English 211 Final Exam Review: Genres and Issues

        First, you need to organize what you've read in rational, not haphazard categories to remember.  Then review the works in the anthology while thinking about what makes them similar to and different from each other.  Do you know of works that directly influenced the authors of later works?  Good--make a note of that and explain how, and why they had an influence.  You can break the syllabus into memorable pieces by considering works that cluster together according to their genre or the issues they raise.   I've filled in "Estates Satire" under "genres" to give you an example of what to do with these categories.  The desired result of this kind of creative organizational thinking is to create a "history of ideas" or "history of forms" view of the readings, and to link them to everything else you know.

Consider the Syllabus by Genres (type of work)

Epic-Eras & Examples: Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, Paradise Lost, "MacFlecknoe" (mock-epic!)

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature--

Lyric Elegy- Eras & Examples:

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature-

Verse, Dramatic, and Prose Satire-Eras & Examples:

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature--

Estates Satire-a subgenre of poetic satire--Eras & Examples:

Medieval, Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, "General Prologue" (continued in fragments of Jonsonian comedy of humors, essays on social themes, and verse satires) Dramatic and verse satires silently often follow the "types of occupations" format (see Swift's "A City Shower").

Characteristics: usually in verse, often four-stress couplets or alliterative 4-stress lines, in which type characters are described in a sequence of short passages, using satiric but truthful tone, with emphasis on clothing, social behavior and morals, common personality traits, and relationships (pro/con) with other types. (E.g., Knight, Squire, Miller, Franklin, Wife of Bath).

Connections to Later Literature-Utopia, Volpone and Way of the World, Rochester's and Swift's satires, Montague's "Ballade"

Fabliau-- Examples:

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature--

Romance-- Examples:

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature--

Epic Poem--Example: John Milton, Paradise Lost

Characteristics--blank verse, high style, invocations of the muse, extended similes, inverted syntax (object-verb-subject) and other unusually long sentence constructions, etc.

Connections to Later Literature--Blake (opposed Milton's definition of good and evil in "prophetic books"); Wordsworth (responded in The Prelude which starts with an echo of Book XII's last sentence), Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Ginsberg (the "long line" poets, epic voice and sentence constructions applied to American themes, elevating the powerless and challenging the mighty, etc.).

Autobiographical Narrative / Confession-Examples:

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature--

Morality Play-- Examples:

Characteristics--

Prose Fiction-Examples:

Characteristics--

Prose Philosophical Essay-Examples:

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature--

Tragic Drama-Examples:

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature--

History Play-Examples:

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature--

Sonnet and Lute Song-Examples:

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature--

Sonnet Sequence/Cycle-Examples: Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella; Edmund Spenser, Amoretti; Lady Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature--

Religious Lyric-Examples--

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature--

Travel Narrative-Examples:

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature--

Letter/Epistle-Examples:

Characteristics--

Connections to Later Literature--

Consider the Syllabus by Issues:

"What the hell are you?" (my namesake to the alien and the alien to my namesake in Predator): The Nature of Human Beings, Their Major Drives, Follies, Virtues, Vices, Reasoning and Emotions:

"Nature" vs. the Court, or "Nature" vs. Civilization, or Tradition vs. the "Modern" (including the fate of "pastoral" motifs and fashionable styles, AKA, "the mode"):

Courtship and Marriage:

Gender roles and crises:

The Social Order, Duties, Rights, Ranks, Disorders:

Literacy, public speech, and publication as emergent "technologies" of self expression and social contention:

Print publication vs. manuscript circulation / mass market reading audiences vs. coterie/court readership:

Authors' appeals to differing levels of audience-expertise (teaching them interpretation in the work):

Genre rules and genre bending:

Aesthetics and the Function of Literature in Society or the Human Spirit:

Poets as prophets, policemen, demons, saints:

Emergence of "English Culture," a Sense of England's Place in the World and England's Destiny:

Colonialism and Empire, effects on character, national image:

Borders and Centers, Legitimacy and Bastardy, Belongingness and Alienation

Heroism and the Nature of the Hero / Villainy and the Nature of Evil:

Villainy and the forms of "bad behavior," including conventional toleration of bad behavior ("rakes" and "belles"), the "servant problem," and foolish or destructive fads:

Violence and the body / identity and commodification (esp. re: slaves and wives and [other] victims of plots):

The Growth and Transformation of the Canon:

Challenges to the idea of "literature," literary quality, poetic authority: