Love through the ages

This booklet contains:

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  Identify the authors or periods you are unfamiliar or unconfident with first and read these.
  

A list of terminology useful for the exam.

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  Complete the table with definitions and examples and become comfortable with using them.
  

An overview table to summarise the major periods that we have covered on this course.

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  Fill the rest of the table in chronologically to create a time line of periods.
  

A list of points to look for when analysing poetry.

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  This will complement the terminology well if you revise from and become familiar with it.
  

A range of poems and extracts from prose and drama taken from the periods that we will cover.

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  Use these extracts to practice your annotation and analysing skills and to help you become acquainted with progressions through literature.
  
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  You should annotate at least one piece from each period
  

Examples of the type of questions that you will face in the exam along with a mark scheme. The mark scheme will show you what will be expected in the exam for you to achieve good grades.

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  Attempt at least one of these questions
  
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  Use the mark scheme to identify any areas where you may lack confidence and work on these.
  

(the bullet points are activities that you should be completing outside of lessons and during holidays)

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  Identify the genre – poetry, prose, drama
  
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  Can you identify the period?
  
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    If so, what are the characteristics associated with the period? Does the extract exemplify them?
    

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  Centre your analysis around the three main areas of Content, Structure and Language.
  

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  What is the extract about? Is there a story?
  
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  Can you identify any major themes?
  
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  Are there characters? What are their roles?
  
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  Is there a historical, social or political context?
  

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  Does the extract have a specific structure or is it random?
  
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  Is there a specific style that the author has chosen which may affect the structure i.e. a Shakespearian sonnet will have 14 lines, a set pattern and it will be written in Iambic Pentameter
  

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  Are there any types of words which are used a lot? i.e adjective, adverb
  
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  Are there any particular words or phrases that you find interesting or significant?
  
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  Does the author employ any specific techniques when writing? E.g. metaphors, alliteration
  
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  What atmosphere is created/ tone is put across?
  

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  Don’t be afraid to include your own opinion
  
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  Always link your points back to the text
  
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  Make sure you refer to wider reading
  

Are there any more questions that you would add to this list that would make your annotating and analysing of the extract more affective?

Add them to the sheet
The Middle English Period (Medieval Period)

Years:  1066-1485 (roughly)
Content:

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  plays that instruct the illiterate masses in morals and religion
  
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  chivalric code of honour/romances
  
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  religious devotion
  

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  oral tradition continues
  
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  folk ballads
  
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  mystery and miracle plays
  
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  morality plays
  
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  stock epithets
  
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  kennings     
  
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  frame stories
  
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  moral tales
  

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  church instructs its people through the morality and miracle plays
  
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  an illiterate population is able to hear and see the literature
  

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  Crusades bring the development of a money economy for the first time in Britain
  
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  trading increases dramatically as a result of the Crusades
  
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  William the Conqueror crowned king in 1066
  
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  Henry III crowned king in 1154 brings a judicial system, royal courts, juries, and chivalry to Britain
  

Domesday Book

L’Morte de Arthur

Geoffrey Chaucer

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  world view shifts from religion and after life to one stressing the  human life on earth
  
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  popular theme: development of human potential
  
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  popular theme: many aspects of love explored
  
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  unrequited love
  
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  constant love
  
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  timeless love
  
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  courtly love
  
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  love subject to change
  

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  poetry
  
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  the sonnet
  
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  metaphysical poetry
  
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  elaborate and unexpected metaphors called conceits
  
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  drama
  
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  written in verse
  
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  supported by royalty
  
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  tragedies, comedies, histories
  

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  commoners welcomed at some play productions (like ones at the Globe) while conservatives try to close the theatres on grounds that they promote brazen behaviours
  
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  not all middle-class embrace the metaphysical poets and their abstract conceits
  

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  War of Roses ends in 1485 and political stability arrives
  
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  Printing press helps stabilize English as a language and allows more people to read a variety of literature
  
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  Economy changes from farm-based to one of international trade
  

Thomas Wyatt

Ben Jonson

Cavalier Poets

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  emphasis on reason and logic
  
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  stresses harmony, stability, wisdom
  
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  Locke: a social contract exists between the government and the people. The government governs guaranteeing “natural rights” of life, liberty, and property
  

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  satire
  
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  poetry
  
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  essays
  
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  letters, diaries, biographies
  
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  novels
  

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  emphasis on the individual
  
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  belief that humanity is basically evil
  
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  approach to life: “the world as it should be”
  

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  50% of males are functionally literate (a dramatic rise)
  
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  Fenced enclosures of land cause demise of traditional village life
  
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  Factories begin to spring up as industrial revolution begins
  
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  Impoverished masses begin to grow as farming life declines and factories build
  
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  Coffee houses—where educated men spend evenings with literary and political associates
  

Daniel Defoe

Jonathan Swift,

Samuel Johnson

John Bunyan

John Milton

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  human knowledge consists of impressions and ideas formed in the  individual’s mind 
  
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  introduction of Gothic elements and terror/horror stories and novels  
  
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  in nature one can find comfort and peace that the man-made urbanized towns and factory environments cannot offer
  

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  poetry
  
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  lyrical ballads
  

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  evil attributed to society not to human nature  
  
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  human beings are basically good
  
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  movement of protest: a desire for personal freedom
  
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  children seen as hapless victims of  poverty and exploitation
  

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  Napoleon rises to power in France and opposes England militarily and economically
  
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  Tory philosophy that government should NOT interfere with private enterprise
  
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  middle class gains representation in the British parliament
  
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  railroads begin to run
  

Mary Shelley

Robert Burns

William Blake

William Wordsworth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lord Byron

Percy Shelley

John Keats

The Victorian Period

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  conflict between those in power and the common masses of labourers and the poor  
  
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  shocking life of workhouses and urban poor is highlighted in literature to insist on reform  
  
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  country versus city life
  
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  sexual discretion (or lack of it)  
  
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  strained coincidences
  
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  romantic triangles
  
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  heroines in physical danger
  
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  aristocratic villains
  
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  misdirected letters
  
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  bigamous marriages
  

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  novel becomes popular for first time; mass produced for the first time
  
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  bildungsroman
  
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  political novels
  
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  detective novels (Sherlock Holmes)
  
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  serialized novels (Charles Dickens)
  
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  elegies
  
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  poetry: easier to understand  
  
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  dramatic monologues
  
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  drama: comedies of manners
  
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  magazines offer stories to the masses
  

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  literature begins to reach the masses
  

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  paper becomes cheap; magazines and novels cheap to mass produce  
  
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  unprecedented growth of industry and business in Britain
  unparalleled dominance of  nations, economies and trade abroad
  

Rudyard Kipling Robert Louis Stevenson

George Eliot Oscar Wilde

Alfred Lord Tennyson Charles Darwin

Charlotte Bronte Robert Browning

The Modern Period
Years: 1900-(subject to debate)
Content:

- Breakdown of social norms

- Realistic embodiment of social meanings

- Separation of meanings and senses from the context

- Despairing individual behaviours in the face of an unmanageable future

- Spiritual loneliness

- Alienation

- Frustration when reading the text

- Disillusionment

- Rejection of history

- Rejection of outdated social systems

- Objection to traditional thoughts and traditional moralities

- Objection to religious thoughts

- Substitution of a mythical past

- Two World Wars' effects on humanity
Genres/Styles:

- poetry: free verse

- epiphanies begin to appear in literature  

- speeches  

- memoirs  

- novels  

- stream of consciousness
Effect:

- Literature attempts to search for ‘truthes’ and discover the deep ideas and meanings behind

- British Empire loses 1 million soldiers to World War I

- Winston Churchill leads Britain through WW II, and the Germans bomb England directly

- British colonies demand independence

James Joyce Virginia Woolf

T. S. Eliot Joseph Conrad

D. H. Lawrence Graham Greene

Dylan Thomas George Orwell

William Butler Yeats Bernard Shaw

The Post Modern Period

Years: 1945(ish) – present

1. 
   Whereas Modernism places faith in the ideas, values, beliefs, culture, and norms of the West, Postmodernism rejects Western values and beliefs as only a small part of the human experience and often rejects such ideas, beliefs, culture, and norms.
   
2. 
   Whereas Modernism attempts to reveal profound truths of experience and life, Postmodernism is suspicious of being "profound" because such ideas are based on one particular Western value systems.
   
3. 
   Whereas Modernism attempts to find depth and interior meaning beneath the surface of objects and events, Postmodernism prefers to dwell on the exterior image and avoids drawing conclusions or suggesting underlying meanings associated with the interior of objects and events.
   
