Literary terms, age and movements notes

Stream of consciousness is a narrative method that tries to put on the page the mixed flow of a mind: sense-impressions, memories, half-thoughts, not a tidy report. Abrams traces the phrase to the psychologist William James, then treats the literary use as a way of showing that inner weather without the old narrator who explains everything. Baldick adds that the sentence may skip, jump, or drop ordinary grammar because thought itself skips. It is not “any first-person story.” A diary that dates and orders events (the opposite contract to this method) is still a report. Stream of consciousness is the report loosened until it feels like thinking.

This paper does not set Joyce’s Ulysses or Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, the glossary’s stock novels of the method. Do not invent them in an answer. The honest cousins on the list are the minds that drift. Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” lets drowsiness, the pane of ice, the ladder “toward heaven,” and the woodchuck’s sleep run together: harvest becomes a falling inward, not a farm-account. Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” pours childhood, apple boughs, and Time in one green-gold rush; the grammar sings more than it files. Mansfield’s “A Cup of Tea” is a modernist short story: we sit inside Rosemary Fell’s noticing (the antique shop, the poor girl, the little box) without a Victorian moralist telling us what to think. That is free indirect access to a mind, a neighbour of the stream, not a twenty-page unpunctuated monologue.

Keep three things apart. Interior monologue is one technique inside the method: a character’s words as if overheard. Soliloquy (the earlier papers’ stage term) is a speech on a stage; Shaw’s Higgins talks to Eliza, not in Joyce’s flow. Stream of consciousness is the whole inner weather, often in prose. If a question says “illustrate from the paper,” name Frost’s drowsy harvest, Thomas’s time-rush, or Mansfield’s inner noticing, and say they are cousins, not textbook Joyce. Golding can cut into Simon’s head; the novel as a whole is not a stream-of-consciousness novel. It has chapters, hunts, and a plot you can tell in order.

A dystopia is a bad place imagined as a whole society: the opposite of utopia (Thomas More’s “good place / no place”). Abrams: a community that looks planned or “advanced” and is in fact nightmarish — unfreedom, fear, a lie called order. Baldick stresses the warning: the fiction shows where a present cruelty might go if it won. It is a mode of world-building, not a synonym for “sad story.” A lyric of one death is not a dystopia. A village tale of one postmaster is not a dystopia.

The set illustration is William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), the novel named in the syllabus. Schoolboys crash on an island with no grown law. The conch, the fire, the shelters are a first attempt at a good place. Hunt, the painted face, the pig’s head, Simon’s death, Piggy’s death, and the burning island are the bad place they make. Golding’s last look is not a future police-state like the glossary’s stock Orwell; it is a social dystopia of the human pack. The naval officer who rescues them is still a man from a world at war. The island is a laboratory: take away adult custom, and the “beast” is us. That is why Unit 1 lists dystopia beside a mid-century novel, not beside O. Henry’s sickroom or Mansfield’s drawing-room.

Exam traps. Schumacher’s “Technology with a Human Face” criticises giant, inhuman machines; it is an essay of scale, not a dystopian fiction. Shaw’s Pygmalion laughs at class and phonetics; Eliza is not a citizen of a nightmarish state. Frost’s woods are tempting, not a regime. If you cannot name a society that has gone wrong as a system, you have written “horror” or “tragedy of manners,” not dystopia. Start with Golding: island, rules, hunt, the darkness of man’s heart.

An allusion is a brief, indirect pointer to a person, story, place, or other text that the writer expects the reader to recognise. Abrams: it is not a full retelling and not a footnote. The extra meaning arrives if you already know the source. Baldick: a tacit reference. If the poem stops to explain the whole myth, it has become exposition, not allusion.

On this paper the title of Shaw’s Pygmalion is the classroom case. Ovid’s sculptor loves a statue that comes alive; Higgins “makes” Eliza’s speech and then cannot treat her as a person he has finished. The play alludes to the myth without staging Olympus. Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter” alludes to Helen and to a famous beauty whose mind became an angry wind — the poem expects you to hear Troy and Maud Gonne without a biography lecture. Owen’s “Strange Meeting” alludes to an epic descent underground: a dull tunnel, encumbered sleepers, a dead enemy who speaks. You need not write Dante’s whole Inferno; you need the underworld as the shape of the meeting. Golding’s title Lord of the Flies translates Beelzebub: the pig’s head on a stick is a biblical-devotional allusion inside a boys’ adventure. Auden’s elegy alludes to Yeats the public man and to “Mad Ireland.” Frost’s woods can brush a fairy-tale forest without naming a tale.

