Time and space practice questions.

Which set of concerns most characterises Romantic literature?

• Emotion, imagination, nature, and the individual
• Objective scientific detachment and social documentation
• Fragmentation and distrust of grand narratives
• Rigid neoclassical rules and reason above feeling

Answer: Emotion, imagination, nature, and the individual

Romanticism (late 18th to mid-19th century) exalted feeling, the imagination, nature, and individual experience, reacting against Enlightenment rationalism.

Literary Realism is chiefly concerned with:

• Supernatural, dreamlike and fantastical events beyond ordinary reality
• The truthful, detailed representation of ordinary life and society
• Idealised heroic myth
• Pure aesthetic form without content

Answer: The truthful, detailed representation of ordinary life and society

Realism aims to depict everyday people and social conditions plausibly and without idealisation; think Eliot, Balzac, and Tolstoy.

Modernist literature of the early 20th century is often marked by:

• Straightforward, strictly linear plots told throughout by wholly reliable, trustworthy narrators
• Strict adherence to neoclassical rules
• A focus on rural pastoral harmony
• Formal experimentation, fragmentation, interiority, and a break with tradition

Answer: Formal experimentation, fragmentation, interiority, and a break with tradition

Modernism responded to a fractured world with experimental form, stream of consciousness, allusion, and scepticism toward inherited conventions.

Common features of Gothic literature include:

• Cheerful, sunlit pastoral settings that end happily in comic marriages and celebration
• Gloomy, decaying settings, terror and the supernatural, and psychological dread
• Objective reportage of urban labour
• Minimalist plain style with no atmosphere

Answer: Gloomy, decaying settings, terror and the supernatural, and psychological dread

The Gothic favours haunted or ruined settings, the uncanny, and heightened emotion, exploring fear and the darker mind.

The Theatre of the Absurd typically dramatises:

• The triumph of reason and order
• A meaningless or irrational universe through illogical situations and broken communication
• Historically accurate court intrigue
• Idealised, sentimental romantic love that is neatly resolved by a conventional happy marriage ending

Answer: A meaningless or irrational universe through illogical situations and broken communication

Absurdist drama (Beckett, Ionesco) stages human existence as purposeless and communication as failing, often with circular, illogical action.

State the term for reading a text with attention to the assumptions and values of the era in which it was written.

• Reception theory
• Historicist reading
• Close reading
• Reader-response reading

Answer: Historicist reading

A historicist reading situates a work within the beliefs, ideologies and conditions of its own historical moment of production.