GRE Lit Subject test

Veni, vidi, vici

"I came, I saw, I conquered"

cogito ergo sum

"I think, therefore I am"

Leda

"Leda and the Swan" Figure in Greek mythology who was raped by Zeus, who appeared to her in the form of a swan. Children: Clytemnestra, twins Castor and Pollux, Helen of Troy

Carpe diem

"Seize the day"

Honi soit qui mal y pense

"Shame on him who thinks this evil"

The Gothic Novel

1764-1860 Produced by the sensibility typified by gloomy, half-deserted castles and crumbling ancestral manors with an evil twin locked in the attic jabbering homicidally to himself Heroines: a penchant for fits of inopportune fainting Always a room one should never enter Noted Works: Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis's The Monk Gothic explique: the process of summing up and revealing the true causes of many seeming impossibilities at the works end; becomes important in the Detective Story

Villanelle

A 19-line form rhyming aba aba aba aba aba abaa. Its most noticeable characteristic is the repetition of the first and third lines throughout the poem. Ex. Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"

Sestina

A 39-line poem of six stanzas of six lines each and a final stanza (called an envoi) of three lines. Rhyme plays no part in the sestina. Instead, one of six words is used as the end word of each of the poem's lines according to a fixed pattern. Ex. Sestina of Tramp-Royal by Rudyard Kipling

Prometheus

A Titan who befriends and helps to civilize man (in some versions of the myth, he creates man from clay). One of the gifts Prometheus bestows upon mankind is fire.

Epic invocation

A call to divinity who will inspire and bless the verse

Charles Lamb

A celebrated London wit, and a friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge among others. Corresponded with Wordsworth and Coleridge. He wrote a noteable response to Wordsworth regarding Lyrical Ballads, which the poets had sent to Lamb to review. Lamb liked to make much of the contrast between his love of the pleasures of Urbanity and the Lake Poets' muddy boots and daffodils Pen name: Elia (Essays of Elia, Last Essays of Elia)

Hyperbole

A deliberate exaggeration

Doggerel

A derogatory term used to describe poorly written poetry of little or no literary value.

Post-Colonial Criticism

A field of study concerned with the critical analysis of the ideological impact of Western imperialism and its continuing influence (neocolonialism). 'Post-' does not signify that colonial relations have been overturned. The primary methodology is called colonial discourse analysis, which involves the deconstruction of the discourses in which colonial relations are constituted, exploring the representational strategies and subject positions of colonialism. Influenced by Foucault's focus on power, it is an anti-*Eurocentric investigation of the representation of race, ethnicity, and nationhood and the marginalization and othering of the colonized. Its exploration of the process of cultural hybridization reflects an anti-essentialist notion of identity.

Allegory

A figurative narrative or description, conveying a veiled moral meaning; an extended metaphor

Simile

A figure of speech (specifically a trope) in which one thing is explicitly compared with something else of a different kind using the words 'as' or 'like'

Metaphor

A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.

Skeltonics

A form of humorous poetry, using very short rhymed lines, a choppy, pronounced rhythm, and stomping end rhymes hammering away at the same sound for five or six or more lines. It is a suitable form only for comedy and satire. It was made popular by Renaissance poet John Skelton. The only real difference between a skeltonic and doggerel is the quality of the thought expressed.

Heroic Stanza

A four-line stanza, usually iambic pentameter, rhyming abab (don't confuse with the ballad stanza, which is usually, though not always, abcb)

The ptolemic model of the universe:

A geometric model in which the stars and other heavenly bodies are fixed upon nested spheres that rotate about the earth. It was believed that this motion produced a divine music. The Ptolemaic model was eventually supplanted by the heliocentric models of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo

Bildungsroman

A german term meaning "a novel of education." It typically follows a young person over a period of years, from naïveté and inexperience through the first struggles with the harsher realities and hypocrisies of the adult world.

Cavalier Poets

A group of English lyric poets of the Caroline period, and derived from the popular designation for supporters of King Charles in the Civil War. The principal figures in the group are Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, Robert Herrick, and Sir John Suckling. They are noted for their elegantly witty short lyric poems, usually love poems. They were influenced by Ben Jonson, and like him tended to avoid employing the sonnet form

Tercet

A group of three lines (paired together they form a sestet, which ends an Italian sonnet)

end-stopped line

A line in which the end of a line occurs at a natural pause and where the meaning of the line is in some sense complete.

Alexandrine

A line of iambic hexameter. The final line of a Spenserian Sonnet is an alexandrine.

Feminist Criticism

A modern tradition of literary commentary and polemic devoted to the defense of women's writing or of fictional female characters against the condescensions of a predominantly male literary establishment. Origins: Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938)), and Simone de Beauvoir (Le Deuxième Sexe/The Second Sex). Modern form: Mary Ellmann's Thinking About Women (1968), and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970)

Chimera

A mythical beast made of parts of a goat, lion, and serpent (or dragon). Ancient sources disagree as to what parts come from what animal. Chimerical: wildly fantastic, improbably

Spenserian Stanza

A nine-line stanza (the only major nine-line form). The first eight lines are iambic pentameter. The final line is an alexandrine. The stanza's rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc; Ex. Spenser's Faerie Queen

Picaresque

A novel, typically loosely constructed along an incident-to-incident basis, that follows the adventures of a more or less scurrilous rogue whose primary concerns are filling his belly and staying out of jail. (Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Defoe's Moll Flanders)

Synecdoche

A phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature of that object or person. Take the following lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Because the "pair of ragged claws" only references the claws, but is used to mean the whole animal, it is an example of synecdoche.

Formalist Criticism

A predominantly Russian school of the 1920s, which attempted to discern the underlying laws that shape a literary text, the objectivity discernible in features that make it, in fact, literature. Defamiliarization: Literature, the formalists found, employed devices of plot, story, and voice, that made language unfamiliar, and thus signaled to the reader that the writing was an aesthetic--literary--object

Zuegma

A pun where a verb is called upon for double duty

Allusion

A reference to someone or something, usually literary.

Homeric Epithet

A repeated descriptive phrase, as found in Homer's epics. Ex. "Rosy-fingered dawn"

Masculine Rhyme

A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable.

Epic Simile

A simile (comparison using like or as) that goes absolutely off the deep end, running on for several lines, and elaborating the comparison so thoroughly that the narrative flow is effectively halted and the reader or auditor is suspended in a realm of pure rhetoric.

Apostrophe

A speech addressed to someone not present or to an abstraction. "History! You will remember me..." is an example of an apostrophe. The innate grandiosity of apostrophe lends itself to parody.

Pathetic Fallacy

A term coined by John Ruskin. It refers to ascribing emotion and agency to inanimate objects, based on the feelings of the observer

Hudibrastic

A term derived from Samuel Butler's Hudibras. It refers specifically to the couplets of rhymed tetrameter lines (well, eight syllables long, anyway), which Butler employed in Hudibras, or more generally to an dilberate, humorous, ill-rhythmed, ill-rhymed couplers. Butler had a genius for "bad" poetry.

