outline_us_lit

GLOSSARYFaust: A literary character who sold his soul to thedevil in order to become all-knowing, or godlike; protagonistof plays by English Renaissance dramatistChristopher Marlowe (1564-1593) and GermanRomantic writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).Feminism: The view, articulated in the 19th century,that women are inherently equal to men anddeserve equal rights and opportunities. More recently,feminism is a social and political movement thattook hold in the United States in the late 1960s andsoon spread globally.Fugitives: Poets who collaborated in The Fugitive, amagazine published between 1922 and 1928 inNashville, Tennessee. The collaborators, includingsuch luminaries as John Crowe Ransom, RobertPenn Warren, and Allen Tate, rejected “northern”urban, commercial values, which they felt had takenover America, and called for a return to the land andto American traditions that could be found in theSouth.Genre: A category of literary forms (novel, lyricpoem, epic, for example).Global literature: Contemporary writing from themany cultures of the world. Selections include literatureascribed to various religious, ideological, andethnic groups within and across geographic boundaries.Hartford Wits: A conservative late 18th-century literarycircle centered at Yale College in Connecticut(also known as the Connecticut Wits).Hip-hop poetry: Poetry that is written on a page butperformed for an audience. Hip-hop poetry, with itsroots in African-American rhetorical tradition,stresses rhythm, improvisation, free association,rhymes, and the use of hybrid language.Hudibras: A mock-heroic satire by English writerSamuel Butler (1612-1680). Hudibras was imitatedby early American revolutionary-era satirists.Iambic: A metrical foot consisting of one short syllablefollowed by one long syllable, or of oneunstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.Image: Concrete representation of an object, orsomething seen.Imagists: A group of mainly American poets, includingEzra Pound and Amy Lowell, who used sharpvisual images and colloquial speech; active from1912 to 1914.Iowa Writers’ Workshop: A graduate program increative writing at the University of Iowa in whichtalented, generally young writers work on manuscriptsand exchange ideas about writing with eachother and with established poets and prose writers.Irony: A meaning, often contradictory, concealedbehind the apparent meaning of a word or phrase.Kafkaesque: Reminiscent of the style of Czech-bornnovelist and short story writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Kafka’s works portray the oppressiveness ofmodern life, and his characters frequently find themselvesin threatening situations for which there is noexplanation and from which there is no escape.Knickerbocker School: New York City-based writersof the early 1800s who imitated English andEuropean literary fashions.Language poetry: Poetry that stretches language toreveal its potential for ambiguity, fragmentation, andself-assertion within chaos. Language poets favoropen forms and multicultural texts; they appropriateimages from popular culture and the media, andrefashion them.158