Literary Schools & Clubs
Terms
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- Transendental Club
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An informal organization of leading transendentalists living in and around Boston. After their first meeting in 1836, they met occasionally in Ralph Waldo Emerson's home in Concord and elsewhere, calling themselves "The Symposium" and "The Hedge Club". Their chief interests were new developments in theology, philosophy, and literature. The movement was closely associated with the growth of the Unitarian spirit in New England.
leading members: Emerson, Convers Francis, Frederick Henry Hedge, Amos Bronson Alcott, Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry D. Thoreau, and William Ellery Channing
other transendentalists of the time: Carlyle, Coleridge, and Goethe. - Bluestockings
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A term applied to women of pronounced intellectual interests, especially a group of London women of the 1750's who held assemblies to which "literary and ingenius men" were invited. Activites were directed toward encouraging an interest in literature, recognizing literary genius, and removing the odium attached to earlier "learned ladies".
Elizabeth Montagn, Hannah More, Fanny Burney, and Hester Chapone
male "members": Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and David Garrick - Knickerbockers
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A group of New Yorkers writing during the first half of the 19th century (most popular during the first third of the century). They focased on: journalism, editorship, the frontier, poetry, novels, songs, and, in Byron's case, translation from the classics.
Washington Irving, James F. Cooper, William C. Bryant, Joseph R. Drake, Fitz-Greene Halleck, John H. Payne, and Samuel Woodworth
The name was made famous by Irving in "'Knickerbocker's' History of New York." - Muckrackers
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A group of American writers who between 1902 and 1911 worked to expose the dishonest methods and unscrupulous motives in big business and in city, state, and national government. The term comes fom a character in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" who is so busy racking up muck that he does not see a celestial crown over his head. The term was applied derogatorily to this group by Theodore Roosevelt. The more substantial work of these journalists, along with a spirit of reform in the atmosphere of their age, led to many practical movements in life, such as the Pure Food and Drug legislation of 1905.
Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, T.W. Lawson, Mark Sullivan, Samuel H. Adams, Winston Churchill, D.G. Phillips, Upton Sinclair (wrote "The Jungle")
magazines: The Arena, Everybody's, McClure's, The Independent, Collier's, Cosmopolitan - Bloomsbury Group
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Powerful in British literary and intellectual life in the 1920's and 1930's. Their philosopy was derived from G.E. Moore's "Principa Ethica", which asserts that "the pleasures of human intercoarse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects" are the rational ends of social progress.
unofficial leader: Virgina Woolf
members: John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, E.M. Forester, Duncan Grant, and David Garnett - School of Night
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A group of Elizabethan dramatists, poets, and scholars, with, perhaps, some of the nobility. They studied the natural sciences, philosophy, and religion, and were suspected of being atheists. Shakesphere seems to condemn them in the lines:
...Black is the badge of hell,/The hue of dungeons and the School of Night.
leader: Sir Walter Ralegh
members: Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, and Thomas Harriot
others: Arthur Acheson and Sir William Alexander - Beat Generation
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A group of American poets and novelists of the 1950's and 1960's in romantic rebellion against what they conceived of as the American culture. They expressed their revolt through literary works of loose structure and slang diction. To prevailing "establishment" values, they opposed and anti-intellectual freedom, often associated with religious ecstasy, visionary states, and the effect of drugs. The group's ideology included some measure of primitivism, orientalism, experimentation, and eccentricity, and reliance on inspiration from modern jazz (bebop especially) and such earlier visionaries as Blake adn Whitman. It was a loose group of poets.
leading members: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and novelists Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs - Lost Generation
- A group of American writers, born around 1900, who served in WWI and reacted against certain tendencies of older writers in the 1920's. They were very active in the publication of Little Magazines.
- Angry Young Men
- A group of British writers in the 1950's and 1960's who demonstrated a particular bitterness in their attacks on outmoded, bourgeois values. The phrase comes from the title of Leslie Paul's autobiography, "The Angry Young Man" (1951). The archetypal example of an Angry Young Man is the protagonist of John Osborne's play "Look Back in Anger" (1957). Other examples are Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim" (1954), John Braine's "Room at the Top" (1957), and Alan Sillitoe's "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" (1960). The protagonists of these plays and novels are examples of the antihero.
