LITERARY MOVEMENTS

SCOTTISH CHAUCERIANS
The name given to a group of 15th- and 16thcentury Scottish poets who wrote under the
influence of Geoffrey Chaucer (or of his follower John Lydgate), often using his seven-line
Rhyme Royal stanza.

The most important poets of this group were Robert Henryson, whose Testament of Cresseid
continues and reinterprets the story of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and William Dunbar,
whose Lament for the Makaris briefly pays tribute to Chaucer.

Other figures are Gavin Douglas, Sir David Lyndsay, and King James I of Scotland. The term
unfortunately diverts attention from the genuinely original character of these poets, and is
thus not much favoured in Scotland.

AUREATE DICTION
A highly ornate ('gilded') poetic diction favoured by the Scottish Chaucerians and some
English poets in the 15th century, notably John Lydgate. The aureate style, perfected by
William Dunbar, is notable for its frequent use of internal rhyme and of coinages adapted
from Latin.

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UNIVERSITY WITS
The name given by some modern literary historians to a group of English poets and
playwrights who established themselves in London in the 1580s and 1590s after attending
university at either Oxford or Cambridge.

The most important member of the group was Christopher Marlowe, whose powerful Blank-
Verse plays prepared the way for Shakespeare.

Others included George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, John Lyly, and Thomas
Lodge. Thomas Kyd is also sometimes included in the group, though he is not believed to
have studied at university.

The term "University Wits" was not used in their lifetime, but was coined by George
Saintsbury, a 19th-century journalist and author.

The plays of the University Wits had several features in common:

(a) There was a fondness for heroic themes, such as the lives of great figures like Muhammed
and Tamburlaine.

(b) Heroic themes needed heroic treatment: great fullness and variety; splendid descriptions,
long swelling speeches, the handling of violent incidents and emotions.

(c) The style was also ‗heroic‘. The chief aim was to achieve strong and sounding lines,
magnificent epithets, and powerful declamation.

(d) The themes were usually tragic in nature, for the dramatists were as a rule too much in
earnest to give heed to what was considered to be the lower species of comedy.

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COMEDY OF HUMOURS
A dramatic genre most closely associated with the English playwright Ben Jonson from the
late 16th century. The term derives from the Latin humor (more properly umor), meaning
―liquid,‖ and its use in the medieval and Renaissance medical theory that the human
body held a balance of four liquids, or humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile (choler), and
black bile (melancholy). When properly balanced, these humours were thought to give the
individual a healthy mind in a healthy body.

The comedy of humours, best exemplified by Ben Jonson's play Every Man in His Humour
(1598), and practised by some other playwrights in the 17th century, is based on the
eccentricities of characters whose temperaments are distorted in ways similar to an imbalance
among the bodily humours.

In his play Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), Jonson explains that the system of
humours governing the body may by metaphor be applied to the general disposition, so that a
peculiar quality may so possess a person as to make him or her act in one way.

Jonson‘s characters usually represent one humour and, thus unbalanced, are
basically caricatures. Jonson distinguished two kinds of humour: one was true humour, in
which one peculiar quality actually possessed a man, body and soul; the other was an adopted
humour, or mannerism, in which a man went out of his way to appear singular by affecting
certain fashions of clothing, speech, and social habits.

MASQUE OR MASK
A spectacular kind of indoor performance combining poetic drama, music, dance, song,
lavish costume, and costly stage effects, which was favoured by European royalty in the 16th
and early 17th centuries. Members of the court would enter disguised, taking the parts of
mythological persons, and enact a simple allegorical plot, concluding with the removal of
masks and a dance joined by members of the audience.

Shakespeare included a short masque scene in The Tempest (1611), and Milton's play Comus
(1634) is loosely related to the masque; these are now the best-known examples, but at the
courts of James I and Charles I the highest form of the masque proper was represented by the
quarrelsome collaboration of Ben Jonson with the designer Inigo Jones from 1605 to 1631 in
the hugely expensive Oberon (1611) and other works.

The English queen Anne of Denmark frequently danced with her ladies in masques between
1603 and 1611, and Henry VIII and Charles I of England performed in the masques at their
courts.

The parliamentary Revolution of the 1640s (the English Civil War) brought this form of
extravagance to an abrupt end.

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SONS OF BEN
Followers of Ben Jonson in English poetry and drama in the first half of the seventeenth
century. These men followed Ben Jonson's philosophy and his style of poetry. These men,
unlike Jonson, were loyal to the king.

Sons of Ben were the dramatists who were overtly and admittedly influenced by Jonson's
drama, his most distinctive artistic achievement.

Joe Lee Davis listed eleven playwrights in this group: Richard Brome, Thomas
Nabbes, Henry Glapthorne, Thomas Killigrew, Sir William Davenant, William
Cartwright, Shackerley Marmion, Jasper Mayne, Peter Hausted, Thomas Randolph,
and William Cavendish.

The term, or the alternative "Tribe of Ben," was a self-description by some of the Cavalier
poets who admired and were influenced by Jonson's poetry, including Robert
Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling, and Thomas Carew.

Jonson and his followers congregated at London taverns, especially the Apollo Room in
the Devil Tavern, near Temple-Bar.

METAPHYSICAL POETS
The name given to a diverse group of 17th century English poets whose work is notable for its
ingenious use of intellectual and theological concepts in surprising conceits, strange
paradoxes, and far-fetched imagery.

The leading metaphysical poet was John Donne, whose colloquial, argumentative abruptness
of rhythm and tone distinguishes his style from the conventions of Elizabethan love-lyrics.
Other poets to whom the label is applied include Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, John
Cleveland, and the predominantly religious poets George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and
Richard Crashaw.

The term ‗metaphysical poets was coined by Samuel Johnson in the chapter on Abraham
Cowley in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81).

In the 20th century, T. S. Eliot and others revived their reputation, stressing their quality of
wit, in the sense of intellectual strenuousness and flexibility rather than smart humour.

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CAVALIER POET
Any of a group of English gentlemen poets, called Cavaliers because of their loyalty
to Charles I (1625–49) during the English Civil Wars, as opposed to Roundheads, who
supported Parliament.

They were also cavaliers in their style of life and counted the writing of polished and elegant
lyrics as only one of their many accomplishments as soldiers, courtiers, gallants, and wits.
The term embraces Richard Lovelace, Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, Edmund Waller,
and Robert Herrick.

Besides writing love lyrics addressed to mistresses with fanciful names like Anthea, Althea,
Lucasta, or Amarantha, the Cavaliers sometimes wrote of war, honour, and their duty to the
king. Sometimes they deftly combined all these themes as in Richard Lovelace‘s well-known
poem, To Lucasta, Going to the Wars.

Cavalier poetry is different from traditional poetry in its subject matter. Instead of tackling
issues like religion, philosophy, and the arts, cavalier poetry aims to express the joy and
simple gratification of celebratory things much livelier than the traditional works of their
predecessors. The intent of their works was often to promote the crown (particularly Charles
I), and cavalier poets spoke outwardly against the Roundheads who supported the rebellion of
Parliament against the crown.

