Definitions Flashcards

Question

comedy of manners

Answer 1

“The Restoration form [of the comedy of manners] deals with the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a sophisticated upper-class society, and relies for comic effect in large part on the wit and sparkle of the dialogue – often in the form of repartee – a witty conversational give-and-take which constitutes a kind of verbal fencing match –and, to a lesser degree, on the violations of social conventions and decorum by would-be wits, jealous husbands, conniving rivals, and foppish dandies.”

Answer 2

mid 18th century

Answer 3

wealth through trade; growing importance of middle classes beginning of the industrial revolution

Answer 4

coffee house and Kit Kat club

Answer 5

“the literary principle according to which the writing and criticism of poetry and drama were to be guided by rules and precedents derived from the best ancient Greek and Roman authors. […] Accordingly, the approved genres of classical literature - epic, tragedy, comedy, elegy, oder, epistle, eclogue, epigram, fable and satire - were adopted as the favoured forms in this period.”

Answer 6

heroic couplet poetic diction

Answer 7

“Satire can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire ‘derides’; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work itself."

Answer 8

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957) realist novel “circumstantial realism”

Answer 9

moral philosophy: human beings are innately benevolent, have sympathy toward others intense responsiveness to beauty and the sublime

Answer 10

* opera: Handel, Italian opera, e.g. Xerxes (1738) * John Gay, “The Beggar’s Opera” (1728) * word theatre: famous actors like David Garrick and Sarah Siddons

Answer 11

* American Revolution (1776), French Revolution (1789) * Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791/2) * William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1783) * Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

Answer 12

“From first to last, slavery was a system characterized by brutality. Moreover, it was a system that had far-reaching ramifications for three continents […] for Africa, for which massive loss of population, with attendant violence and upheaval, caused incalculable and long-term damage. […] it was a major ingredient in the transformation of the West. Slavery was the means by which the West emerged to a position of unrivalled economic and political dominance.”

Answer 13

landscape garden Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown

Answer 14

“a quality of awesome grandeur in art and nature, which some 18th-century writers distinguished from the merely beautiful.”

Answer 15

“Frightening or horrifying stories of various kinds have been told in all ages, but the literary tradition confusingly designated as ‘Gothic’ is a distinct modern development in which the characteristic theme is the stranglehold of the past upon the present, or the encroachment of the ‘dark’ ages of oppression upon the ‘enlightened’ modern era. In Gothic romances and tales this theme is embodied typically in enclosed and haunted settings such as castles, crypts, convents, or gloomy mansions, in images of ruin or decay, and in episodes of imprisonment, cruelty, and persecution.”

Definitions Flashcards

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