Metonymy

A term for a phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature of the person. The famous line "The pen is mightier that the sword," from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's play Richelieu, is an example of metonymy. The sentence is essentially saying that the written word is often more powerful and influential than acts of war and violence, but it uses the pen to represent the written word, and the sword to represent violent acts.

Synaesthesia

A term referring to phrases that suggest an interplay if the senses. "Hot pink" and "golden tones" are examples of synaesthesia.

Pastoral elegy

A type of poem that takes the form of an elegy (a lament for the dead) sung by a shepherd. In this conventionalized form, the shepherd who sings the elegy is a stand-in for the author, and the elegy is for another poet. Ex. Milton's Lycidas and Shelley's Adonais (a lament for John Keats).

Euphemism

A word derived from Lyly's Euphues (1580) to characterize writing that is self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech. Language characterized by an extreme and elaborate artifice in the construction of its lines--swelling, grandiose metaphors, rhetorical questions, a preponderance of mythological reference, and a general sense of a writer laying it on about as thick as he can manage. This was a popular and influential mode of speech and writing in the late sixteenth century.

Pastoral Literature

A work that deals with the lives of people, especially shepherds, in the country or in nature

Epithalamium

A work, especially a poem, written to celebrate a wedding.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

African American poet of the late 19th century Used idioms of black speech in his verse

Amiri Baraka

African American poet, playwright, novelist, and belles-lettrist Works: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (first collection of poetry), The Dutchman (play), Blues People (study of jazz in America)

Claude McKay

African-American radical famous for his poetry and ardent socialism

An Essay on Criticism

Alexander Pope While Pope includes certain guidelines for good poetry and good criticism, the essential quality of the good critic is moral conduct exemplified by teaching, which for Pope is also an act of friendship. The ideal critic is "Still pleas'd to teach, and yet not proud to know," and "Tho' Learn'd, well-bred; and tho' well-bred, sincere." Generously impartial, this critic "to a Friend his Faults can freely show, / And gladly praise the Merit of a Foe." For Pope, the model of virtuous teaching and conduct is friendship, and he prized above all else his friendships, including those with writers John Gay and Jonathan Swift as well as those with powerful statesmen

Dunciad

Alexander Pope Mock epic Heroic couplets A fantastical and withering satire in which Pope lambasts bad poets; chief subject is the poet Colley Cibber. Concerns the coronation ceremony of Bayes as the poet laureate of the Kingdom of Dulness, during which everyone in attendance falls asleep. Poem suggests that Dulness will ultimately prevail over all arts and sciences One target: the loss of our senses in the mindless indulgence of them Conclusion: Dulness yawns in mid-sentence—a yawn that spreads throughout the land, ending civilization.

"The Rape of the Lock"

Alexander Pope, published 1712 Mock epic Epic invocation, epic feast (dainty affair of coffee in little cups), epic battle (played out at a card table), interference of the gods (spirits of dead demi-mondes), epic simile It uses traditional epic devices (derived from classical sources such as Homer) for the ironic treatment of non-heroic material. Based on an actual occurrence in which a gentleman, Lord Petre, took a lock of hair from a gentlewoman, Arabella Fermor (called Belinda in the poem), of whom he was enamored. This minor transgression caused an uproar between the two families. By treating this subject in an epic manor, Pope ironically foregrounds the participant's own exaggerated concern Not mean-spirited, the subjects were honored NAMES: Belinda, Caryll

"Ulysses"

Alfred, Lord Tennyson Classical references Odysseus is hanging around Ithaca, very old and very bored. He gazes out over the water and contemplates sailing with his companions off "beyond the sunset" because "Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. / Death closes all; but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done, / Not unbecoming men that strove with gods."

Tom Stoppard

Almost impenetrable for their intellectual explorations of advanced physics, ancient poetry, and the nature of love.

William Carlos Williams

American Modernist Style: Spare but warm verse is associated with the imagist school of poetry, poems are characterized by easily accessible language and quotidian imagery Famous dictum: "no ideas but in things" Works: Paterson (book-length poem which concerns life in his hometown, Paterson, New Jersey, where he practiced medicine for the better part of his life)

Carson McCullers (1917-1967)

American Southern Gothic Writer Works: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (story of the chaos wrought on a woman's life when her dwarf cousin enters her world), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Compassionate treatment of individualism and its sensitive style Most of her works are set in Georgia

Sylvia Plath

American poet known for haunting, violent, bitter, and pitiless poems. Poems are often about her stormy relationship with her father Works: Ariel (poem collection), The Bell Jar (autobiography, recounting her nervous breakdown)

Sir Walter Raleigh

An adventurer, poet, and confidante to Queen Elizabeth

Epic of Gilgamesh

An ancient Assyrian work that is almost 1500 years older than the Iliad Concerns a questioning hero who must battle supernatural monsters

Symbolism

An artistic and poetic movement or style using symbolic images and indirect suggestion to express mystical ideas, emotions, and states of mind. It originated in late 19th century France and Belgium, with important figures including Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Redon.

Litotes

An understatement created through double negative (or, more precisely, negating the negative).

"To His Coy Mistress"

Andrew Marvell Exquisite verse "Who are you saving your virginity for, the grave?" This theme was popular among the cavalier poets "But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity"

New Historicism

Argues that the specifics of culture matter profoundly: The institutions (in the broadest sense, for example, language is an institution) of a given society produce discernible effects in the consciousness of a society's members, and therefore the products of consciousness, such as literature. The cultural-ideological layer is the proper object of analysis

Hamartia

Aristotle's term for what is popularly called "the tragic flaw." Hamartia differs from tragic flaw in that hamartia implies fate, whereas tragic flaw implies an inherent psychological flaw in the tragic character.

Ars longa, vita brevis

Art is long, life is short

Middle English

Began around 1350 Middle English revival of alliterative verse: Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

"To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare"

Ben Jonson Lots of references to other poets "He was not of an age, but for all time"

Volpone, or the Fox

Ben Jonson Setting: Venice Concerns the efforts of Volpone and his confederate Mosca to bilk everyone everyone who comes across thier path, in particular Volpone's heirs. Volpone and Mosca manage to outwit everyone but each other, which ultimately proves their downfall. Mosca tries to blackmail Volpone, who is too proud to be victimized and so reveals his and Mosca's scheming wats to the authorities, bringing ruin upon them both. The characters are named according to the personalities animals are given by folklore. Characters: Volpone (fox), Mosca (fly), Corvino (raven)

Horace Walpole

Castle of Otranto Fourth earl of Orford The first true gothic novel Many of the events the book describes (such as statues bleeding) or truly supernatural (in contrast to Radcliffe's events, which only appear supernatural) Other works: A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, Fugitive Pieces in Verse and Prose, Anecdotes of Painting in England, Historic Doubts on the Life, Reign of King Richard the Third, The Mysterious Mother.