Keep allusion apart from symbolism and from quotation. A quotation lifts words and often marks them. An allusion glances. A symbol is an object in the story that keeps meaning (the conch, the last ivy leaf). Shaw’s title is allusion; Eliza’s flower-shop future is plot. In an answer, name the source in a few words and the job it does now. Do not retell Ovid, the Gospels, or Yeats’s life as if they were extra set books.

Symbolism as a literary term (the heading is under terms, not under movements) is the use of a person, object, or action that means itself and also something further. Abrams: a symbol is concrete; the extra meaning is not a secret code you can swap for one word and throw the object away. A metaphor says A is B once. A symbol stays in the story and keeps radiating. Do not confuse this exam word with the French Symbolist school of Mallarmé as a set movement: that school is not on the official movements list. If a question says “symbolism,” give the figure, then an object from this paper.

Golding’s island is a map of symbols you can name in an eight-mark answer: the conch (assembly and a fragile order), the fire (rescue and, later, destruction), Piggy’s glasses (sight, science, the power to light fire), the painted face (the hunt unbinding shame), the pig’s head (the “lord” of the flies — evil spoken as a thing). O. Henry’s “The Last Leaf” hangs hope on one ivy leaf outside Johnsy’s window; the twist is that the last leaf is also Behrman’s painted masterpiece — a symbol that was labour and love, not weather. Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” makes the woods lovely, dark and deep: rest, temptation, even death-sleep, held against “promises” and “miles to go.” Dylan Thomas’s green and gold, and Time holding the child “green and dying,” turn colour into a symbol of youth already mortal. Yeats asks for “custom” and “ceremony” as the horn and the laurel: social form as a living tree, not a dead rule.

Rule: quote the object, say what it is on the literal level, then the further meaning it earns by repetition or place in the plot. The poor girl in Mansfield is a person first; the enamel box Rosemary wants is a thing of appetite — you may call it a symbol of possession only if you show Rosemary using people as she uses objects. Gandhi’s swaraj in Unit 5 is a political concept, not a lyric symbol. Allusion points out to another text; symbolism points through an object still on the page.

Modernism names the literary weather of the early twentieth century, especially about 1910–1930, with roots in the 1890s and a long afterlife through the Second World War. Albert’s history and Levenson’s companion agree on the shock: Victorian confidence in progress, empire, and a reliable narrator cracks. War, city, machine, and psychology (the same inner weather Unit 1 called stream of consciousness) make old forms feel dishonest. Abrams: a break with inherited realisms; experiment in voice, time, myth, and the fragment. It is not “anything written after 1900.” O. Henry’s 1907 twist-story is early-century magazine fiction, not a modernist experiment. Tagore’s “The Postmaster” (1891) is earlier still; it sits on this paper under Voices from India, not as a modernist manifesto.

On this paper the modernist climate is the lyrics and the short story of the war and the years just after. Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter” (1919) is late Yeats: a private ceremony against a public storm, not a Victorian hymn of progress. Owen’s “Strange Meeting” is the Great War’s underworld — pity distilled, the enemy as friend — the disillusion Albert places at the centre of the war poets. Mansfield’s “A Cup of Tea” (1922) is the modernist short story of class and appetite in a tight scene. Frost’s two lyrics are modern American speech: apple-picking and snowy woods in a plain voice that still holds symbol. Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912–13) is the Edwardian play of ideas (the outcome the syllabus names): language as class-weapon. It shares the century’s social nerve; it is not high modernist fragment-poetry. Auden’s 1939 elegy for Yeats already looks back on a modernist master from the “nightmare of the dark” of Europe.

Three tests for an answer. Does the work distrust easy story and easy comfort? Does it make form do new work (symbol, broken time, a hard lyric line)? Does it belong to the war, the city, or the cracked public faith of those decades? If you are with Golding (1954) you have crossed into a later, mid-century fable. If you are with Zadie Smith you are in the twenty-first century. Hold Modernism on Yeats, Owen, Mansfield, Frost, and the Shaw of ideas; name Auden as the next generation remembering Yeats.

Post Modernism (the syllabus spelling; Abrams and Baldick usually write postmodernism) names the literary and cultural weather after the high modernist decades, gathering force from the 1960s. Abrams: a mixed, often playful or sceptical art that no longer trusts one “grand” story of progress, nation, or the artist as priest. Pastiche, collage, the blurring of high and low, metafiction that knows it is made — these are the glossary marks. It is not a rude word for “after modernism, therefore worse,” and it is not a date-stamp you can put on every page written after 1945. Golding’s 1954 fable is mid-century moral experiment, closer to a dark parable than to postmodern play.