4. 
   Whereas Modernism focused on central themes and a united vision in a particular piece of literature, Postmodernism sees human experience as unstable, internally contradictory, ambiguous, inconclusive, indeterminate, unfinished, fragmented, discontinuous, "jagged," with no one specific reality possible.  Therefore, it focuses on a vision of a contradictory, fragmented, ambiguous, indeterminate, unfinished, "jagged" world.
   
5. 
   Whereas Modern authors guide and control the reader’s response to their work, the Postmodern writer creates an "open" work in which the reader must supply his own connections, work out alternative meanings, and provide his own (unguided) interpretation.
   

Jean Baudrillard Jorge Louis Borges

William S. Burroughs Albert Camus

Bret Easton Ellis Gabriel García Márquez

Jack Kerouac Vladimir Nabokov

George Orwell Sylvia Plath

Tom Stoppard Salman Rushdie

Kurt Vonnegut Jeanette Winterson

The following is a selection of very brief examples of the main literary figures from the different literary periods. It should serve as a jumping off point for some class discussion and for students to be proactive in investigating and researching the various authors/periods.


Medieval Period – 5^th – 15^th Century

Can be further broken down – Anglo-Saxon Period – 5^th-11^th Century

- Middle Ages – 11^th-15^th Century (1066-1485)



Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400)

A

Troilus and Criseyde (written between 1381-86)

(Song of Troilus from Chaucer’s epic poem. Troilus is tormented by love)
If no love is, O God, what fele I so?

And if love is, what thing and which is he?

If love be good, from whennes cometh my wo? (whennes, whence)

If it be wikke, a wonder thynketh me, (wikke evil)

Whan every torment and adversite

That cometh of him may to me savoury thinke, (savoury thinke seem)

Foe ay thurst I, the more that ich it drynke.
And if that at myn owen lust I brenne, (brenne burn)

From whennes cometh my waillynge and my pleynte? (pleynte

If harm agree me, whereto pleyne I thenne? complaint)

I noot, ne whi unwery that I feynte. (I noot I do not know)

O quikke deth, O swete harm so queynte,

How may of the in me swich quaintite,

But if that I consente that it be?
And if that I consente, I wrongfully

Compleyne, iwis. That possed to and fro (iwis indeed)

Al stereless within a boot am I (stereless rudderless; boot

Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two, boat)

That in contrarie stoned evere mo.

Allas, what is this wondre maladie?

For hete of cold, for cold of hete I die.


1066 Battle of Hastings (Norman Conquest)

1485 Henry Tudor defeats and kills Richard III ending the War of the Roses (1455-1485)

1476 William Caxton opens the first printing press in Westminster




The Renaissance – 1485 – 1660 (dates differ, for example, ending in 1650)

Tudor Period – 1485 – 1603 (Henry VIII reigning from 1508-1547)

A

With naked foot stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild, and do not remember

That sometime they put themselves in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be Fortune it hath been otherwise,

Twenty times better; but once in special,

In thin array, after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small,

And therewith all sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"
It was no dream, I lay broad waking.

But all is turned, thorough my gentleness,

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go, of her goodness,

And she also to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindely am served,

I fain sould know what she hath deserved

Dissolution of the Monasteries – 1536-1541

The Act of Supremacy confirmed Henry VIII’s as Supreme Governor of the Church of England 1534.

The Renaissance – 1485-1660

S

ir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

Sir Philip Sidney was a prominent figure during the Elizabethan period. He was a poet, courtier and soldier and something of a celebrity at the time. He died from battle wounds in the Netherlands and is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Sidney is best known for his epic ‘Astrophil and Stella’ and ‘The Defence of Poetry’

From Astrophil and Stella (written 1581, published 1591)

How silently, and with how wan a face!

What may it be, that even in heavenly place

That busy archer his sharp arrow tries?

Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes

Can judge of love, thou feel’st a lover’s case;

I read it in they looks, thy languished grace,

To me that feel the like, thy state descries.

That even of fellowship, Oh Moon, tell me,

Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?

Are beauties there as proud as here they be?

Do they above love to be loved, and yet

Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?

Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?

Anglo-Spanish War – 1585-1604

Defeat of the Spanish Armada - 1588

Renaissance Period – 1485-1660

Elizabethan Period – 1558-1603

S

The language of his poetry is purposely archaic, echoing that of Chaucer’s. Spencer’s influence can be found in many later writers, including Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Tennyson.

Elizabethan Period – 1558-1603

S

Sonnet 130 (published 1609 as part of a collection of sonnets)

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

Renaissance Period – 1485-1660