Trojan War

Caused when Paris ran away with Menelaus's wife, Helen. Trojan Horse: built by greek craftsman Epeius; referred to in Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid In: The Iliad,

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens Semi-autobiographical Characters: Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Clara and Daniel and Ham Pegotty, Betsy Trotwood, Edward Murdstone, James Steerforth, Agnes Wickfield, Dora Spenlow

The Turn of the Screw

Henry James The story is told by an English Governess who attends a pair of young children at a country estate. The children, Miles and Flora, seem haunted by the ghosts of two former employees, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. A strong aura of sexual perversity and sexual hysteria pervades the story and its involvement with the children. It is never quite certain that the haunting is real, yet neither is it certain that the governess is crazy. Ambiguity, sexual anxiety

Moby Dick

Herman Melville Captain Ahab (a raging tragic fool in his quest for the whale) Ahab's monologues have a biblical, Shakespearean style Ishamael (narrator and sole survivor) Savage harpooners: Queequeg, Dashoo, Tashtego First mate: Starbuck

Reader Response Criticism

Insists that the reader's experience of a text is the literary event--literature is what happens inside a reader's head, not what occurs on the page. Literary works involve an implied or ideal reader. Some reader response criticism, in a literary-history mode, examines the aesthetic impact of a work, judging whether the work broke with the aesthetic horizon of expectations of its time

J.M. Synges

Irish playwright Works: The Playboy of the Western World (The plays themes and its morally unflattering portrayal of the Irish working class drew protest and angry criticism even as Synge's language was praised for its poetic richness) Abbey Theater Knew Yeats Style: spare, rhythmic, lyric prose; achieved effects of great power and resonance; both tragedies and comedies display the ironic wit and realism which many of his countrymen found offensive.

George Bernard Shaw

Irish playwright, critic, and propagandist Works: Mrs. Warren's Profession (prostitute), John Bull's Other Island, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma, Androcles and the Lion, and Pygmalion, Common Sense about the War (essay) Shaw invariably included a long elegant Preface with each of his plays, using them as vehicles for his diverse opinions, which were not always connected with the plays they prefaced

Biographia Literaria

Samuel Taylor Coleridge A work of philosophical autobiography and Romantic criticism. Part I is broadly autobiographical describing Coleridge's friendship with Southey and with the Wordsworths at Stowey, and going on to trace his struggle with the 'dynamic philosophy' of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling in Germany. The humorous narrative is gradually overwhelmed by Romantic metaphysics. Ch. XIII contains his famous distinction between Fancy and Imagination. Part II is almost entirely critical, attacking Wordsworth's preface to the Lyrical Ballads and then marvellously vindicating the poetry itself. Coleridge concentrates on the psychology of the creative process, and propounds new theories of the origins of poetic language, metre, and form, as the interpenetration of 'passion and will.' Other chapters discuss the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Daniel, G. Herbert, etc., as exemplary of true 'Imagination' and the 'language of real life'.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Published in Lyrical ballads The Mariner tells a man on the way to a wedding the story of how, by senselessly killing an albatross, he brought a world of bad luck down upon himself and his companions and must now, in penance, travel the world relating his tale. Vivid imagery

Theater of the Absurd

Sartre, Beckett, Jean Genet

Post-structuralism

Schools that both make use of structuralism and critique it. Refers to either the deconstructionist school of criticism or to those critics who, although not deconstructionists per se, have been markedly influenced by deconstructionist critic Jacques Derrida's critique of structuralist linguistics; Acceptance of multiple readings: words are signs that point toward meaning, but the meaning pointed to is always only found in more words, which in turn point to other words Keywords: mimesis, alterity, marginality, desire, lack

Rhyme Royal Stanza

Seven-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc; Ex. "They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek" by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Samuel Pepys

Seventeenth-century diarist. Easy style and frank portrayal of the private life of a London man during the restoration.

Metaphysical Poets

Seventeenth-century school led by John Donne and George Herbert

The Franklin (The Canterbury Tales)

The Franklin: A wealthy land owner The Franklin's tale: a romantic tale about a lover, Aurelius; a faithful wife, Dorigen; and Dorigen's husband, Arveragus

Sprung Rhyme

The rhythm created and used in the nineteenth century by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like Old English verse, sprung rhythm fits a varying number of unstressed syllables in a line--only the stresses count in scansion. The metrical principal of organizing lines based on the number of stressed syllables they contain; the unstressed syllables are not taken into account Google: a poetic meter approximating to speech, each foot having one stressed syllable followed by a varying number of unstressed ones.

In Memorium Stanza

The stanza composed of four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming ABBA; Ex. A stanza of Tennyson's "In Memorium A.H.H"

Ballad Stanza

The typical stanza of the folk ballad. The Length of the lines in a ballad stanza, just as in sprung rhythm poetry and Old English verse, is determined by the number of stressed syllables only. Rhyme scheme: ABCB; Ex. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge

Alliteration

The use of a repeated consonant or sound, usually at the beginning of a series of words.

Germanic customer of wergild

The value set in Anglo-Saxon and Germanic law upon human life in accordance with rank and paid as compensation to the kindred or lord of a slain person.

Terza Rima Stanza

This form consists of three-line stanzas with an interlocking rhyme scheme proceeding aba bcb cdc ded etc. Ex. Invented by Dante for his Divine Comedy

Sartor Resartus

Thomas Carlyle Philisophical work in the guise of fiction Title means "the tailor reclothed;" Bombast, self-satire, and German metaphysics do battle in the speculations of the imaginary Professor Teufelsdrockh Concerns the relationship between outward and inward essences, and it also relates personal growth (Teufelsdrockh is the author's proxy) Names/phrases: Professor Teufelsdrockh, Weissnichtwo (the professor's hometown), the Everlasting Yea, the Everlasting No, and the Wanderer (which refers to Teufelsdrockh)

"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

Thomas Gray Meditation on death and worldly fame, death without recognition or full expression of one's gifts Written in heroic stanzas "Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, / Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood" --often alluded to by other writers Famous epithet that closes the poem (probably for Richard West)

Cerberus

Three headed dog that guards the entrance to the underworld

Old English

Unique verse form: caesura, alliteration rather than rhyming Gave way to Middle English around 1350

Blank Verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter. Ex. Alfred Lord Tennyson's Ulysses

Free Verse

Unrhymed verse without strict meter. Ex. "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman

Old English Verse

Verse characterized by the internal alliteration of lines and a strong midline pause called a caesura. Ex. Beowulf Fell insto disuse by 1100

"Bob and wheel"

Verse form The "bob" is a single, very short line (one foot) and the "wheel" that follows is a short quatrain of trimeter lines rhyming ababa

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf Describes the Ramsey family's two separate visits to the lighthouse Stream of consciousness Concerned with the passage of time Three sections, the middle of which is an elliptical prose experiment meant to create a sense of the passage of time Novel is invested in epistemological questions, particularly temporality and each character's psychological experience of events Characters: The Ramseys, Lily Briscoe, Charles Tansley, Augustus Carmichael, Paul Rayley, Minta Doyle

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf Opening lines: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would by the flowers herself" Narrates the single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she readies her her home for a party. Forgoes the beginning-middle-end form and foregrounds the minor details of the lives of the characters Intimate stream of consciousness, interested in highlighting characters interiority Characters: Septimus Smith (a shell-shocked veteran whose story offers a partial parallel to Clarissa's), Richard Dalloway, Sally Seton, and Peter Walsh

Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman First editions (1855) contained 12 poems A total of nine editions were published, where Whitman added and revised poems Radically original and uniquely American celebration of self, spirit, and democracy Thoughts reflected were influenced by German metaphysical philosophers (Hegel), Hindu religions texts such as Upanishads, transcendental philosophy of Emerson

Humanism

When moral issues predominate, the critical type is best classified as humanism. Seeing art as having primarily a moral/educational function Matthew Arnold, Irving Babbit

Henrik Ibsen

Works: A Doll's House (Nora; concerns a woman who ultimately leaves her husband and children) Associated with the phrase "problem play" which refers to drama that centers around a social problem

Lorraine Hansberry

Works: A Raisin in the Sun Dramatist

Mary Wollstonecraft

Works: A Vindication of the Rights of Women Mother of Mary Shelley

John Dryden (1631-1700)

Works: Absalom and Achitophel, Mac Flecknoe (set in a land of boring poets, and takes the restoration playwright Thomas Shadwell to task) Descriptive literary criticism, debating rhyme and verse

Percy Shelley

Works: Adonais XXXVI (and elegy to John Keats)

Ann Bronte

Works: Agnes Gray (recollections of her experiences with the over‐indulged young children and the worldly older children of these two households), The Tenant of Widfell Hall Pen name: Acton Bell

Sir Philip Sidney

Works: An Apology for Poetry

George Orwell

Works: Animal Farm, 1984, Homage to Catalonia (concerns socialism in the context of the Spanish civil war) autobiographies/journalistic accounts of his remarkable life Jobs: colonial policeman in Burma, dishwasher in Paris Experienced war Passionate but undogmatic commitment to social justice

John Henry, Cardinal Newman (1801-1890)

Works: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (reasoned account of his life and the social and spiritual reflections that led to his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith), The Idea of a University (Champions the virtues of liberal arts) Converted from the Anglican faith to Roman Catholocism Became Roman Catholic cardinal in 1879 Style: Clear, dispassionate, logical reasoning, rigorous clarity Breaks ideas down point by point

Christopher Isherwood

Works: Berlin Stories (Sally Bowles)

Thomas Mann

Works: Buddenbrooks (the story of the decay of the Buddenbrooks family), The Magic Mountain (Hans Castorp)

Caedmon

Works: Caedmon's Hymn First English poet known by name to history

Jean Toomer

Works: Cane Religious philosopher and poet

J. D. Salinger

Works: Catcher in the Rye (Holden Caulfield, the jaded teenage narrator)

Lord Byron

Works: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Works: Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground (the memoir of a bitter, sensitive, hypochondriacal, anonymous narrator alienated from society;), The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov Murder

Ted Hughes

Works: Crow Poetry: unflinching investigation of the darker side of human nature (people are frequently portrayed as beasts), is unmistakably contemporary

Henry James

Works: Daisy Miller (young, flirtatious American girl in Europe), The Turn of the Screw, The Aspern Papers (the biographer of the long-dead poet, Joseph Aspern (fictionalized Byron), fails to secure some papers from the poet's aged mistress and her homely daughter; set in Venice), The Golden Bowl Style: Famously elaborate, delicate, interior, and convoluted Baroque sentence construction, hesitations, considerations, and possibilities envisioned and discarded James's writing leaves the impression of a man who takes all the time he needs to explore his delicate genius Psychological realism and formal architectonics, sensitive apprehension of values of character Themes: American vs. European character

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

Works: Daniel Deronda, Adam Bede (Rector of Broxton), Middlemarch (Lydgate and Casaubon; the novel centers around Dorothea Brooke and the town of Middlemarch), Silas Marner (Silas Marner, Eppie) Discarded traditional feminine interests to write about common people

Charles Dickens

Works: David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Bleak house (Esther Summerson, Lady Deadlock (Honoria), Jarndyce, Ada Clare, Richard Carstone), Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Hard Times (Thomas Gradgrind, JOsiah Bounderby, Louisa, Sissy Jupe, Tom, Stephen Blackpool), Little Dorrit (Rigaud, John Baptist Cavalletoo, Arthur Clennam, Gilbert Clennam, Affery, FLintwinch, Meagles, Tattycoral), A Tale of Two Cities (set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution; Jerry Cruncher, Jarvis Lorry, Lucie Manette, Monsieur Defarge, Dr. Alexandre Manette, Charles Darnay, John Barsad, Mr. Stryver, Miss Pross, Sydney Carton) Dickens captured the popular imagination as no other novelist had done Complexity of the sombre late works at the expense of the high‐spirited humour and genius for caricature traditionally labelled 'Dickensian'

Miguel de Cervantes

Works: Don Quixote (Sancho Panza, the fat, ignorant, lovable, faithful squire of Don Quixote, the main character), The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda, Galatea Comic

John Berryman

Works: Dreamsongs Names: Mr. Bones, Henry Style: Mordant

Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

Works: Erewhon (a parody of a Utopian society), The Way of All Flesh (semi-autobiographical)

Jorge Luis Borges

Works: Ficciones Known for his poetry, but his novels are more studied outside of Spanish-speaking countries

Knut Hamsun

Works: Growth of the Soil (the story of a rustic Norwegian's stoic, self-reliant determination to persevere in a hard land)

Johnathan Swift

Works: Gulliver's Travels, The Lady's Dressing Room Satirist In politics he was a Whig, but he wrote against the Occasional Conformity Bill in 1708, and he used his satirical power for religious ends in his Argument to Prove the Inconvenience of Abolishing Christianity

Mark Twain

Works: Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Letters from Earth (Satan corresponds with God about the foolish notions humans have about spiritual matters)

Samuel Butler (1613-1680)

Works: Hudibras (a Knight whose squire is Sir Ralpho) Verse: "Hudibrastic", deliberately clubfoot form

Maya Angelou

Works: I know Why the Caged Bird Sings (autobiography), "On the Pulse of Morning" (Read at Clinton's inauguration) Best known for her autobiographies

Homer

Works: Iliad, Odyssey

Charlotte Bronte

Works: Jane Eyre (Rochester, Bertha, Helen Burns, Mr. Brocklehurst), Villette (Lucy Snowe, Madame Beck, John Bretton, Paul Emanuel), The Professor (William Crimsworth, Frances Henri, Zoraide Reuter), Shirley (Robert Gérard Moore, Caroline Helstone) Deep feeling, courageous realism Pen name: Currer Bell Friendship with Elizabeth Gaskell

Robert Herrick

Works: Julia Poems, "To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time" Julia is associated with Robert Herrick Herrick's secular poems are mostly exercises in miniature, very highly polished and employing meticulous displacements of syntax and word order so as to give diminutive aesthetic grace to the great chaotic subjects—sex, transience, death—that obsess him

James Fenimore Cooper

Works: Leather-Stocking Tales (Natty Bumppo, also called Hawkeye, Leather-stocking, and Deerslayer is a nature lover and a crack shot who always does the righteous thing), The Spy Writes frontier tales of men who live freely, communing with nature Cooper was also deeply critical of American democracy, and expressed his conservative opinions directly and fictionally. Tension between different kinds of society, between society and the individual, between the settlement and the wilderness, and between civil law and natural rights as these suggest issues of moral and mythic import.

