Literary Worlds
This term describes when a literary world mirrors and critiques the conditions of the society in which it was produced.
Mimesis
Heaney writes against the backdrop of this late 20th century conflict in Northern Ireland.
The Troubles
This era’s obsession with reason and science is critiqued in Frankenstein through Victor’s dangerous ambitions.
The Enlightenment
Lang’s Metropolis uses this emerging film form to dramatize upheaval.
German Expressionism
Literary worlds are never fixed, their construction shifts depending on this historical factor.
The audience or reader
The speaker compares his pen to this tool, emphasising his shift from manual to poetic labour.
The Spade
Shelley’s Frankenstein critiques this Enlightenment ideal through the destructive ambition of Victor.
Unchecked scientific ambition
In Metropolis, this machine swallows workers in a hallucinatory sequence, symbolising industrial oppression.
Moloch
Writers and composers shape literary worlds through choices in this, the “building blocks” of representation.
In Digging, the speaker honours his father and grandfather’s manual labour but claims his tool will be this.
The pen
Shelley innovates in form by blending Gothic and Romantic traditions with this narrative structure.
Epistolary Form
Metropolis was inspired by Lang's trip to which iconic city?
New York
The function of upheaval in literary worlds is often to destabilise this, prompting re-evaluation of values.
Hegemony, dominant ideology, status quo
Heaney’s recurring use of peat, soil, and natural imagery symbolises the endurance of this.
Cultural Identity and Heritage
Which myth was Shelley's novel inspired, based off, and an allusion to?
Prometheus
In Metropolis, the “heart” is needed to mediate between these two parts of society.
The Head and the Hands
This theorist described reading a text as an “active, self-ordering and self-correcting process.”
Louise Roseblatt
Funeral Rites uses ritual imagery to imagine peace, drawing on this mythological figure’s burial to symbolise reconciliation.
Shelley critiques patriarchal structures by removing this traditionally feminine role from the process of creation.
The mother, maternal figure
The Maschinenmensch (robot Maria) embodies the fear that technology can corrupt and replace this essential human quality.
Empathy, humanity