There was also a celebration of the monarchy of Charles I among the cavalier poets. Jonson
in particular celebrated ideas of common sense, duty, moderation, propriety, and elegance.

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COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE
Commedia dell'arte, also known as "Italian comedy," was a humorous theatrical presentation
performed by professional actors who traveled in troupes throughout Italy in the 16th century.

Performances took place on temporary stages, mostly on city streets, but occasionally even in
court venues. The better troupes — notably Gelosi, Confidenti, and Fedeli — performed in
palaces and became internationally famous once they traveled abroad.

Music, dance, witty dialogue, and all kinds of trickery contributed to the comic effects.
Subsequently, the art form spread throughout Europe, with many of its elements persisting
even into the modern theater.

The characters of the commedia usually represent fixed social types and stock characters,
such as foolish old men, devious servants, or military officers full of false bravado. The
characters are exaggerated "real characters", such as a know-it-all doctor called Il Dottore, a
greedy old man called Pantalone, or a perfect relationship like the Innamorati.

The first recorded commedia dell'arte performances came from Rome as early as 1551.
Commedia dell'arte was performed outdoors in temporary venues by professional actors who
were costumed and masked, as opposed to commedia erudita, which were written comedies,
presented indoors by untrained and unmasked actors.

In commedia dell'arte, female roles were played by women.

Each character in Commedia dell'arte has a distinct costume that helps the audience
understand who the character is.

KIT-CAT CLUB
An early 18th-century English club in London with strong political and literary associations,
committed to the furtherance of Whig objectives, meeting at the Trumpet tavern in London,
and at Water Oakley in the Berkshire countryside.

The first meetings were held at a tavern in Shire Lane run by an innkeeper called Christopher
Catt. He gave his name to the mutton pies known as "Kit Cats" from which the name of the
club is derived.

Amongst the club's membership were writers such as William Congreve, John
Locke, Sir John Vanbrugh, and Joseph Addison, and politicians including Duke of Somerset,
the Earl of Burlington, Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, The Earl of Stanhope, Viscount
Cobham, Abraham Stanyan and Sir Robert Walpole.

Other notables included Garth, Charles Dartiquenave, Count Saint Germain, Steele, and
the Dukes of Grafton, Devonshire, Kingston, Richmond, Manchester, Dorset, and Lords
Sunderland and Wharton.

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SCRIBLERUS CLUB
18th-century British literary club whose founding members were the brilliant Tory
wits Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Thomas Parnell, and John Arbuthnot.

Its purpose was to ridicule pretentious erudition and scholarly jargon through the person of a
fictitious literary hack, Martinus Scriblerus. The name Martin was taken from John
Dryden‘s comic character Sir Martin Mar-all, whose name had become synonymous with
absurd error; Scriblerus was a reference to scribler, the contemporary term of contempt for a
talentless writer.

The collaboration of the five writers on the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus began as early as
1713 and led to frequent, spirited meetings when they were all in London. When they were
separated, they pursued their project through correspondence.

Of the five, only Pope and Swift lived to see the publication of the Memoirs (1741), although
miscellaneous minor pieces written in collaboration or individually had appeared earlier
under the Scriblerus name.

Other prominent Tories—such as Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, and Henry St. John, 1st
Viscount Bolingbroke—were members of the club.

GRAVEYARD POETRY
The term applied to a minor but influential 18th century tradition of meditative poems on
mortality and immortality, often set in graveyards. The so-called 'graveyard school' of poets
in England and Scotland was not in fact an organized group.

The bestknown examples of this melancholic kind of verse are A Night-Piece on Death
(1721) by the Irish poet Thomas Parnell, Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742-6), the
Scottish clergyman Robert Blair's The Grave (1743), and the culmination of this tradition in
English, Thomas Gray's Elegy written in a Country Churchyard (1751). These works had
many imitators in Europe, and constitute a significant current of Preromanticism.

Many of the Graveyard School poets were, like Thomas Parnell, Christian clergymen, and as
such they often wrote didactic poetry, combining aesthetics with religious and moral
instruction.

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LAKE POETS
A group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England, United Kingdom, in
the first half of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of
thought or literary practice then known. They were named, only to be uniformly disparaged,
by the Edinburgh Review. They are considered part of the Romantic Movement.

The three main figures of what has become known as the Lakes School were William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey. They were associated with
several other poets and writers, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, Mary
Lamb, Charles Lloyd, Hartley Coleridge, John Wilson, and Thomas De Quincey.

They were first described derogatorily as the ―Lake school‖ by Francis Jeffrey in The
Edinburgh Review in August 1817, and the description ―Lakers‖ was also used in a similar
spirit by the poet Lord Byron.

SATANIC SCHOOL
Pejorative designation used by Robert Southey, most notably in the preface to his A Vision of
Judgement (1821), in reference to certain English poets whose work he believed to be
―characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety.‖ Although Southey did not
name any of those poets in his preface, elsewhere he identified Lord Byron as the head of the
Satanic school, and Byron‘s friend PB Shelley is also generally understood to have been a
target of Southey‘s opprobrium. The term expressed Southey‘s disapproval of the unorthodox
views and lifestyles of those poets and those in their circle.

COCKNEY SCHOOL
A dismissive name for London-based Romantic poets such as John Keats, Leigh Hunt,
and PB Shelley. The term was first used in a scathing review in Blackwood’s Magazine in
October 1817, in which the anonymous reviewer mocked the poets‘ lack of pedigree and
sophistication. Its primary target was Leigh Hunt. Only Keats could properly be regarded as
a cockney. Hazlitt was not even born in London. John Scott died after a duel over the
controversy.

The term, and the campaign against Hunt and the others, was not a question of aesthetics. It
was, instead, an attack on the class background of the authors and their aspirations to the
highest level of the literati, and it was, additionally, a reaction to the "Cockney" politics of
the authors.

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DARK ROMANTICISM
A literary subgenre of Romanticism, reflecting popular fascination with the irrational, the
demonic and the grotesque. Often conflated with Gothicism, it has shadowed the euphoric
Romantic movement ever since its 18th-century beginnings. Edgar Allan Poe is often
celebrated as one of the supreme exponents of the tradition.

Romanticism's celebration of euphoria and sublimity has always been dogged by an equally
intense fascination with melancholia, insanity, crime and shady atmosphere; with the options
of ghosts and ghouls, the grotesque, and the irrational.

The name "Dark Romanticism" was given to this form by the literary theorist Mario Praz in
his lengthy study of the genre published in 1930, ‗‘The Romantic Agony‘‘

Like romanticism itself, Dark Romanticism arguably began in Germany, with writers such
as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Christian Heinrich Spiess, and Ludwig Tieck – though their emphasis
on existential alienation, the demonic in sex, and the uncanny, was offset at the same time by
the more homely cult of Biedermeier.

British authors such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, and John
William Polidori, who are frequently linked to Gothic fiction, are also sometimes referred to
as Dark Romantics.

Dark Romanticism is characterized by stories of personal torment, social outcasts, and

usually offers commentary on whether the nature of man will save or destroy him.

