Literary Lenses
This lens focuses on gender roles, patriarchy, and how women are represented in texts.
What is Feminist Criticism?
This term refers to the time and place in which a story is set.
What is setting?
Jonathan Swift used satire in Gulliver’s Travels to critique this system of governance.
What is monarchy or British government?
This term refers to a direct reference or quotation from another text.
What is an allusion?
Literature reflects the cultural ___ of its time.
What are values?
This reading focuses on class conflict and economic power structures.
What is Marxist Criticism?
A third-person limited narrator offers insight into this character’s perspective.
What is one character only?
In dystopian texts, this is often the "real" purpose of a supposedly utopian society.
What is control or oppression?
A world that mirrors real life with slight exaggerations is called this.
What is a heightened reality?
The political system often challenged in dystopian texts.
What is totalitarianism?
A psychoanalytic reading of Frankenstein might explore Victor’s repression and this unconscious drive.
What is the death drive (Thanatos)?
This narrative technique presents fragmented or disjointed thoughts, often mimicking consciousness.
What is stream of consciousness?
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale critiques this type of religious extremism.
What is theocracy?
This term describes a world where traditional values are subverted or questioned.
What is a disrupted world?
A society that enforces strict traditional gender roles reflects this ideology.
What is patriarchy?
A post-colonial reading examines this power imbalance in texts like Heart of Darkness.
What is coloniser vs colonised?
This literary technique places one story inside another, like a frame.
What is a frame narrative?
This author’s use of unreliable narration in Fight Club critiques modern consumerism and masculinity.
Who is Chuck Palahniuk?
This kind of world shows ideal perfection but often reveals flaws underneath.
What is a utopia?
The process by which texts challenge or reject dominant ideologies.
What is subversion?
This term refers to the way language shapes identity and is key in post-structuralist readings.
What is discourse?
This is the term for when a world mirrors or distorts reality to critique it.
What is allegory or satire?
In Waiting for Godot, Beckett expresses this existential value about meaning.
What is life is inherently meaningless or absurdism?
In literature, this is a world shaped by internal thoughts and perceptions.
What is a subjective world?
When a text promotes introspection and questions meaning, it explores this philosophy.
What is existentialism?