Context for A2 English - Love Through the Ages

Years: 1000s - 1400s

Types of love:

• Courtly love: emphasis on nobility and chivarly
• Religious love: emphasis on God and religion

Types of Literature:

• Unstructured miracle plays: see and hear the literature
• Moral tales: Church wanted to instruct people in what is right and wrong

Audience:

• Illiterate masses: literature had to be simple and entertaining

Years: 1485 - 1660

Elizabethan: reign of Elizabeth I, 1586 - 1603

Jacobean: reign of James I, 1603 - 1625

Types of love:

• Courtly love
• Timeless love
• Sexual love

Types of literature:

• Metaphysical: emphasis on life as a metaphor
• Shakespeare!

Audience:

• tension between upper-class and commoners, commoners were allowed in some theatres (such as the one-penny audiences at the globe)

Years: 1660 - 1798 

The reign of Charles II after his restoration to the throne in 1630

Types of love:

• Crude sexual love (e.g. John Wilmot)
• Unrequited love
• Eternal love
• Love is a contract

Types of literature: 

• Introduction of prose (e.g. Moll Flanders and Daniel Defoe)
• Satire
• Poetry 

Audience:

• Wanted excitement 

Years: 1798 - 1832

Types of love:

• Idealistic love: women wanted perfection in a man
• Perfection in love

Types of literature:

• Lyrical ballads
• Long prose, women starting to become writers 
• Introduction of gothic aspects to literature

Audience:

• Becoming literate, able to read

1837 - 1901

Years of Queen Victoria's reign

Types of love:

• Reductive love: the thought of speaking about sex was repressed, and women were not allowed to speak out (e.g. the Bronte sisters publishing under unisex names)
• Repressed love
• Love is a contract just for marriage and wealth

Types of literature: 

• Onset of industrialisation meant that novels became popular as they could be produced by the masses
• Bildungsroman: following a character from when they were young to older life (e.g. Pip in Great Expectations)
• Serialised novels (e.g. Thomas Hardy)

Audience:

• Literature began to reach the masses as the became more literate 
• Conflict between those in power and the poor

Dates: from 1900

Types of love: 

• Free love
• Crude love 
• Loss of love

Types of literature:

• War poetry: exposure to mass death and loss of faith 

Audience:

• Breakdown of social norms 
• Rejection of society
• Lonliness: reading poetry and novels common

Years: 1945 - present

Types of love:

• Free love
• Sexual love 

Types of literature:

• Free verse 
• No need to find answers: ambiguous endings to literature

Audience: 

• Introduction of drugs being widely used allowed for 'free love'
• Women became more independent: onset of feminism