Some Victorian authors of English horror fiction, such as Bram Stoker and Daphne du
Maurier, follow in this lineage.

The American form of this sensibility centered on the writers Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. As opposed to the perfectionist beliefs
of Transcendentalism, these darker contemporaries emphasized human fallibility and
proneness to sin and self-destruction, as well as the difficulties inherent in attempts at social
reform.

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TRANSCENDENTALISM
A 19th-century school of American theological and philosophical thought that combined
respect for nature and self-sufficiency with elements of Unitarianism and German
Romanticism. Writer Ralph Waldo Emerson was the primary practitioner of the movement,
which existed loosely in Massachusetts in the early 1800s before becoming an organized
group in the 1830s.

Thinkers in the movement embraced ideas brought forth by philosophers Immanuel Kant and
Hegel, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ancient Indian scripture the Vedas, and religious
founder Emanuel Swedenborg.

Transcendentalists advocated the idea of a personal knowledge of God, believing that no

intermediary was needed for spiritual insight. They embraced idealism, focusing on nature
and opposing materialism.

Emerson‘s essay Nature, published in 1836, presented Transcendentalist philosophy.

The Transcendental Club

On September 12, 1836, four Harvard University alumni—writer and Bangor, Maine,
minister Frederic Henry Hodge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Unitarian ministers George
Ripley and George Putnam—left a celebration of the bicentennial of Harvard to meet at
Willard‘s Hotel in Cambridge.

Transcendental Club were interested in forming a commune to put their ideas to the test. In
1841, a small group of them, including author Nathaniel Hawthorne, moved to a property
named Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.

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THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD
A group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in September 1848 by William
Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The three founders were
joined by William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas
Woolner to form the seven-member ―brotherhood‖.

The Pre-Raphaelites opposed the dominance of the British Royal Academy, which
championed a narrow range of idealized or moral subjects and conventional definitions of
beauty drawn from the early Italian Renaissance and Classical art. In contrast, the Pre-
Raphaelites took inspiration from an earlier (pre-Raphaelite - before the artist Raphael)
period, that is, the centuries preceding the High Renaissance. They believed painters before
the Renaissance provided a model for depicting nature and the human body realistically,
rather than idealistically, and that collective guilds of medieval craftspeople offered an
alternative vision of artistic community to mid-19th-century academic approaches.

AESTHETICISM
Late 19th-century European arts movement which centred on the doctrine that art exists for
the sake of its beauty alone, and that it need serve no political, didactic, or other purpose.

The movement began in reaction to prevailing utilitarian social philosophies and to what was
perceived as the ugliness and philistinism of the industrial age. Its philosophical foundations
were laid in the 18th century by Immanuel Kant, who postulated the autonomy of aesthetic
standards, setting them apart from considerations of morality, utility, or pleasure. This idea
was amplified by J.W. von Goethe, J.L. Tieck, and others in Germany and by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle in England. It was popularized in France by Madame de
Staël, Théophile Gautier, and the philosopher Victor Cousin, who coined the phrase l’art
pour l’art (―art for art‘s sake‖) in 1818.

In England, the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, from 1848, had sown the seeds of
Aestheticism, and the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and Algernon
Charles Swinburne exemplified it in expressing a yearning for ideal beauty through conscious
medievalism. The attitudes of the movement were also represented in the writings of Oscar
Wilde and Walter Pater and the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley in the periodical The Yellow
Book. The painter James McNeill Whistler raised the movement‘s ideal of the cultivation of
refined sensibility to perhaps its highest point.

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FIRESIDE POETS/SCHOOLROOM POETS/HOUSEHOLD POETS
Used to designate a group of five poets—William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell—
who were popular in America in the latter half of the 19th century. Their poetry was read
both around household firesides, often aloud by a mother or father to the gathered family, and
in schoolrooms, where they inculcated wisdom and morals and patriotic feeling in America‘s
young.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is occasionally included in the group as well. The name "fireside
poets" is derived from that popularity; their writing was a source of entertainment for families
gathered around the fire at home. The name was further inspired by Longfellow's 1850 poetry
collection The Seaside and the Fireside. Lowell published a book titled Fireside Travels in
1864 which helped solidify the title.

The poets' primary subjects were domestic life, mythology, and the politics of the United
States, in which several of them were directly involved. The fireside poets did not write for
the sake of other poets, for critics, or for posterity. Instead, they wrote for a contemporary
audience of general readers.

Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes are featured in the bestselling novel The Dante
Club by Matthew Pearl, published in 2003.

OXFORD MOVEMENT
An effort by Anglican clergymen of Oxford University between 1833 and 1845 to renew
the Church of England by a revival of Catholic doctrine and practice.

Leaders of the movement were John Henry Newman, Richard Hurrell Froude, John Keble
and Edward Pusey.

The movement's philosophy was known as Tractarianism after its series of publications,
the Tracts for the Times, published from 1833 to 1841. Tractarians were also disparagingly
referred to as "Newmanites" (before 1845) and "Puseyites" (after 1845) after two prominent
Tractarians, John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey. Other well-known
Tractarians included John Keble, Charles Marriott, Richard Froude, Robert
Wilberforce, Isaac Williams and William Palmer.

Apart from the Tracts for the Times, the group began a collection of translations of the
Church Fathers, which they termed the Library of the Fathers.

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REALISM
Realism was an artistic movement that emerged in France in the 1840s, around the 1848
Revolution. Realists rejected Romanticism, which had dominated French literature and art
since the early 19th century. Realism revolted against the exotic subject matter and the
exaggerated emotionalism and drama of the Romantic movement. Instead, it sought to
portray real and typical contemporary people and situations with truth and accuracy, and not
avoiding unpleasant or sordid aspects of life. The movement aimed to focus on unidealized
subjects and events that were previously rejected in art work. Realist works depicted people
of all classes in situations that arise in ordinary life, and often reflected the changes brought
by the Industrial and Commercial Revolutions. Realism was primarily concerned with how
things appeared to the eye, rather than containing ideal representations of the world.

The chief exponents of Realism were Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, Honoré
Daumier, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

Literary Realism

In its methods and attitudes, realism may be found as an element in many kinds of writing
prior to the 19th century (e.g. in Chaucer or Defoe, in their different ways); but as a dominant
literary trend it is associated chiefly with the 19th-century novel of middle- or lower-class
life, in which the problems of ordinary people in unremarkable circumstances are rendered
with close attention to the details of physical setting and to the complexities of social life.
The outstanding works of realism in 19th-century fiction include Honore de Balzac's Illusions
perdues (1837-43), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), and George Eliot's
Middlemarch (1871-2).

Realism also established itself as an important tradition in the theatre in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, in the work of Henrik Ibsen, Bernard Shaw, and others; and it remains a
standard convention of film and television drama. Despite the radical attempts of Modernism
to displace the realist emphasis on external reality (notably in the movements of
Expressionism and Surrealism), realism survived as a major current within 20th-century
fiction, sometimes under the label of Neo-Realism.