- Lake Poets
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Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey--three poets who at the beginning of the 19th century were living in the Lake District. The pejorative "lakers" is credited to the "Edinburgh Review", which for several years behaved contemptuously toward the poets.
They were romantic poets. Wordsworth and Coleridge worked together on a work called "Lyrical Ballads" (1798), which is said to have begun the Romantic Period in English literature. - Tribe of Ben
- A contemporary nickname for young poets and dramatists of the 17th century (under the reign of Charles I) who acknowledged the "rare Ben Jonson" as their master. Their chief was Robert Herrick, and the group included the Cavalier Lyricists and others of the younger Jacobean writers. Jonson influenced his followers in the direction of classical polish and symmetry, imitation of classical writers and types (as ode, epigram, satire), and classical ideas of criticism. The attitude represented a revolt from the Puritanism and Italian romanticism represented in Spenser. The poets strove to make lyric graceful and in general followed the creed: "Live merrily and write good verses." Also called "Sons of Ben".
- Agrarians
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Literally people living in an agricultural society (and supporting pastoral tradition). Usually refers to a group of Southern Americans in Nashville who published "The Fugitive" (1922-1925), "The American Review" (1933, 1937), and "The Southern Review" (1935-1942) (edited by Cleaneth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren). Championing an agrarian economy instead of industrial capitalism in the 1930's, they published "I'll Take My Stand" collectively. Most of them were associated with Vanderbilt University, and they were among the founders of New Criticism.
John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, and Merrill Moore - Saturday Club
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A club of literary and scientific people in and around Cambridge and Boston in the mid-19th century who came together chiefly for social intercourse and good conversation, at irregular intervals.
most famous members: Emerson, Longfellow, Agassiz, Prescott, Whittier, and Holmes
frequent visitors: Hawthorne, Motley, Sumner
writing: Holmes' tribute to the club in verse: "At the Saturday Club", and Dr. Emerson wrote the official history of the club - Hartford Wits
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A group of Connecticut writers, active around the period of the American Revolution. They were conservative in their models, following Addison and Pope, the two literary gods of their century. They were also known as the Connecticut Wits.
most prominent: Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight, and John Trumbull
best-known works: Trumbull's "M'Fingal", Dwight's "Conquest of Canaan" (an epic of 11 books mingling Christian and Revolutionary history), Barlow's "Columbiad" (planned as another American epic, a 10 book recitation of the coming glories of America as revealed to Columbus in prison.) - Cavalier Lyricists
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The followers of Charles I (1625-1649) were called Cavaliers, as opposed to the supporters of Parliament, who were called Roundheads. The Cavalier Lyricists were a group of the former who composed lighthearted poems. These were soldiers and courtiers first and authors of lyrics only incidentally.
Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, and Sir John Suckling. Robert Herrick, although he was a country parson and not a courtier, is often classified with these poets. - Brook Farm
- A Utopian experiment in communal living, sponsored by the Transendental Club of Boston. The farm, at West Roxbury, MA, was taken over in 1841 by a joint stock company headed by George Ripley. Teh scheme was supposed to give the residents opportunity for cultural pursuits and leisure at little cost...to support the residents who, in most of their time, were to be free to attend lectures, read, write, and converse. Hawthorne was there for a short time (see "The Blithedale Romance"). The experiment failed, and it was brought to an end in 1846.
- The Literary Club (or Doctor Johnson's Circle)
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A club formed in London in 1764 at the suggestion of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and with the cooperation of Samuel Johnson. Their meetings fostered free and spirited discussion of books and writers, classic and contemporay, with Johnson frequently dominating the conversation. The club was very influential. Althouth commonly thought of only in connection with late-18th century literature, the Club is still around, its later membership including 15 prime ministers and such authors as Scott, Macaulay, Hallam, and Tennyson.
leader: Samuel Johnson
charter members: Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith
members: Bishop Percy, David Garrick, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, and James Boswell - Kit-Kat Club
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A club believed to have existed in London between 1703 and 1733, founded by Whigs and dedicated in part to ensuring a Protestant succession to the throne. It met at the "Cat and Fiddle" pastry shop kept by Christopher Cat.
named after Christopher Cat
sometimes met in the home of publisher Jacob Tonson
painter: Godfrey Kneller
members: Addison, Steele, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Malborough - Lollards
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- Imagists
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