an object with the object itself, forcing the viewer to rethink their assumptions about art and representation.
• Writers associated with British Modernism include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence.
• British Modernism refers to a literary and cultural movement that emerged in UK at the beginning of the 20th century, from early 1900s to late 1930s, characterized by a deliberate break from traditional forms of art, literature and social organization.
• British Modernism was a response to the drastic changes in society, technology and the arts.
• Modernist literature includes unusual syntax, new forms of expressions and more colloquial language.
• Many works of modernist literature have a somber and cynical tone, often question established norms about morality, society, religion, and art.
• The changes that influenced British Modernism included the aftermath of the Victorian Era, industrialization and technological change, intellectual and philosophical influences, the decline of the British Empire, and the impact of WWI.
• Modernist writers used stream of consciousness as a narrative technique to depict the continuous flow of characters’ thought and feelings, reflecting the disillusionment of the post-war era.
• Modernist texts feature fragmented structures, in narrative form and in the use of imagery, reflecting the modernist perception of a disintegrated world and the disjointed experience of modern life.
• Modernist writers experimented with language and style, pushing the boundaries of what was considered acceptable in literature.