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NATURALISM
A more deliberate kind of Realism in novels, stories, and plays, usually involving a view of
human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. As a literary
movement, naturalism was initiated in France by Jules and Edmond Goncourt with their
novel Germinie Lacerteux (1865), but it came to be led by Emile Zola, who claimed a
'scientific' status for his studies of impoverished characters miserably subjected to hunger,
sexual obsession, and hereditary defects in Therese Raquin (1867), Germinal (1885), and
many other novels. Naturalist fiction aspired to a sociological objectivity, offering detailed
and fully researched investigations into unexplored comers of modem society-railways in
Zola's La Bete humaine (1890), the department store in his Au Bonheur des dames (1883)-
while enlivening this with a new sexual sensationalism.

Other novelists and storytellers associated with naturalism include Alphonse Daudet and Guy
de Maupassant in France, Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris in the United States, and
George Moore and George Gissing in England; the most significant work of naturalism in
English being Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900).

In the theatre, Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts (1881), with its stress on heredity, encouraged an
important tradition of dramatic naturalism led by August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, and
Maxim Gorky; in a somewhat looser sense, the realistic plays of Anton Chekhov are
sometimes grouped with the naturalist phase of European drama at the turn of the century.
The term naturalistic in drama usually has a broader application, denoting a very detailed
illusion of real life on the stage, especially in speech, costume, and sets.

IMPRESSIONISM
In the literary sense borrowed from French painting, a rather vague term applied to works or
passages that concentrate on the description of transitory mental impressions as felt by an
observer, rather than on the explanation of their external causes.

Impressionism in literature is thus neither a school nor a movement but a kind of subjective
tendency manifested in descriptive techniques. It is found in Symbolist and Imagist poetry,
and in much modern verse, but also in many works of prose fiction since the late 19th
century, as in the novels of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf.

Impressionistic criticism is the kind of criticism that restricts itself to describing the critic's
own subjective response to a literary work, rather than ascribing intrinsic qualities to it in the
light of general principles.

Walter Pater's defence of such criticism, in the Preface to his Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (1873), was that 'in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object
as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it
distinctly'. The most common kind of impressionistic criticism is found in theatre and book
reviews: 'I laughed all night'; 'I couldn't put it down'.

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Impressionism in Art

19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes,
open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often
accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion
of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual
angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent
exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.

The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille
Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Frédéric Bazille, who
worked together, influenced each other, and exhibited together.

SYMBOLISM
Symbolism was largely a reaction against naturalism and realism, anti-idealistic styles which
were attempts to represent reality in its gritty particularity, and to elevate the humble and the
ordinary over the ideal. Symbolism was a reaction in favour of spirituality, the imagination,
and dreams.

In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs
du mal. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into
French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The
aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and
1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a
generation of writers. The term "symbolist" was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who
invented the term to distinguish the Symbolists from the related Decadents of literature and of
art.

Symbolists believed that art should represent absolute truths that could only be described
indirectly. Thus, they wrote in a very metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing
particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. Jean Moréas published the Symbolist
Manifesto in Le Figaro on 18 September 1886. The Symbolist Manifesto names Charles
Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine as the three leading poets of the
movement.

Among the minor Symbolist poets were Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbiere. The Symbolists
aimed for a poetry of suggestion rather than of direct statement, evoking subjective moods
through the use of private symbols, while avoiding the description of external reality or the
expression of opinion. They wanted to bring poetry closer to music, believing that sound had
mysterious affinities with other senses. Among their influential innovations were free verse
and the prose poem.

As a self-conscious movement, French symbolism declared itself under that name only in
1886, forming part of the so-called decadence of that period. It appeared in drama too,
notably in the works of the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck in the 1890s; and some

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of its concerns were reflected in novels by J-K. Huysmans and Edouard Dujardin. The
influence of symbolism on European and American literature of the early 20th century was
extensive: Paul Valery in French, Rainer Maria Rilke in German, and W. B. Yeats in English
carried the tradition into the 20th century, and hardly any major figure of Modernism was
unaffected by it.

IMAGISM
The doctrine and poetic practice of a small but influential group of American and British
poets calling themselves Imagists or Imagistes between 1912 and 1917. Led at first by Ezra
Pound, and then after his defection to Vorticism by Amy Lowell, the group rejected most
19th-century poetry as cloudy verbiage, and aimed instead at a new clarity and exactness in
the short lyric poem.

Influenced by the Japanese Haiku and partly by ancient Greek lyrics, the Imagists cultivated
concision and directness, building their short poems around single images; they also preferred
looser cadences to traditional regular rhythms. Apart from Pound and Lowell, the group also
included Richard Aldington, 'H.D.' (Hilda Doolittle), F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence, Ford
Madox Ford, and William Carlos Williams.

Imagist poems and manifestos appeared in the American magazine Poetry and the London
journal The Egoist. Pound edited the first anthology of Imagist poetry Des Imagistes (1914),
while the three further anthologies (1915-17), all entitled Some Imagist Poets, were edited by
Lowell.

Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments (1916) was intended as a satire directed at

the Imagism poetry movement.

SURREALISM
An anti-rational movement of imaginative liberation in European (mainly French) art and
literature in the 1920s and 1930s, launched by Andre Breton in his Manifeste du Surrealisme
(1924) after his break from the Dada group in 1922. The term surrealiste had been used by
the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917 to indicate an attempt to reach beyond the
limits of the 'real'.

Surrealism seeks to break down the boundaries between rationality and irrationality,
exploring the resources and revolutionary energies of dreams, hallucinations, and sexual
desire. Influenced both by the Symbolists and by Sigmund Freud's theories of the
unconscious, the surrealists experimented with Automatic Writing and with the free
association of random images brought together in surprising juxtaposition. Although
surrealist painting is better known, a significant tradition of surrealist poetry established itself
in France, in the work of Breton, Paul Bluard, Louis Aragon, and Benjamin Peret.

Surrealism also attempted to become an international revolutionary movement, associated for

a while with the Communist International. Although dissolved as a coherent movement by
the end of the 1930s, its tradition has survived in many forms of postwar experimental

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writing, from the theatre of the Absurd to the songs of Bob Dylan. The adjectives surreal and
surrealistic are often used in a loose sense to refer to any bizarre imaginative effect.

THE RHYMERS' CLUB

A group of London-based male poets, founded in 1890 by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys.
Originally not much more than a dining club, it produced anthologies of poetry in 1892 and
1894.

The first, entitled The Book of the Rhymers' Club was published by Elkin Mathews. The
Second Book of the Rhymers' Club appeared two years later in 1894, published by the
recently merged Elkin Mathews and John Lane.

They met at the London pub ‗Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese‘ in Fleet Street and in the 'Domino
Room' of the Café Royal.

The membership of the club shifted over the years, but included John Davidson, Ernest
Dowson, Edwin Ellis, George Arthur Greene, Arthur Cecil Hillier, Herbert Horne, Lionel
Johnson, Richard Le Gallienne, Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, Ernest Rhys, T. W. Rolleston,
Arthur Symons, John Todhunter, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats. Yeats later referred to many
of these poets as ―The Tragic Generation.‖

THE IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL

A unfolding of Irish literary talent in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was closely
allied with a strong political nationalism and a revival of interest in Ireland‘s Gaelic literary
heritage. The revival was inspired by the nationalistic pride of the Gaelic revival and by the
Gaelic League, which was formed in 1893 to revive the Irish language and culture.

