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Humanities 420 - Intellectual Eras
Terminal Course Objective Eight (8):
Describe the characteristics of major literary movements and eras (e.g., neo-classicism, romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and post-modernism) and apply them to specific texts.
Terminal Course Objective Seven (7):
Analyze the relationship between the literature and critical thought of an era and contemporaneous movements in politics, economics, religion, and philosophy.
Literature is affected by the times in which it is created and written. The politics, economics, religious beliefs,
culture and values of a society are all reflected in its literary works. Below are listed some characteristics
of the major intellectual eras of Western culture, and how these characteristics affected the literature
of that era. I also include representative types of literature of the times, their characteristics, and
some representative works and authors of the time periods. Some of these periods overlap, as some represent
intellectual trends or literary characteristics within other historical time periods.
The following summaries are written by Charles Haddad and Karey Perkins.
All quotes used are from:
Harmon, William and C. Hugh Holman.
A Handbook to Literature.
8th ed.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, 1999.
Eras described:
Graeco-Roman Era: Classicism
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The Dark Ages, ( a.k.a.: Late Antiquity or Early Middle Ages)
The Dark Ages began with the fall of the Roman Empire in 410 A.D. Without the the order of Roman rule,
Europe collapsed into a disorder of warring fiefdoms. Life was short and very brutal, with few people living into their 40s.
Infectious disease killed most people. The Dark Ages was the time of the Black Plague, a bacterial infection carried by
rats, and excacerbated by poor hygienic conditions, that wiped out entire villages -- killing approximately two-thirds
of Western European population.
It was a time of no one force providing stabilty in Europe, except for the Roman Catholic Church.
Europe was considered one large church-state called "Christendom." It was divided into two ruling
powers, the King, who ruled the state and took care of temporal concerns of the people, and the Pope,
who ruled the church, which attended to the spiritual needs of the people. No other social unit
existed outside the church or state.
The concept of self, of people as individuals, existed only for a
handful people such as the King and the Pope. Most people saw themselves as little different from animals, as part of a
natural world that they couldn't control and that was all controlling of them. They were but cogs in the cosmic machine that
they didn't understand -- they trusted their "lord" (the local nobility or king) and Pope to tell them their
place and purpose in the world, and to tell them what to do.
Even most of nobility saw itself as just cogs in the agrarian machine that supported the local Baron or top lord.
There were lots of different kings, with Europe fragmented into thousands of small fiefdoms.
Most people either worked the land or worked as servants for the church or nobility. Few people worked for money;
they worked for a roof over their heads (often sleeping only on the floor of the castle) and food. When a village was
under attack, everyone in the village slept in the castle.
Literary output was minimal in Western culture at this time; art and culture were essentially non-existent.
Classical and ecclesiastical learning --
knowledge of any kind -- was preserved in isolated monastic communities, recorded by hand by the few who had the time
and ability to write. Beowulf was one of the few non-ecclesiastical literary works to emerge from this period.
A Danish folk legend passed down by oral tradition for centuries, Beowulf was committed to writing between 800-1000 A.D.
The Dark Ages extended approximately from the 5th century A.D. to 1000 A.D.
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The Middle Ages: Medieval Era
The Middle Ages opened with brutal warfare as a handful of Lords tried to gobble up weaker powers.
This marked the beginning of the rise of what we know today as France, England and Germany. Life was still brutal.
King and church remained all powerful, and often in competition with one another. The church tried to stamp out the last
vestiges of paganism. People were brutal tortured and killed by the church for sacrificing an animal to a pagan god. Still,
while most people believed in God, they also kept a strong faith in the natural world.
People believed that most illnesses were caused by evil spirits and could be cured by doing things such as
spitting three times on a toad.
Royalty began to challenge the power of the church, asserting it was closer to God than priests.
The struggle climaxed in the 1500's (during the Renaissance,see below) with Henry the VIII, who insisted
he could divorce and remarry as he choose -
even that violated church doctrine. And so he did - breaking off from the Catholic Church and
establishing the Church of England (the Anglican Church), with himself,
not the Pope as leader, from which vantage point he could divorce, remarry, behead, remarry, as many as
six wives...
Most people lived in small villages. Life was tied to the land, which was
owned by a Lord, or owned by the King who let the Lord live on it and manage it. There were a few great cities,
such as London, Paris, Venic and Milan. But life wasn't much better. People lived in dark, airless cottages.
They slept on straw mattress. Most had no more furniture than a table and a chair or two. People were named
after what they did, such as Peg Bonesetter, for someone who fixed broken limbs. There was no medicine.
