Six Eras
This period features sermons, captivity narratives, and promotional literature.
Colonial Period
Poetry written without consistent meter or rhyme.
Free Verse
"honoring the Gods, saluting the sun,
Making a fetish of the first rock or stump, powwowing with sticks in the circle of obis,
Helping the lama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols"
Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"
The Scarlet Letter
1850
Unferth
A quote full of rationality, natural law, and critiques of tradition most likely belongs to this period.
Enlightenment / Age of Reason
This Chopin phrase describes a split between outward social roles and inward emotional life.
"MADMAN! I TELL YOU THAT SHE NOW STANDS WITHOUT THE DOOR!"
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher"
1855
The Greek concept of hospitality.
Xenia
A passage obsessed with the self, nature, intuition, and individual genius belongs to this 19th-century movement.
American Renaissance / Transcendentalism
This term describes reading as interpretation: how meaning is uncovered, constructed, or what "lens" one employs.
Hermeneutic
"He was mortified, but pitched sleepless through his private catechizing, intimidated by the ancient mysteries, a thirteen year old would never say that, resolved to experience conversion like St. Augustine."
John Barth, "Lost in the Funhouse"
Lost in the Funhouse
1968
In what century was the book of Genesis probably written down?
6th c. BC
"The Open Boat" by Stephen Crane is a classic example of this literary philosophy.
Naturalism
Determinism
"It is a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here, and some there, like a company of sheep torn by wolves, all of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting, and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out; yet the Lord by His almighty power preserved a number of us from death, for there were twenty-four of us taken alive and carried captive."
Mary Rowlandson, "Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson"
1927
What does "giusto sdegno" mean?
"Righteous indignation" / "just anger"
This 19th century movement, which involved a reaction against rationalism, began in northern Germany.
Romanticism
Jean Baudrillard's phrase for the way postmodernists view life.
"a random swirl of empty signals"
"A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse;—whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight."
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
1890
What was the name of Shakespeare's theater?
The Globe