The movement developed into a vigorous literary force centered on the poet and playwright
William Butler Yeats. Though he contributed to the foundation of the Abbey Theatre, the first
Irish national theater, he wrote only a few plays. His chief colleague was Lady Isabella
Augusta Gregory, who took a leading part in the Abbey‘s management and wrote many
plays. The Irish Literary Theatre, established in 1898, also excelled in the production of
peasant plays. The greatest dramatist of the movement was John Millington Synge, who
wrote plays of great beauty and power in a stylized peasant dialect. Later, the theater turned
toward realism, mostly rural realism. Lennox Robinson and T.C. Murray were among the
early realists. In reaction to peasant realism, Sean O‘Casey wrote three great dramas of the
Dublin slums: The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The
Plough and the Stars (1926).

In poetry, in addition to Yeats, George Russell (pseudonym AE) composed works of

enduring interest. Notable among their younger contemporaries were Padraic Colum, Austin
Clarke, Seumas O‘Sullivan (James Sullivan Starkey), F.R. Higgins, and Oliver St. John
Gogarty. The Irish Republican movement had its poets in Patrick Henry Pearse, Thomas
MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett, all executed in 1916 for their part in the Easter Rising.

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AUDEN GROUP/AUDEN GENERATION
A group of British and Irish writers active in the 1930s that included W. H. Auden, Louis
MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, and
sometimes Edward Upward and Rex Warner. They were sometimes called simply
the Thirties poets.

Although many newspaper articles and a few books appeared about the "Auden Group", the
existence of the group was essentially a journalistic myth, a convenient label for poets and
novelists who were approximately the same age, who had been educated at Oxford and
Cambridge, who had known each other at different times, and had more or less left-wing
views.

Macspaunday

A name invented by Roy Campbell, in his Talking Bronco (1946), to designate a composite
figure made up of the four poets:

 Louis MacNeice ("Mac")

 Stephen Spender ("sp")

 W. H. Auden ("au-n")

 Cecil Day-Lewis ("day")

HARLEM RENAISSANCE
An intellectual, social, and artistic explosion centered in Harlem, New York, spanning the
1920s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New
Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke.

The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call
the Harlem Renaissance, took place between 1924—when Opportunity: A Journal of Negro
Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance—and
1929, the year of the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. The
Harlem Renaissance is considered to have been a rebirth of the African-American arts.

The Harlem Renaissance was successful in that it brought the Black experience clearly within
the corpus of American cultural history. Not only through an explosion of culture, but on
a sociological level, the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance redefined how America, and the
world, viewed African Americans

Harlem Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Georgia Douglas
Johnson, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston explored the beauty and pain of black life
and sought to define themselves and their community outside of white stereotypes.

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WAR POETS
The First World War inspired profound poetry – words in which the atmosphere and
landscape of battle were evoked perhaps more vividly than ever before.

The poets – many of whom lost their lives – became a collective voice , illuminating not only
the war‘s tragedies and their irreparable effects, but the hopes and disappointments of an
entire generation.

Famous War Poets

 Wilfred Owen
 John McCrae
 Siegfried Sassoon
 Alan Seeger
 Guillaume Apollinaire
 Vera Brittain
 August Stramm
 Rupert Brooke

LOST GENERATION
The generation that came of age during World War I. "Lost" in this context also means
"disoriented, wandering, directionless"—a recognition that there was great confusion and
aimlessness among the war's survivors in the early post-war years."

The term is particularly used to refer to a group of artists,and particularly American

expatriate writers, living in Paris during the 1920s. Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the
term; it was subsequently popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it in the epigraph for
his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises: "You are all a lost generation."

The writings of the Lost Generation literary figures tend to have common themes. These
themes mostly pertained to the writers' experiences in World War I and the years following it.
It is said that the work of these writers was autobiographical based on their use of
mythologized versions of their lives. One of the themes that commonly appears in the authors'
works is decadence and the frivolous lifestyle of the wealthy. Both Hemingway
and Fitzgerald touched on this theme throughout the novels The Sun Also Rises and The
Great Gatsby. Another theme commonly found in the works of these authors was the death of
the American dream, which is exhibited throughout many of their novels. It is particularly
prominent in The Great Gatsby, in which the character Nick Carraway comes to realize the
corruption that surrounds him.

Members of the Lost Generation include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest
Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Jean Rhys and Sylvia Beach.

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BLOOMSBURY GROUP/BLOOMSBURY SET
A group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of
the 20th century, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton
Strachey. This loose collective of friends and relatives was closely associated with
the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, and they
lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London.

Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as
well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. A well-known quote,
attributed to Dorothy Parker, is "they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in
triangles".

The group had ten core members:

 Clive Bell
 Vanessa Bell
 E. M. Forster
 Roger Fry
 Duncan Grant
 John Maynard Keynes
 Desmond MacCarthy
 Lytton Strachey
 Leonard Woolf
 Virginia Woolf

All male members of the Bloomsbury Group, except Duncan Grant, were educated
at Cambridge.

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STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
A method of narration that describes happenings in the flow of thoughts in the minds of the
characters.

The term "stream of consciousness" was coined by philosopher and psychologist William
James in The Principles of Psychology (1890)

The term is often used as a synonym for interior monologue, but they can also be
distinguished, in two ways. In the first (psychological) sense, the stream of consciousness is
the subject-matter while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it; thus Marcel
Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time (1913-27) is about the stream of consciousness,
especially the connection between sense-impressions and memory, but it does not actually
use interior monologue.

In the second (literary) sense, stream of consciousness is a special style of interior

monologue: while an interior monologue always presents a character's thoughts' directly',
without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator, it does not
necessarily mingle them with impressions and perceptions, nor does it necessarily violate the
norms of grammar, syntax, and logic; but the stream-of-consciousness technique also does
one or both of these things.

An important device of Modernist fiction and its later imitators, the technique was pioneered
by Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage (1915-35) and by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922), and
further developed by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and William Faulkner in The
Sound and the Fury (1928).

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BLACK MOUNTAIN POETS
The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid-20th-
century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain
College in North Carolina.

Although it lasted only twenty-three years (1933–1956) and enrolled fewer than 1,200
students, Black Mountain College was one of the most fabled experimental institutions in art
education and practice.

In 1950, Charles Olson published his seminal essay, Projective Verse. In this, he called for a
poetry of "open field" composition to replace traditional closed poetic forms with an
improvised form that should reflect exactly the content of the poem. This form was to be
based on the line, and each line was to be a unit of breath and of utterance. The content was
to consist of "one perception immediately and directly (leading) to a further perception". This
essay was to become a kind of de facto manifesto for the Black Mountain poets. One of the
effects of narrowing the unit of structure in the poem down to what could fit within an
utterance was that the Black Mountain poets developed a distinctive style of poetic diction
(e.g. "yr" for "your").