Most ills were treated by draining people of blood with leaches. People believed that bad blood,
or an imbalance and bad and good blood, caused illness.
This was a time when western civilization lagged behind others in the world, such as Islam and the Chinese. Indeed,
Islam was considered the most advanced, both in terms of science and culturefore.
The concept of "courtly love" began in the Medieval era and continued into the Renaissance. Much literature recorded the
experience of the warrior-knight, in service to his king and country, in love with the unattainable lady of nobility, usually
married already. The knight worshipped his lady from afar, and his chaste, unrequited love kept him pure and strong for
feats of heroism in battle. Arthurian legend contains many characteristics of medieval times, including courtly love. Dante's
trilogy, the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradisio, are examples of this, in Dante's love for Beatrice.
The philosophical concept of the "Great Chain of Being" dominated Medieval and Renaissance thought.
God is at the top of the "Great Chain," followed by the angels and other spiritual beings, followed by man. Beneath man are
the animals, then plants, then inanimate objects. Heirarchy, and obedience to authority, especially the ultimate
authority of God (represented by the Pope and King) was important in social and spiritual order of this time, and
was reflected in literature.
The Middle Ages extended from approximately 1120 AD to 1300-1500 A.D.
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The Renaissance: A Rebirth
The Renaissance was a period of cultural and economic revival of the art and learning of the Classical era; some date this
period beginning around 1300's (in Italy) and as late as the 1500's (in England).
It marked, in Europe at least, the serious beginning of individual artistic expression and scientific exploration
in modern times.
The idea of the individual began to emerge apart from the one ruling social unit. Many different kinds of social organizations
developed at this time besides just the church-state, and people had greater autonomy and independence than they had experienced
in the last 1000 years. Organizations of legal representation and political assemblies, guilds and civic councils began during
this period.
Economically, the world no longer consisted of nobility and peasant-servants, but a middle class of merchants started to emerge in
the 1500's, marking the beginnngs of modern capitalism. This economic reform was fueled by the Protestant Reformation
due to its emphasis on hard work and frugality. (Those who work hard, benefit more, unlike the "caste system" of the
Middle Ages.)
People tried to explain the world in terms other than religion as classical scholarship was
rediscovered and humanism arose. The printing press enabled greater numbers of books, encouraged greater literacy, and
people could read the Bible (the most published book in the Western world at that time) for themselves in the "new" King
James version, and find out directly what "God said" rather than relying on the clergy and the authority of the church.
The Protestant Reformation, led by Martin Luther in Germany and John Calvin in England, is an example of the end of the all-supreme
power of the one Roman Catholic church. The Pope and the church no longer had final authority over one's soul, and
the threat of "excommunication" from the church for disobedience no longer meant social and spiritual ostracization for the
rest of one's earthly and heavenly years.
Europeans also set out to explore the world,
the way the Greeks and Phoenecians had done before them. Thus began the rise of the colonial empires that would dominate
world politics, beginning around the 1500s. This is also the time when the Europeans began to push back the Muslim world,
which dominated Europe militarily. The Ottomans, inheritors of Mohammad's mantle, were driven out of Eastern Europe.
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Neo-Classicism
TIME and CHARACTERISTICS: "The term for classicism ["Neo" = "new"] that dominated English literature in the Restoration Age and the 18th century. It draws its name from its finding of models in classical literatue and contemporary French neoclassical writings.
It was in part a reaction against the enthusiasm that had blazed in the Renaissance.
Against the Renaissance idea of limitless human potentiality (Renaissance) was opposed a view of humankind as
limited, dualistic, imperfect (neoclassicism); on the intensity of human responses (Renaissance)were imposed a reverence for order and delight in reason and rules (neoclassicism);
the burgeoning of imagination into new and strange worlds (Renaissance)was countered by a distrust of innovation and invention (neoclassicism);
on expanding individualism (Renaissance) was imposed a view that saw most people most significantly in their generic qualities (neoclassicism);
on the enthusiasm of mysticism (Renaissance) was imposed the restrained good sense of deism (neoclassicism).
"Artistic ideals prized order, concentration, utility, logic, restrained emotion, accuracy, correctness, good taste, and decorum.
A sense of symmetry, delight in design, and a view of art as centered in humanity, and the belief that literature should be judged according to its service to humanity
resulted in the seeking of proportion, unity, harmony, and grace in literary expressions aimed to
delight, instruct and correct human beings, primarily as social animals."
COMMON or PREDOMINANT LITERARY FORMS: The essay, letter, satire, parody. Conventional poetic diction and imagery; realism; imitation of classics; emphasis on form over obscurity and mystery; emphasis design over detail; on the play of the mind as opposed to feeling;
style was "polite, urbane, witty, intellectual art developed."