This paper does not set a textbook postmodern novel. Teach the term from Abrams so a two-mark definition is ready; illustrate with caution. Zadie Smith’s “Joy” (collected in Feel Free, 2018 — the edition the syllabus names) is a twenty-first-century essay that moves between a night of dancing, a child, and the difference between pleasure and joy. The voice mixes registers; it does not build a Victorian moral sermon. That mix is a late, essayistic cousin of postmodern freedom, not a proof that Smith wrote a postmodern novel. Edwin Thumboo’s “Words” treats language as something inherited, used, and argued over after empire — a self-conscious attention to words as words. Shaw already showed language as costume; Thumboo shows language as history. Do not dump Pygmalion into postmodernism because it is witty.

Contrast in one sentence: Modernism still often wants a new myth or a hard form to hold the fragments (Yeats’s ceremony, Owen’s pity, Golding’s fable). Postmodernism doubts that any one form can be the cathedral. On this paper you define the second climate from the glossary, then say the set page is thin for it: Smith’s essay and Thumboo’s language-poem are the honest glances, not a second Golding.

Magic Realism (also magical realism in Baldick) is a mode in which marvels happen inside an otherwise realist world and are told as ordinary. Abrams: ghosts, miracles, metamorphoses sit beside kitchens and politics without a sci-fi explanation and without a special contract of disbelief. The extraordinary is the neighbourhood’s weather. The name travels from visual art (Franz Roh) into Latin American fiction (Alejo Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso; later García Márquez as the glossary’s stock novel). It is a movement-heading on this paper, not a synonym for “any strange event.”

No set text here is a textbook magic-realist novel. O. Henry’s “The Last Leaf” looks, for a page, as if a leaf had refused winter; then the story explains the marvel as Behrman’s painting and his death from the cold. Explanation kills magic realism. Golding’s “beast” is fear and a dead parachutist, then a pig’s head talking in Simon’s faint: vision and psychology, not a village that treats a flying carpet as a bus. Tagore’s Ratan and the postmaster live in a realist Bengal village. Do not force the term onto a twist ending or a fever-dream.

Write the heading as: realist ground + the marvelous narrated as fact + no lab footnote. Keep it in the glossary for two- and eight-mark definitions. If a question demands an illustration from the paper, say the list does not set one, then contrast Last Leaf’s explained trick and Golding’s psychological beast so the examiner sees you know what the word would have required.

Existentialism is a philosophical and literary climate, strongest in mid-twentieth-century Europe, for which existence comes before any given “essence”: a human being is what he or she chooses, in a world that does not hand down a ready meaning. Abrams names Kierkegaard as a nineteenth-century root and Sartre and Camus as the public French faces after 1945. Anxiety, freedom, bad faith, the absurd, responsibility — the glossary cluster. The syllabus course-objectives already list existentialism beside war, alienation, and the human condition. It is a movement of thought that literature can stage; it is not a rhyme-scheme.

Golding’s island is the set place where the word earns its keep. The boys are thrown there (existence first). The conch is a chosen rule, not a law of nature. When the rule fails, Jack’s hunt is another choice. Simon’s knowledge — that the beast is them — is an existential recognition without Sartre’s vocabulary. The officer at the end does not cancel the choice; he only returns the boys to a larger war. Owen’s dead enemy (“I am the enemy you killed, my friend”) strips war of official meaning: pity is what is left when the big words fail. Frost’s speaker in the snowy woods stands before a choice: the lovely dark, or promises and miles. That lyric is still a picture of freedom against rest, not a French tract. Auden, in the Yeats elegy, will not let poetry pretend to run history — “poetry makes nothing happen” — and still commands the poet to “teach the free man how to praise” in Europe’s dark. Freedom with no alibi is the existential note.

Gandhi’s swaraj is ethical-political self-rule, not Sartre. Mansfield’s Rosemary is vain, not a textbook existential heroine. Shaw’s Eliza chooses speech and a living; the play is social comedy of ideas. If the question is existentialism, start with choice without a given script, then Golding, then, if needed, Owen’s stripped war and Frost’s speaker at the edge of the snowy woods.

Surrealism is the 1920s movement, named in André Breton’s manifesto (1924), that tried to let dream, chance, and the unconscious write over daylight reason. Abrams: a successor to Dada; images collide; Freud’s inner life is treated as a source, not a case-history. Automatic writing, surprising juxtaposition, the marvelous without a realist alibi — Baldick’s marks. It began in French poetry and painting (Breton, Éluard; in paint, Dalí, Magritte as the popular names). It is not a loose word for “weird.” Owen’s tunnel is strange; that does not make Owen a surrealist of the Paris group.