In addition to Olson, the poets most closely associated with Black Mountain include Larry
Eigner, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn, Hilda Morley, John Wieners, Joel
Oppenheimer, Denise Levertov, Jonathan Williams and Robert Creeley.

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THE APOCALYPSE POETS/NEW APOCALYPTICS
A network of British writers centred around the largely forgotten Apocalypse poetry
movement. Apocalypse poetry, inspired by the notion of Surrealism stripped of its
automatism, was a reaction to the poetic dominance of the Auden Generation during the
1930s. Aesthetically, Apocalypticism dealt in nightmarish images, engaged with mythology,
and meditated on war. Politically, it tended towards anarchism.

Poets Henry Treece (1912–1966) and J. F. Hendry (1912–1986) became acquainted with one
another while contributing to the literary magazine Seven. They developed an Apocalyptic
manifesto in 1938 in collaboration with Dorian Cooke (1916–2005). The following year,
Treece and Hendry edited an anthology of poetry entitled The New Apocalypse (1939). They
later anthologised two more collections of Apocalyptic poetry: The White Horseman (1941)
and The Crown and the Sickle (1943). Others closely associated were the Scottish (as Hendry
was) poets G. S. Fraser and Norman MacCaig.

By the time The Crown and the Sickle saw publication, the Apocalypse movement had lost
much of its momentum and was subsumed under an emerging New Romanticism.

SOUTHERN AGRARIANS
The Southern Agrarians (also the Twelve Southerners, the Vanderbilt Agrarians,
the Nashville Agrarians, the Tennessee Agrarians, and the Fugitive Agrarians) were a
group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in
the Southern United States, who united to write a pro–Southern agrarian manifesto, published
as the essay collection I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930). The
Southern Agrarians greatly contributed to the Southern Renaissance, the revival of Southern
literature in the 1920s and 1930s, and were based at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville,
with John Crowe Ransom as the unofficial leader.

The Southern Agrarians included:

 Robert Penn Warren

 Donald Davidson
 John Gould Fletcher
 Henry Blue Kline
 Lyle H. Lanier
 Andrew Nelson Lytle
 Herman Clarence Nixon
 Frank Lawrence Owsley
 John Crowe Ransom
 Allen Tate
 John Donald Wade
 Stark Young

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BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT/BAM
The Black Arts Movement was the name given to a group of politically motivated black
poets, artists, dramatists, musicians, and writers who emerged in the wake of the Black
Power Movement. The poet Imamu Amiri Baraka is widely considered to be the father of the
Black Arts Movement, which began in 1965 and ended in 1975.

There are many parallels that can be made between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black
Arts Movement. The link is so strong, in fact, that some scholars refer to the Black Arts
Movement era as the Second Renaissance.

The Black Arts Movement was formally established in 1965 when Baraka opened the Black
Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem. The movement had its greatest impact in theater and
poetry. Although it began in the New York/Newark area, it soon spread to Chicago, Illinois,
Detroit, Michigan, and San Francisco, California.

In 1969, Robert Chrisman and Nathan Hare established The Black Scholar, which was the
first scholarly journal to promote black studies within academia.

The movement began to fade when Baraka and other leading members shifted from Black
Nationalism to Marxism in the mid-1970s, a shift that alienated many who had previously
identified with the movement. Additionally Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Gil Scott-Heron, Maya
Angelou, and James Baldwin achieved cultural recognition and economic success as their
works began to be celebrated by the white mainstream.

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EXISTENTIALISM
A current in European philosophy distinguished by its emphasis on lived human existence.
Although it had an important precursor in the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard in the
1840s, its impact was fully felt only in the mid-20th century in France and Germany: the
German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers prepared some of the ground in the
1920s and 1930s for the more influential work of Jean-Paul Sartre and the other French
existentialists including Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau Ponty.

The term "existentialism" was coined by the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel in
the mid-1940s.

In terms of its literary impact, the thought of Sartre has been the most significant, presented
in novels (notably La Nausee (Nausea), 1938) and plays (including Les Mouches (The Flies),
1943) as well as in the major philosophical work L'Etre et Ie neant (Being and Nothingness),
1943). Sartrean existentialism, as distinct from the Christian existentialism derived from
Kierkegaard, is an atheist philosophy of human freedom conceived in terms of individual
responsibility and authenticity. Its fundamental premise, that 'existence precedes essence',
implies that we as human beings have no given essence or nature but must forge our own
values and meanings in an inherently meaningless or absurd world of existence. Obliged to
make our own choices, we can either confront the anguish (or angst) of this responsibility, or
evade it by claiming obedience to some determining convention or duty, thus acting in 'bad
faith'. Paradoxically, we are' condemned to be free'. Similar themes can be found in the
novels and essays of Camus; both authors felt that the absurdity of existence could be
redeemed through the individual's decision to become engage ('committed') within social and
political causes opposing fascism and imperialism.

Some of the concerns of French existentialism are echoed in English in Thom Gunn's early
collection of poems. The Sense of Movement (1957), and in the fiction of Iris Murdoch and
John Fowles.

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AGITPROP
A political propaganda, especially the communist propaganda used in Soviet Russia, that is
spread to the general public through popular media such as literature, plays, pamphlets, films,
and other art forms with an explicitly political message.

The term originated in Soviet Russia as a shortened name for the Department for Agitation
and Propaganda, which was part of the central and regional committees of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union.

Typically Russian agitprop explained the ideology and policies of the Communist Party and
attempted to persuade the general public to support and join the party and share its ideals.
After the October Revolution of 1917, an agitprop train toured the country, with artists and
actors performing simple plays and broadcasting propaganda. It had a printing press on board
the train to allow posters to be reproduced and thrown out of the windows as it passed
through villages.

It gave rise to agitprop theatre, a highly politicized theatre that originated in

1920s Europe and spread to the United States; the plays of Bertolt Brecht are a notable
example. Gradually the term agitprop came to describe any kind of highly politicized art.

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THEATRE OF CRUELTY
A form of theatre generally associated with Antonin Artaud. Artaud, who was briefly a
member of the surrealist movement, outlined his theories in The Theatre and its Double. The
Theatre of Cruelty can be seen as a break from traditional Western theatre and a means by
which artists assault the senses of the audience. Artaud's works have been highly influential
on artists including Jean Genet, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, and Romeo Castellucci.

In 1926, in association with surrealist playwright Roger Vitrac, Artaud founded the Theatre
Alfred Jarry, which only produced non-realistic drama.

In his writings on the Theatre of Cruelty, Artaud notes that both "theatre" and "cruelty" that
are separate from their colloquial meanings. For Artaud, theatre does not merely refer to a
staged performance before a passive audience. The theatre is a practice, which "wakes us up.
Nerves and heart," and through which we experience, "immediate violent action," that
"inspires us with the fiery magnetism of its images and acts upon us like a spiritual
therapeutics whose touch can never be forgotten."

For Artaud, cruelty is not exclusively sadism or causing pain, but just as often a violent,
physical determination to shatter a false reality. He believed that text had been a tyrant over
meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language, halfway
between thought and gesture. Artaud described the spiritual in physical terms, and believed
that all theatre is physical expression in space.

Artaud believed that language was an entirely insufficient means to express trauma.
Accordingly, he felt that words should be stripped of meaning and chosen for their phonic
elements.

Artaud wanted to abolish the stage and auditorium, and to do away with sets and props and
masks. He envisioned the performance space as an empty room with the audience seated in
the center and the actors performing all around them. The stage effects included
overwhelming sounds and bright lights in order to stun the audience's sensibilities and
completely immerse them in the theatrical experience.

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PANIC MOVEMENT
A collective formed by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland
Topor in Paris in 1962. Inspired by and named after the god Pan, and influenced by Luis
Buñuel and Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, the group concentrated on chaotic and
surreal performance art, as a response to surrealism becoming mainstream.

The movement's violent theatrical events were designed to be shocking, and to release
destructive energies in search of peace and beauty. One four-hour performance known
as Sacramental Melodrama was staged in May 1965 at the Paris Festival of Free Expression.
The "happening" starred Jodorowsky dressed in motorcyclist leather and featured him slitting
the throats of two geese, taping two snakes to his chest and having himself stripped and
whipped. Other scenes included "naked women covered in honey, a crucified chicken, the
staged murder of a rabbi, a giant vagina, the throwing of live turtles into the audience, and
canned apricots."

Arrabal and Jodorowsky later started to work also on film. Arrabal is well known for his
films Viva la muerte (1971) and I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse (1973), while Jodorowsky
achieved even more fame with Fando y Lis (1967), El Topo (1970) and The Holy
Mountain (1973). Jodorowsky dissolved the Panic Movement in 1973, after the release of
Arrabal's book Le panique.

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EPIC THEATRE
A theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice
of a number of theatre practitioners who responded to the political climate of the time
through the creation of a new political theatre. Epic theatre is not meant to refer to the scale
or the scope of the work, but rather to the form that it takes. Epic theatre emphasizes the
audience's perspective and reaction to the piece through a variety of techniques that
deliberately cause them to individually engage in a different way. The purpose of epic theatre
is not to encourage an audience to suspend their disbelief, but rather to force them to see their
world as it is.

Famous practitioners

 Erwin Piscator
 Vladimir Mayakovsky
 Vsevolod Meyerhold
 Bertolt Brecht

The term "epic theatre" was coined by Erwin Piscator. Piscator aimed to encourage
playwrights to address issues related to "contemporary existence." This new subject matter
would then be staged by means of documentary effects, audience interaction, and strategies to
cultivate an objective response.

While not invented by Brecht, the Verfremdungseffekt, known in English as the

"estrangement effect" or the "alienation effect", was made popular by Brecht and is one of the
most significant characteristics of epic theatre.

Some of the ways the Verfremdungseffekt can be achieved is by having actors play multiple
characters, rearrange the set in full view of the audience, and "break the fourth wall" by
speaking to the audience. (The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an
invisible, imagined wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see
through this "wall", the convention assumes, the actors act as if they cannot.)

The use of a narrator in The Caucasian Chalk Circle is another example of

Verfremdungseffekt at work. Lighting can also be used to emulate the effect. For example,
flooding the theatre with bright lights (not just the stage) and placing lighting equipment on
stage can encourage the audience to fully acknowledge that the production is merely a
production instead of reality.

Historicisation is also employed in order to draw connections from a historical event to a

similar current event. This can be seen in the plays Mother Courage and Her
Children and The Good Person of Szechwan, both written by Brecht, which comment on a
current social or political issue using historical contexts.

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ANGRY YOUNG MEN
A group of mostly working- and middle-class British playwrights and novelists who became
prominent in the 1950s. The group's leading figures included John Osborne and Kingsley
Amis. The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre's press officer in order to
promote Osborne's 1956 play Look Back in Anger. It is thought to be derived from
the autobiography of Leslie Paul, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, whose Angry Young
Man was published in 1951.

Following the success of the Osborne play, the label "angry young men" was later applied by
British media to describe young writers who were characterised by a disillusionment with
traditional British society. The term, always imprecise, began to have less meaning over the
years as the writers to whom it was originally applied became more divergent, and many of
them dismissed the label as useless.

Associated Writers

 Kingsley Amis
 John Osborne
 Stan Barstow
 Edward Bond
 John Braine
 Michael Hastings
 Thomas Hinde
 Stuart Holroyd
 Bill Hopkins
 Bernard Kops
 John Arden
 Harold Pinter
 Alan Sillitoe
 David Storey
 Kenneth Tynan
 John Wain
 Keith Waterhouse
 Arnold Wesker
 Colin Wilson

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KITCHEN SINK DRAMA
A British cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s
in theatre, art, novels, film, and television plays, whose protagonists usually could be
described as "angry young men" who were disillusioned with modern society. It used a style
of social realism, which depicted the domestic situations of working class Britons, living in
cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to
explore controversial social and political issues ranging from abortion to homelessness. The
harsh, realistic style contrasted sharply with the escapism of the previous generation's so-
called "well-made plays".

The films, plays and novels employing this style are often set in poorer industrial areas in
the North of England, and use the accents and slang heard in those regions. The film It
Always Rains on Sunday (1947) is a precursor of the genre, and the John Osborne play Look
Back in Anger (1956) is thought of as the first of the genre. The gritty love-triangle of Look
Back in Anger, for example, takes place in a cramped, one-room flat in the English
Midlands. Shelagh Delaney's 1958 play A Taste of Honey is about a teenage schoolgirl who
has an affair with a black sailor, gets pregnant, and then moves in with a gay male
acquaintance; it raises issues such as class, race, gender and sexual orientation. The
conventions of the genre have continued into the 2000s, finding expression in such television
shows as Coronation Street and EastEnders.

In art, "Kitchen Sink School" was a term used by critic David Sylvester to describe painters
who depicted social realist–type scenes of domestic life.

Kitchen sink realism involves working class settings and accents, including accents from
Northern England. The films and plays often explore taboo subjects such as adultery, pre-
marital sex, abortion, and crime.

In the United Kingdom, the term "kitchen sink" derived from an expressionist
painting by John Bratby, which contained an image of a kitchen sink.

Kitchen sink realism was also used in the novels of Stan Barstow, John Braine, Alan
Sillitoe and others.

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ASHCAN SCHOOL/ASH CAN SCHOOL
An artistic movement in the United States during the early 20th century that is best known for
works portraying scenes of daily life in New York, often in the city's poorer neighborhoods.

The best known artists working in this style included Robert Henri (1865–1929), George
Luks (1867–1933), William Glackens (1870–1938), John Sloan (1871–1951), and Everett
Shinn (1876–1953). Some of them met studying together under the renowned realist Thomas
Anshutz at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, others met in the newspaper offices
of Philadelphia where they worked as illustrators. Theresa Bernstein, who studied at
the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, was also a part of the Ashcan School. She was
friends with many of its better-known members, including Sloan with whom she co-founded
the Society of Independent Artists.

The movement, which took some inspiration from Walt Whitman's epic poem Leaves of
Grass, has been seen as emblematic of the spirit of political rebellion of the period.