Vladamir Nobakov

Works: Lolita, Pale Fire (a novel told through the annotations to a mediocre poem; the annotator is an insane academic named Charles Kinbote) An émigré from Russia, Nabokov wrote his later novels (such as Lolita) in English Style: erudite, self-conscious, put to humorous effect, proclivity for experimentation with form

Eugene O'Neill

Works: Long Day's Journey into Night, Mourning Becomes Electra Irish-American origin, troubled family life Profound melancholy at the heart of much of his work Parallels between his work and Greek tragedy Overall sense of enormous and powerful emotion that characterizes his plays Worked on a massive scale

John Milton

Works: Lycidas, Paradise Lost, Comus (masque), Areopagitica Blank Verse Merciless torture of English sentence structure Mastery of stanza and structure, an exuberant and at times baroque use of imagery, and the love of resounding proper names so marked in his later work. Notable sonnets: on his blindness, on his deceased wife, his addresses to Cromwell, Fairfax, and Vane, and those to Lawes Political activities: defense of religious, civil, and domestic liberties

Aristophanes

Works: Lysistrate (title character's name, meaning "she breaks up armies"), Clouds (ridicules the philosopher Socrates), Frogs (pokes fun at the great Greek tragedians Sophocles, Euripides (author of Medea), and Aeschylus) Comedic dramatist

Gustave Flaubert

Works: Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education (Frederic Moreau is stuck with an obsessive love for a married bourgeois which comes to naught) Flaubert ever exposes everyone and everything as petty, vain, despicably commercial, and utterly unable to live up to his or their own ideals

Stephen Crane

Works: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (the dystopic story of a girl who is raised in wretched poverty by a hideous, alcoholic mother. The heroine, Maggie, is driven to prostitution after having been manipulated, seduced, and cast aside by her lover, Peter. Ultimately kills herself)

Herman Melville

Works: Moby Dick, Billy Budd (the story of a handsome sailor, a stock seafaring character elevated to a Christlike status, undone by his own goodness and the repulsive Claggart), "Bartleby the Scrivener" (a short story about the bizarrely alienated Bartleby, whose mantra, whenever asked to do anything, is the reply "I'd prefer not to")

Willa Cather

Works: My Antonia (the story of the hardscrabble Nebraska pioneer life of Jim Burden and Antonia Shimerda) Novels heavily associated with the west and midwest

Richard Wright

Works: Native Son (Bigger Thomas), Black Boy (autobiographical account of Wright's youth), The Outsider Powerful and violent novels tragedy in the lives of black victims of poverty and politics James Baldwin and Richard Wright had a rancorous dispute about the role a prominent black artist should most properly take amidst racial divisions of the United States Refusal to give the reading public what it had hitherto demanded of the African American writer Insistence on the expression of an African American voice

Jean-Paul Sartre

Works: No Exit, Being and Nothingness, The Flies Best known for formalizing the philosophy known as "existentialism" in a work called Being and Nothingness

Elizabeth Gaskell

Works: North and South, Mary Barton, Cranford, Ruth, Wives and Daughter, Sylvia's Lovers Fashionable member of upper-crust society Novels notable for their portrayal of, and outcry agains, social conditions industrializing nineteenth-century England Friends with Charlotte Bronte Biographer of Charlotte Bronte Keen storyteller Lover of ghost stories Humanitarian: workers/employers, outcasts of society

James Baldwin

Works: Notes of a Native Son, Go Tell it on the Mountain (about a day in the lives of various members of a Harlem church and, through flashbacks, about their forebears), Giovanni's Room (set in his new residence of Paris and concerned a man torn between homosexual love and love of a woman) James Baldwin and Richard Wright had a rancorous dispute about the role a prominent black artist should most properly take amidst racial divisions of the United States Never went to college History as a preacher Cadence of prose

John Steinbeck

Works: Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath (Tom Joad)

Jack Kerouac

Works: On the Road (Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassidy)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Works: One Hundred Years of Solitude (the story of Macondo, an isolated town whose history is like the history of Latin America on a reduced scale. While the setting is realistic, there are fantastic episodes) Magic Realism

Samuel Richardson

Works: Pamela, Clarissa Author of huge epistolary novels-cum-doorsteps (parodied by Henry Fielding in Shamela)

Honore de Balzac

Works: Pere Goriot (main character: Rastignac, naive, shows up in later works as increasingly cynical; villain: Vautrin), Lost Illusions (Tells the story of a young, handsom, talented man, Lucien de Rubempre, who travels to Paris with a married woman to make his literary name. He loses the woman, betrays his talent, and sells out everyone. He dies in the end after making an unlikely comeback orchestrated by Balzac's criminal mastermind, Vautrin) Known for his examinations of bourgeois life in nineteenth-century Paris

Jean Racine

Works: Phaedra Master of French neoclassical theater

William Langland

Works: Piers Plowman

John Bunyan

Works: Pilgrim's Progress, Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners

Jane Austen

Works: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park (The Bertrams, Fanny Price, Mrs. Norris), Northanger Abbey (parody of a gothic novel; Catherine Morland, the Allens, Henry Tilney, John Thorp), Persuasion (Sir Walter, Elizabeth, Anne Eiot, Frederick Wentworth, Kellynch Hall) Funny: wry, biting Often cited remark Austen made about herself: "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour" Subtle satiric sense Understated ironic treatment of character

P.B. Shelley (1792-1822)

Works: Prometheus Unbound (uses Aeschylus's version of Prometheus), "Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude", Adonais XXXVI (and elegy to John Keats) British radicalism and atheism Hatred of tyranny and authority Poetry of ideas Shared the German Romantic idealist vision of a spirit of the age moving humanity and history with it Lyric powers Intellectual courage and originality Mischievous, sometimes macabre, sense of humour Widely read in the classics, philosophy, and contemporary science Translated from Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, Italian, and some Arabic fragments. Political pamphlets: angry and idealistic.

Alexander Pope

Works: Rape of the Lock, Essay on Criticism, Dunciad Heroic couplets Ends his lines on natural pauses Cutting satire Exploration of motives and morals Complex wit Conjunction of argument and images Peerless fluency in the couplet form Most important subject matter: learning how to live Conversational verse epistles (letters) that depend on dialogue, employing a tonal range from glittering humor to grave pessimism

Oscar Wilde

Works: Salome (story of "bring me the head of John the Baptist" and the "Dance of Seven Veils"), The Picture of Dorian Gray (eschews the didacticism of these plays in favor of a more sustained display of paradox and a more enigmatic commentary on social and sexual identity), The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde's scandalous relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie) led to his imprisonment Flamboyant aestheticism "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all." Moralizing social comedies which combine teasing wit with shrewd observation of upper-middle-class English manners

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

Works: Sartor Resartus Style: famously idiosyncratic, rancorous, philosophical, funny, and linguistically playful, offbeat Student of German philosophy, particularly Kant, and an early English advocate of Goethe Inventive, passionate, humorous, sometimes weird, strong sense of the ridiculous, berserk prose style

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Works: Self-reliance

William Blake (1757-1872)