MAJOR FIGURES: Hulme, Eliot, Pound, Lewis, Babbitt, Van Doren, Sitwell, Kenner, Auden, Richard Wilbur, the New Critics.
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The Enlightenment/The Age of Reason: The Rise of Science
With the advent of the Renaissance, man's individuality and his ability to
REASON and understand his own conditions and that of the universe gained precedence over simple obedience to
the church-state.
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Romanticism
TIME and CHARACTERISTICS: "A movement of the 18th and 19th centuries that marked the reaction in literature, philosophy art, religion, and politics from the neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the preceding period.
Romanticism arose so gradually and exhibited so many phases that a satisfactory definition is not possible...
An interesting schematic explanation calls romanticism the predominance of imagination over reason and [over] formal rules (classicism) and over the sense of fact or the actual (realism),
a formula which recalls Hazlitt's statement (1816) that the classic beauty of a Greek temple resided chiefly in its actual form and its obvious connotations, whereas the
"romantic" beauty of a Gothic building or ruin arose from associated ideas that the imagination conjured up....
Among aspects of the
English romantic movement may be listed: sensibility; primitivism; love of nature; sympathetic interest in the past;
especially the medieval; mysticism; individualism; romantic criticism, and a reaction against whatever
characterized neoclassicism."
"The term designates a literary and philosophical theory that tends to see the individual at the center of all life, and it places the individual, therefore, at the center of art, making literature
valuable as an expression of unique feelings and particular attitudes and valuing its fidelity in portraying experiences,
however fragmentary and incomplete, more than it values adherence to completeness, unity or the demands of the genre...it
more often than not sees in nature a revelation of Truth, the "living garment of God," and a more suitable subject for art than those
aspects of the world sullied by artifice. Romanticism seeks to find the Absolute, the Ideal, by
transcending the actual, whereas Realism finds its values in the actual and naturalism in scientific laws that
undergird the actual."
LITERARY FORMS: "Typical literary forms include the lyric...Among the specific characteristics...are abandonment of the 'heroic couplet'
in favor of 'blank verse,' the 'sonnet,' the 'spenserian stanza,' and many experimental verse forms;
the dropping of conventional poetic diction in favor of fresher language and bolder figures; the
idealization of rural life; enthusiasm for the wild, irregular, or grotesque in nature and art;
unrestrained imagination; enthusiasm for the uncivilized or "natural"; interest in human rights; sympathy with animal life; sentimental melancholy;
emotional psychology in fiction..."
MAJOR FIGURES:
English: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Byron.
American: Emerson, Lowell, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson.
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Realism
"Realism is, in the broadest literary sense, fidelity to actuality in its representation;
a term loosely synonymous with verisimilitude; and in this sense has been a significant element in almost very school of writing.
To give it more precise definition, however, one may limit it to the movement in the nineteenth century that was centered in the novel and dominant in France, England, and America from roughly mid-century to the closing of the decade, when it was replaced by naturalism.
In this sense realism defines a literary movement and a particular range of subject matter.
Along one axis, realism opposes idealism; along another it opposes nominalism.
Confusingly the latter kind of realism, asserting that only ideas are "real," seems idealistic; whereas nominalism, asserting that ideas are only names, would seem to be what most people call realistic.
Generally, realists are believers in pragmatism, and the truth they seek to find and express is a relativistic or pluralistic truth,
associated with discernible consequences and verifiable by experience. Generally, too, realists are believers in
democracy, and the materials they elect to describe are the common, the average, the everyday. Furthermore, realism can be thought of as the ultimate of middle-class art, and it finds its subjects in bourgeois life and manners.
Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists plumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions,
realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action and the verifiable consequence."
LITERARY FORMS: Mimetic art (imitation of reality); concern for work's effect; avoidance of symmetry and plot (as life does); concern for ethics; focus on surface details and common actions; comic, satiric tone rather than somber;
high valuation of individual, characterization primary, exploration of "inner selves of characters onfronted with complex ethical choices": the psychological novel.
MAJOR FIGURES:
France: Balzac
England: George Eliot, but also, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Austin, Trollope, Thackeray and Dickens, H. G. Wells.
America: Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Sinclair Lewis, John O'Hara.
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Naturalism
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World Wars: Modernism
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Postmodernism
A brief definiton: Toward a Theological Understanding of Postmodernism
See also Postmodernism Portal at this site for more links.
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Post-postmodernism
(See also "Name Contest" at this site.)
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