The Ashcan School was not an organized movement. The artists who worked in this style did
not issue manifestos or even see themselves as a unified group with identical intentions or
career goals. Some were politically minded, and others were apolitical. Their unity consisted
of a desire to tell certain truths about the city and modern life they felt had been ignored by
the suffocating influence of the Genteel Tradition in the visual arts.

THEATRE OF THE ABSURD

A term derived from the Existentialism of Albert Camus, and often applied to the modern
sense of human purposelessness in a universe without meaning or value. Many 20th century
writers of prose fiction have stressed the absurd nature of human existence: notable instances
are the novels and stories of Franz Kafka, in which the characters face alarmingly
incomprehensible predicaments.

The critic Martin Esslin coined the phrase theatre of the absurd in 1961 to refer to a number
of dramatists of the 1950s (led by Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco) whose works evoke
the absurd by abandoning logical form, character, and dialogue together with realistic
illusion. The classic work of absurdist theatre is Beckett's (Waiting for Godot, 1952), which
revives some of the conventions of clowning and parce to represent the impossibility of
purposeful action and the paralysis of human aspiration. Other dramatists associated with the
theatre of the absurd include Edward Albee, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, and Vaclav Havel.

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THEATRE OF THE OPPRESSED
Describes theatrical forms that the Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal first elaborated
in the 1970s, initially in Brazil and later in Europe. Boal was influenced by the work of the
educator and theorist Paulo Freire. Boal's techniques use theatre as means of promoting social
and political change in alignment originally with radical-left politics and later with centre-
left ideology. In the Theatre of the Oppressed, the audience becomes active, such that as
"spect-actors" they explore, show, analyse and transform the reality in which they are living.

Boal points out that when we are simply passive audience members, we transfer our desire to
take action onto the characters we identify with, and then find that desire satiated as the
conflict resolves itself on stage, in films or in the news. Catharsis substitutes for action.

Boal, following Brecht, calls this bourgeois theater, which functions to reproduce elite
visions of the world and pacify spectators. He says bourgeois theater is ―finished‖ theater; the
bourgeoisie already know what the world is like and so simply present it onstage.

In contrast to bourgeois theater, ―the people‖ do not yet know what their world will be like
Their ―authentic‖ theater is therefore unfinished, and can provide space to rehearse different
possible outcomes. As Boal says: ―One knows how these experiments will begin but not how
they will end, because the spectator is freed from his chains, finally acts, and becomes a
protagonist.

Theater of the Oppressed encompasses many forms, including the following:

Image theater invites spect-actors to form a tableau of frozen poses to capture a moment in
time dramatizing an oppressive situation.

Forum theater is a short play or scene that dramatizes a situation, with a terribly oppressive
ending that spect-actors cannot be satisfied with.

Legislative theater takes forum theater to the government and asks spect-actors to not only
attempt interventions on stage, but to write down the successful interventions into
suggestions for legislation and hand them in to the elected officials in the room.

Invisible theater is a play that masquerades as reality, performed in a public space.

Newspaper theater is a system of techniques devised to give the audience a way to transform
daily news articles or any non-dramatic pieces to theatrical scene.

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BEAT GENERATION
A literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and
influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was
published and popularized throughout the 1950s. The central elements of Beat culture are the
rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American
and Eastern religions, the rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition,
experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.

Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack
Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.
Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to
liberalize publishing in the United States. The members of the Beat Generation developed a
reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous
creativity.

Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948 to characterize a perceived
underground, anti-conformist youth movement in New York.

The female contemporaries of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs were intimately involved in
the creation of Beat philosophy and literature, and yet remain markedly absent from the
mainstream interpretation of the most important aspects and figures of the movement.

Beat Generation women who have been published include Edie Parker; Joyce
Johnson; Carolyn Cassady; Hettie Jones; Joanne Kyger; Harriet Sohmers Zwerling; Diane
DiPrima; and Ruth Weiss.

In 1982, Allen Ginsberg published a summary of "the essential effects" of the Beat
Generation:
 Spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation," i.e., gay liberation, somewhat
catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism.
 Liberation of the world from censorship.
 Demystification and/or decriminalization of cannabis and other drugs.
 The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art form, as evidenced
by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and other popular musicians influenced in the
later fifties and sixties by Beat generation poets' and writers' works.
 The spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized early by Gary
Snyder and Michael McClure, the notion of a "Fresh Planet."
 Opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in writings
of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac.
 Attention to what Kerouac called (after Spengler) a "second religiousness" developing
within an advanced civilization.
 Return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy vs. state regimentation.
 Respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in
his slogan from On the Road: "The Earth is an Indian thing."

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CONFESSIONAL POETRY
An autobiographical mode of verse that reveals the poet's personal problems with unusual
frankness.

In 1959 M. L. Rosenthal first used the term "confessional" in a review of Robert Lowell's Life
Studies entitled "Poetry as Confession".

The term is usually applied to certain poets of the United States from the late 1950s to the late
1960s, notably Robert Lowell, whose Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964)
deal with his divorce and mental breakdowns. Lowell's candour had been encouraged in part
by that of the gay poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl (1956) and by the intensely personal poetry of
Theodore Roethke.

Other important examples of confessional poetry are Anne Sexton's To Bedlam and Part Way
Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962), including poems on abortion and life in mental
hospitals; John Berryman's Dream Songs (1964) on alcoholism and insanity; Sylvia Plath's
poems on suicide in Ariel (1965); and W. D. Snodgrass's Heart's Needle (1969) on his
divorce.

The term is sometimes used more loosely to refer to any personal or autobiographical poetry,
but its distinctive sense depends on the candid examination of what were at the time of
writing virtually unmentionable kinds of private distress. The genuine strengths of
confessional poets, combined with the pity evoked by their high suicide rate (Berryman,
Sexton, and Plath all killed themselves), encouraged in the reading public a romantic
confusion between poetic excellence and inner torment.

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THE MOVEMENT
A term coined in 1954 by J. D. Scott, literary editor of The Spectator, to describe a group of
writers including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, John
Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn and Robert Conquest. The Movement was essentially
English in character as poets from other parts of the United Kingdom were not involved.

The Movement poets were considered anti-romantic, but Larkin and Hughes featured
romantic elements. To these poets, good poetry meant simple, sensuous content and
traditional, conventional and dignified form.

The Movement sparked the divisions among different types of British poetry. Their poems
were nostalgic for the earlier Britain and filled with pastoral images of the decaying way of
life as Britain moved farther from the rural and more towards the urban.

The Movement produced two anthologies, Poets of the 1950s (1955) (editor D. J. Enright,
published in Japan) and New Lines (1956). Poets in the original New Lines anthology in 1956
included Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, Thom Gunn, John
Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain.

In 1963, a sequel to the original New Lines anthology, titled New Lines 2, was published. It
included many of the authors from the original anthology, as well as younger English poets
like Thomas Blackburn, Edwin Brock, Hilary Corke, John Fuller, Ted Hughes, Edward
Lucie-Smith, Anthony Thwaite and Hugo Williams.

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