Works: Songs of Innocence and Experience, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion Considered an early romantic, and had a profound impact on the period Displeased with Enlightenment movement Two distinct styles: SIE type; and Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Visions of the Daughters of Albion type (visionary mystic) Although his styles are distinct, they are consistent at their spiritual base Reconciliation of opposites is one of the cornerstones of Blake's philosophy

Marcel Proust

Works: Swan's Way, Remembrance of Things Past (epic masterpiece, deals with his memories of his rather ordinary childhood)

Thomas Hardy

Works: Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Saul Bellow

Works: The Adventures of Augie March (coming-of-age novel set in depression-era Chicago), Henderson and the Rain King, Herzog Ironic and optimistic Theme: Alienated individual, who must learn to be reconciled with external reality and the human condition

Kate Chopin

Works: The Awakening (novella; characters: Pontellier, Lebrun, set in Louisiana; defiance, frank sexuality) Common Theme: women are the property of men Short Stories: interpretations of Creole and Cajun life

Jean Genet

Works: The Balcony Novels and plays Theater of the Absurd One of the great antisocial authors of world literature and spent much of his life in jail Turns the moral universe on its head, relentlessly aestheticizing and eroticizing vice, crime, and cruelty in a gorgeous, fevered, baroque prose

Margery Kempe

Works: The Book of Margery Kempe (autobiography, dictated) A medieval figure who, at forty years of age, after a long marriage and having borne several children, devoted her life to Christ, wandering through Europe proselytizing for the Church

William Wycherly

Works: The Country Wife (Characters: Mr. Horner, Mr. Pinchwife, Sir Jasper Fidget, Mrs. Squeamish, Mrs. Dainty Fidget)

Sarah Orne Jewett

Works: The Country of the Pointed Firs (quiet and lyrical) Nineteenth-century New England writer

Arther Miller

Works: The Crucible, Death of a Salesman

Edmund Spenser

Works: The Faerie Queene Deliberately used an idiosyncratic archaic English, but he was actually a close contemporary of Shakespeare

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

Works: The House of Mirth (characters: Lily Bart; setting: NY City; satirizes the hypocrisies of New York society in turning against a social climber when her attempts to join its ranks fail), Ethan Frome (Zenobia, Mattie Silver, the Hales; a grim story of passion, jealousy, and revenge set on a New England farm), The Age of Innocence (Newland Archer, May Welland, Ellen Olenska, Manson Mingott; a New York lawyer who, though in love with the separated wife of a Polish count, is forced into a loveless marriage with his fiancée who enlists all the snares of social convention to entrap him) Style: Famously elaborate, delicate, interior, and convoluted Explores the conflict between social duty and the aspirations of the individual through witty and satirical observation of the manners of fashionable society

George Etherege

Works: The Man of Mode (Characters: Mr. Dorimant, Mrs. Loveit, Sir Fopling Flutter; )

Edgar Allan Poe

Works: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon (Poe's only novel, concerns the adventures of a young man who stows away aboard a ship), "Hop-Frog" (the story of a dwarf jester) Indicated his conception of poetic unity to be one of mood or emotion, and especially emphasized the beauty of melancholy. His short stories may be said to fall into two categories, those of horror, set in a crepuscular world, and those of ratiocination (reasoning, exact thinking), which set the standard for the modern detective story ("The Murders on the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter"). Consummate artistry, self-consciousness, heavy atmosphere of decay

Rainer Maria Rilke

Works: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (series of almost autobiographical spiritual musings) Best known for his lyric "object poems" where he attempts to describe physical objects so that there is no separation between the observer and the object being observed

Sean O'Casey

Works: The Plough and the Stars (Irish nationalism, poverty), Juno and the Paycock With the help of W. B. Yeats, he overcame the disadvantages of his background to become a leading Irish writer of the twentieth century Best works based on the lives of the Irish poor during the political troubles in which O'Casey himself had played a minor but active part.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Works: The Queen mother and Rosamund (echoes Elizabethan dramatists, notably George Chapman), Atalanta in Calydon (a drama in classical Greek form), Chastelard (Marry Queen of Scots) Known for his rebellious attitude towards morality and excellent sense of rhyme and meter Love of the sea Associated with the pre-raphaelite circle Complicated regard for Christianity Classical Burlesques, modern and mock‐antique ballads, and roundels

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Works: The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance , House of Seven Gables (sins of the fathers visited on later generations; names: Pyncheons, Hepzibah, old Maule, Phoebe, Holgrave, Clifford)

Richard Sheridan

Works: The School for Scandal (Characters: Sir Peter Teazle, Maria, Lady Sneerwell, Sir Benjamin Backbite, Charles Surface)

William Faulkner

Works: The Sound and the Fury Novels, short stories, Yoknapatawpha county: a fictionalized version of Lafayette county in Mississippi (Faulkner was a native of Oxford, MI) High Modernist Had deep roots in America, and nearly all his works explore the American south Style: Stream-of-consciousness (bluntly idiosyncratic), regular perspectival shifts, use of italics Themes: perspective, race, and the effects of history on life in the present Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels focus on the successive generations of a few families: Snopes, Compsons, Sartorises. Count No 'count: A derogatory nickname Faulkner bore during his days as a mail clerk at the University of MI

Albert Camus

Works: The Stranger (begins with the death of the narrator's mother. The plot centers around the seemingly motiveless killing of a stranger on a beach and the subsequent trial; disaffected, matter-of-fact narrator)

William Cowper

Works: The Task (title reflects Lady Austen's challenge to Cowper to write a poem about a sofa; goes on to adress the small pleasures of his country-mouse life, and to a lesser extent, the discomforts of the city) Bouts of suicidal madness Reflective, graceful, and subdued,

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Works: The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Ash Wednesday, Hollow Men Towering figure in pre WWII American letters, best known as a poet, but equally prolific and influential as a critic Poetry is marked by heavy allusions to biblical, classical, and literary sources Bleak sense of cultural emptiness and barrenness Mash-up of poetry and prose style

William Congreve

Works: The Way of the World (Characters: Millamant, Mirabell, Mr. Fainall, Lady Wishfort, Foible, Mincing)

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Works: This Side of Paradise (Amory Blaine), Tender is the Night, The Great Gatsby, many short stories

Lacanian Criticism

Jacques Lacan: "The Mirror Stage in the Formation of the I": a child's first (mis)recognition of him or herself in the mirror is the point at which the child becomes alienated from him or herself, because it is the point at which the child enters the symbolic order Language comes first and and shapes or "structures" the unconscious; Bridge between psychoanalytic criticism and linguistics Keywords: Mirror, phallus, signifier/signified, substitution, desire, jouissance, objet petit a, the three orders: imaginary, symbolic, real

The Blithedale Romance

Nathaniel Hawthorne The fictional treatment of an actual socialist-utopian community Names: Miles Coverdale, Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla Blithedale Farm is based on Brook Farm, an actual utopian community. Brook Farm: founded by prominent Boston social and literary figures, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau. Dominant philosophy of the farm was transcendentalism (a philosophical, religious, and cultural movement founded to contrast traditional European ideals)

