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10 Cards in this Set
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Absurdist Theatre (or Theatre of the Absurd)
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Dramatic works of the mid twentieth century -- by authors like Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet -- who seemed to express the idea of the absurdity and meaninglessness of the human situation. An important source of such ideas were the writings of the French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus ("The Myth of Sisyphus," 1942).
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Allegory
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A form of symbolism in which persons, objects, or actions are equated with meanings that are far removed from the entities which represent them. Thus, allegory represents one thing in the guise of another and generally involves an abstract idea which is personified or otherwise presented as a concrete image (example: a woman holding a torch is an allegory for the idea of "liberty").
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Antiquity
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The period of human history from around 3,000 B.C. to the fall of the Roman empire (around 476 A.D.). Followed by the Middle Ages.
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Bildungsroman
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A novel involving the moral, spiritual, intellectual, and/or emotional education of a young hero or heroine
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Black Comedy
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A literary genre involving the use of the morbid and the absurd for darkly comic purposes; the term refers as much to the tone of anger and bitterness as it does to the grotesque and morbid situations characteristic of the genre; also referred to as "tragic farce."
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Blank Verse
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Lines of unrhymed verse, usually iambic pentameter
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Bloomsbury Group
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Group of thinkers, artists, and writers, many of whom lived in the residential district of London known as Bloomsbury, near the British Museum; the group began meeting in 1907; became a powerful force in British literary and intellectual life in the 1920's and 1930's; inspired by the belief that "the pleasures of human intercourse [interaction] and the enjoyment of beautiful objects" are the result of social progress; members included Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, E. M. Forster, Duncan Grant, and David Garnett.
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Canto
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Each one of the sections or chapters in a poetic epic like Dante's Divine Comedy. The word "canto" literally means "song"
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Classicism
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Style, attitudes, and ideas in art and literature inspired by, and including, the culture of classical antiquity (ancient Greece and Rome). The values of classicism are harmony, proportion, clarity, elegance, simplicity, restraint, ideality and universality.
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Comedy
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A dramatic literary genre generally defined as the opposite of tragedy and characterized by the portrayal of amusing situations featuring ordinary people in ordinary situations. Comedy often begins with a sad or difficult situation but ends happily. Comedy has also been described as having a corrective or punitive character--often ridiculing or satirizing problematic human behavior. The endings of comedies frequently feature marriages or reunions of characters formerly separated by adverse circumstances.
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