No manifesto-surrealist poem is set. The honest cousins are dream-logic inside another job. Owen’s “Strange Meeting” unfolds as if after death: a dull tunnel, sleepers, an enemy who is also a friend. The war poem uses underworld vision to say pity; it is not Breton’s game of chance. Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” lets time, farm, and colour run in a dream-syntax of childhood — associative, lush — while still remaining an elegy for youth, not a surrealist tract. Golding’s Simon before the pig’s head hears a voice; the scene is fever and symbol (Unit 1’s symbolism), closer to a moral vision than to automatic writing. Do not call Frost’s clear woods surreal: the diction is plain, the choice is waking.

Exam sentence: Surrealism = the 1920s program of dream and the unconscious as method. On this paper you define it from Abrams, then, if asked to glance at a set page, name Owen’s underworld meeting and Thomas’s dream-time as cousins that still serve war-pity and childhood-elegy. They are not membership cards of Breton’s group.

The Harlem Renaissance is the flowering of African American arts in and around Harlem, New York, mainly in the 1920s and into the 1930s. Albert’s century-map and the Norton twentieth-century volume treat it as a named movement, not a nickname for “any Black writing.” The Great Migration had brought Southern Black workers north; Harlem became a city within the city. Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro (1925) is the critical landmark. Jazz, the blues, the magazine, the stage, and a new public pride in Black history and everyday speech are the climate. Stock names in the glossaries (Langston Hughes and others) are not prescribed on this paper. Do not pretend they are.

Why is the heading here if no Harlem text is set? Because the course-objectives ask you to identify Modernism, postmodernism, and the Harlem Renaissance as key movements, and to hear a diverse range of voices. Harlem is modernism’s American Black city-voice: parallel to, not a copy of, Yeats’s Ireland or Owen’s trench. It answers racist caricature with lyric, novel, and essay. It is not the same map as Unit 5’s India (Gandhi, Bharati, Tagore), not Thumboo’s Singapore English, not Zadie Smith’s later Black British essay. Smith writes a century after Locke; “Joy” is not a Harlem nightclub piece. Thumboo’s “Words” is postcolonial language, not the New Negro.

Two-mark answer: 1920s Harlem; African American arts; New Negro; jazz and lyric pride. Eight-mark answer: add the Migration, Locke 1925, the difference from European high modernism (a renaissance of a people, not only a break of form), and the warning that this paper’s diverse voices are a different list. Do not call Golding Harlem. Do not call Shaw Harlem. Keep the movement in America, in those decades, in that neighbourhood of the mind.

Post Colonialism (the syllabus spacing; Abrams and Baldick usually write postcolonial) names both the historical condition after empire and the later critical school that reads literature for colony, race, language, and the “writing back” of the formerly colonised. The companions take 1947 and the wider mid-century independences as political landmarks; later theory titles come after that. On this paper the heading must cover early anti-colonial writing as well as the later school. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj is 1909: not “after” the Raj, but already against a civilisation he calls a disease. Do not wait for later theory books to let Gandhi into the answer.

Unit 5 is the set Indian map. Chapter 4, “What is Swaraj,” asks what home rule is for: not the English machine with brown clerks, but self-rule of the self and of a different civilisation. Subramania Bharati’s “Phoenix,” “Freedom,” and “Ode to Freedom” (Prema Nandakumar’s Sahitya Akademi text named in the syllabus) are nationalist lyrics of dying and resurgent Bharat. Tagore’s “The Postmaster” (Radice’s Penguin, the named translation) is a village under a colonial office: the postmaster is posted, bored, leaves; Ratan remains. That is not a manifesto; it is the human cost of an outpost. Unit 2 adds Edwin Thumboo’s “Words”: Singapore, English as a language one must use, question, and own after empire. Zadie Smith is a later Black British voice in Britain; “Joy” is not a swaraj tract, but the paper’s range of voices includes her. Shaw’s Pygmalion is about class-speech inside England; that is not the colony. Do not call Eliza postcolonial because she is taught to talk.

Three tests. Is empire, its language, or its civilisational claim on the page? Is there a counter-claim for a people, a village, or a tongue? Are you still inside this paper’s names? Gandhi, Bharati, Tagore, Thumboo carry the heading. Golding’s island is a dystopia of English schoolboys, not a colony’s reply. Yeats’s Ireland is a nation-question inside European modernism; you may mention it as a cousin of nationalist lyric, not as Unit 5.

The paper’s title is 20th Century Literature; the official movements still include a 1891 Tagore story, a 1909 Gandhi chapter, a 1954 Golding novel, and a 2018 Smith essay. Dates are not a cage. They stop you putting Harlem on the island, magic realism on Behrman’s painted leaf, or postmodernism on Pygmalion. Stream of consciousness, dystopia, allusion and symbolism are tools that can sit inside more than one climate: Golding is dystopia plus symbol plus an existential test; Auden alludes to Yeats inside a late-modernist elegy. Unit 2 will walk the poems. Here you only need the names, the tests, and which set text may carry which word.