Mary Sarton

New English poet, novelist, and diarist

Georgic

Not to be confused with pastoral poetry, which idealizes life in the countryside, georgic poems deal with people laboring in the countryside, pushing plows, raising crops. Virgil's Georgics

Virginia Woolf

Novelist, literary critic Works: To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway (Clarissa), A Room of One's Own Noted modernist Style: delicate touch of stream-of-consciousness (To the Lighthouse) Concerned with the roles an rights of women in modern society

Iris Murdoch

Novels often feature twisted, wealthy men and bizarre plot twists

Mikhail Bakhtin

One central thesis: The novel as a form is characterized by the play of the microlanguages that exist within a language. For Bakhtin, the novel is where the language of the farmer can do battle with the language of the scholar, or where the language of irony can discourse with the language of sincerity Highlighted the contingent, messy, unfinished unfolding of events, especially as they are revealed in the great realistic novels of the nineteenth century. His leading idea was that of the dialogue, an open-ended and indefinitely extensible form, a process that can never be reduced to a single system Works: Rebalais and his Word, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics Key concepts: Carnivalesque, chronotope, dialogism, heteroglossia and polyphony

Decorum

One of the neoclassical principles of drama. Decorum is the relation of style to content in speech of dramatic characters. For example, a character's speech should be appropriate to his or her social station.

Prosopopoeia

Personification, specifically when the personified object not only has human qualities but also speaks

Romulus Linney

Plays are characterized by an almost impenetrable southern regional dialect

John Guare

Plays erode the boundaries of traditional realistic drama

Clifford Odets

Playwright and left-wing political figure

Gwendolyn Brooks

Poet

Nikki Giovanni

Poet

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

Works: Three Lives, "The Good Anna," "Melanctha", "The Gentle Lena" (last three are unconnected, but take place in the fictional town of Bridgepointe), "Sacred Emily" ("rose is a rose is a rose"), Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas "Anti-literature" Heavily influenced by Paul Cezanne's painting Relatively accessible: early novellas, Three Lives (Melanctha) Obscure: Tender Buttons (gibberish) Approach is distinctly unconventional. She heightens the reader's awareness of language and narrative by writing "badly" (with inane repetitions, sing-song rhythms, or in pure nonsense), but does so with such evident control that the writing cannot be dismissed offhand. Deliberate sing-song, hypnotic, anti-literary repetitions Stein's writing nearly always calls attention to itself as writing, foregrounding the words until conventional meaning and narrative threaten to fly away Writes almost exclusively in the present tense

Anton Chekov

Works: Three sisters Plays are typically set in upper-middle-class Russian homes. Wrote intricately plotted and dramaturgically innovative plays Unparalleled ability, through dialogue simultaneously natural and poetic, to convey the inner life of his characters Doctor of medicine Playwright, short stories

Henry Fielding

Works: Tom Jones (Goody Brown, Molly), Shamela (parodied Samuel Richardson's habit of lecturing people on how to live) Tone: comic irony, farcical comedy

John Dos Passos

Works: U.S.A trilogy (experimental), antiwar stories and essays Hard headed realist and sometimes socialist

James Joyce (1882-1941)

Works: Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, "The Dead" from The Dubliners Exile, especially that of the artist from society, is an underlying theme in much of Joyce's work (he, as an artist, needed "silence, cunning, and exile") Style: Stream-of-consciousness (obtrusively virtuosic)

Malcom Lowry

Works: Under the Volcano (set in Mexico, concerns the last day in the life of an alcoholic and desperately unhappy former British consul)

Thomas More

Works: Utopia Beheaded for treason after his refusal to take a position of unequivocal support for Henry VIII in the King's conflict with the Pope

Ben Jonson

Works: Volpone, or The Fox, "To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare", Epicene, or the Silent Women, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair Masques, dramatist, poet Comedy

Samuel Beckett

Works: Waiting for Godot (Vladamir/Didi, Estragon/Gogo, Lucky, Pozzo), Happy Days Irish-born playwright (and poet and novelist) Plays are Spartan in decor and the cast is rarely larger than four. Characters are always in some way disabled (physically, mentally, economically, spiritually). They inhibit a bleakly, absurd world of futility, alienation, and discomfort, in which things go from awful to perfectly hideous, though the gloom is enlivened by moments of humor violence, and even lyricism. Associated with "Theater of the Absurd"

Emily Bronte

Works: Wuthering Heighs Pen name: Ellis Bell Gondal: the setting for many of her finest narrative and lyric poems (fictional place created with Anne) Fusion of romanticism and realism

E.M. Forster

Works: novels and criticism; Aspects of the Novel Formulated the idea of "flat" and "round" characters, both of which have their place in the novel Cites Dickens as someone who makes excellent use of flat and round characters Novels examine the intricacies of human relationships

Lyrical Ballads

Written together by Coleridge and Wordsworth "Preface to Lyrical Ballads": poetic diction attacking the 'gaudy and inane phraseology of many modern writers', Wordsworth 'low' subjects and language and their alleged banality and repetitions Landmark of English Romanticism

"The Second Coming"

Yeats A bleak vision of the future "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold" "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

The Hydra

a mythical seven-headed dragon. When one head is severed, two more grow back in its place.

Spenserian Sonnet

A 14-line poem with three quatrains, ending in a couplet. The final line of a Spenserian Sonnet is an alexandrine. Rhymes abab bcbc cdcd ee. Ex. Spenser's "One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand"

The Faerie Queene

(1590-1596) Edmund Spenser Spenserian stanzas (in general, nine-line stanza with a patterned rhyme scheme that ends in an alexandrine) Style: archaic, "warre" "whilome" "renowmd" "hardinesse" Archaic diction gives it an antique flavor

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

1380 Unknown poet, also thought to be the author of Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness; sometimes called "the Pearl poet" Distinctive verse stanzas: The body of each stanza is composed of long, alliterative lines, but the stanzas end with the "bob and wheel" form Plot: Draws on the legend of the Arthurian court. A large, green night interrupts a New Year's banquet and challenges any knight to lop off his head. But if he survives, that Knight must lose his head in one year. Sir Gawain accepts, but the Knight simply puts his head back on after Gawain strikes it off. A year later, Gawain sets out to meet his fate. He stays with a lord along the way. Gawain finds the Green Knight at the Green chapel, but the Green Knight spares him because he was the lord Gawain stayed with, and was impressed by his honorable conduct and his willingness to keep the bargain. The Knight does cut Gawain's neck a little bit because he tried to keep a magic girdle while staying with the green knight/lord that would supposedly protect him.

The Canterbury Tales

1387 Geoffrey Chaucer Middle English

Le Morte D'Arthur

1470 Sir Thomas Malory Written in Late Middle English, prose Recounts the legend surrounding King Arthur Malory wrote the work while in prison and seems to have drawn from English sources as well as the "French Book" he acknowledges

Christopher Marlowe

1564-1593 Born in Canterbury; Killed, apparently, in a pub brawl Playwright, poet, spy Plays: energetic, restless, generically daring explorations of selfhood May 1593: Warrant issued for his arrest on charges of atheism "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" Works: Dr. Faustus, Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Dido, Queen of Carthage Inventor of both the English history play (Edward II) and of Ovidian narrative verse in English (Hero and Leander). Innovations: development of the blank verse (Tamburlaine)-leading to Shakespeare and Jonson; epic poetry; English couplet-anticipating Alexander Pope

Comus

1634 John Milton A "masque", a dramatic form in which all entertainment systems are go in music, singing, dancing, acting, and stage design. Often offered in performance as a tribute to a patron Original name: A Masque, Presented at Ludlow Castle Plot: A lady lost in the woods who, upon falling asleep, is captured by the lecherous Comus and carried back to face a series of erotic harassments. Ends with the famous lines: "Mortals, that would follow me, / Love Virtue; she alone is free. / She can teach ye how to climb / Higher than the sphery chime; / Or, if Virtue feeble were, / Heaven itself would stoop her"

Lycidas

1637 John Milton Written as a pastoral elegy for Milton's recently passed friend Edward King. The invocation of nature is coupled with a symbol of poetic fame (the laurel), and throughout the poem, Lycidas becomes a point of contact between some shared pastoral past, classical tradition, and Christian tradition (with the "Pilot of the Galilean Lake" as St. Peter) Opening lines: "Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more" Other famous lines: "Without the meed of some melodious tear"; "But oh! the heavy change, now thou art gone, / Now thou art gone and never must return!"; "Fame is the spur that the clever spirit doth raise / (That last infirmity of noble mind) / To scorn delights and live laborious days"; "Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth: / An, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth"

Restoration Comedy

1660-1730 Extended from the restoration of Charles Stuart in 1660 to the French Revolution in 1789 Comedies of language and manners, written with their own peculiar take on farce. Centered on tension between the accepted social codes of behavior towards sex and marriage, and the rather more direct prerogatives of human lust and social ambition. "War between the sexes" Typically open with a verse prologue to the audience, but the plays are not in verse Names in restoration comedy often reflect the character's foibles Insults itself and the audience, but wittily Noted Works: Wycherly's The Country Wife, Etherege's The Man of Mode, Congreve's The Way of the World, Sheridan's The School for Scandal, and Swift's Gulliver's Travels

Areopagitica

1664 John Milton Milton's best known prose piece Defense of free expression, condemnation of censorship Milton argues that free press is God's will because published books are the means by which man will hear God's Revelation: "...as good almost kills a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye." Much of Milton's political prose is interested in in separating the spheres of spiritual and temporal authority

Paradise Lost

1667 John Milton Miltonic blank verse Faulted for its tangled syntax

Pilgrim's Progress

1678-1684 John Bunyan An allegory of the believer's journey toward redemption. The protagonist, Christian, slogs through life, passing places like the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair on his way to the Celestial City. Travel narrative, christian allegory, cultural and political statements (anti-catholic), materiality of sin

Gulliver's Travels

1726 Jonathan Swift Houyhnhnms: intelligent, clean-living, right-thinking horses Lilliput: where everyone is six-inches tall Bodbingnag: where everyone is enormous Laputa: a flying island The Stuldburgs: unhappy immortals who wish they could die Yahoos: idiotic, dirty, violent creatures who turn out to be people, or at least look like them

William Butler Yeats

1865-1939 Irish poet, dramatist, essayist, autobiographer Irish nationalist Poetry is characterized by symbolism. Eventually renounced the diction and syntax of his youth for a starker, more dramatic voice Works: The Countess Cathleen (play, 1892, dramatizes an Irish fable concerning people who sell their souls in order to obtain food during a famine), The Second Coming At once traditionalist and modern, his work looks back to the energies of the English Romantics, particularly William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and it borrows from the patriotism of the Young Ireland school of poetry of the 1840s and the epic voice of Sir Samuel Ferguson. Not a "high modernist" in any conventional sense, he described himself as one of "the last Romantics": his modernism resides not in the use of highly allusive, fragmented narrative as in The Waste Land nor in Poundian free verse, but in his rejection of Victorian literary conventions and his creation of a passionate syntax and modern diction through which he expressed the fever of modernity and the sense of an ending for modern Western society. Shared with the modernists a sense that cultural unity and plenitude might be represented in terms of key moments in the past

"Tradition and the Individual Talent"

1919 T.S. Eliot Critical piece Poetic manifesto for Eliot's pre-conversion work Sustained argument in favor of "impersonal poetry" For Eliot, tradition is not simply a collection of cultural artifacts from the past; instead, tradition operates as a "simultaneous order" of timeless work, uniting past and present. The great artist attaches him- or herself to tradition rather than breaking with it. As such, Eliot does not believe in the inspired genius popularized by the Romantic poets, and argues for an artist that can use tradition to lift him or her above personal experience.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

1920 T.S. Eliot Heavily wrought with allusions and disparate, seemingly unconnected parts Famous Lines: "Let us go then, you and I" (opening); "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo"; "And indeed there will be time / To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and 'Do I dare?'"; "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?"; "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas"; "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown" (last stanza)

"The Waste Land"

1922 T.S. Eliot Considered one of the great works of Anglophone Modernism Split into five sections and supplemented by seven pages of notes. Fragmentation, polyglot vocabulary ( Latin, Greek, Italian, and more), dense cultural allusions

"The Hollow Men"

1925 T.S. Eliot Concerned with the difficulty of the search for meaning in postwar Europe. Famous lines: "This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper"

The Sound and the Fury

1929 William Faulkner Split into four sections, each with a different narrator 1st narrator: Benjy, mentally disabled 2nd narrator: Quentin Compson, obsessed by questions of Southernness and the downfall of the American South. This section is more modernist, conflating separate times and places. Quentin harbors a deep felt and guilty incestuous passion for his sister Caddy. He is obsessed with her purity, and repulsed by her extramarital pregnancy. He ultimately kills himself, whether because of his incestuous passion or because of Caddy's sexual promiscuity is unclear. Caddy names her daughter Quentin, after he dead brother. The name Quentin is given to a Compson each generation. As a result, there are two Quentin Compsons to be found in Faulkner's novels. The first Quentin's niece, his sister Caddy's bastard daughter, resourceful and morally ambiguous, is the second Quentin). The first Quentin also appears in Absalom, Absalom

"Ash Wednesday"

1930 T.S. Eliot First long poem published after his conversion to Anglicanism Stylistic turning point, where he began to rely more heavily on traditional forms of melody and prosody Famous lines: "Because I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn" (opening)

As I Lay Dying

1930 William Faulkner Title is an illusion to Book 11 of Homer's Odyssey Complex experiment in perspective Addie Bundren has died, and to honor her dying wish, The Bundren family attempts to transport her to Jefferson, where she wishes to be buried. Told by 15 different narrators (including Addie from beyond the grave) Characters: The Bundrens, The Tulls, Revernend Whitfield (with whom Addie had an affair)

Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

1933 Gertrude Stein Told from the perspective of her lover (so Stein is referred to in the third person). It is as much an autobiography of Stein as it is of Toklas. Much of the book concerns Stein's relationship with artists and her role in discovering and popularizing them. Many are attracted to the book not as a portrait of Stein but of the cultural milieu of Paris in the 19010s and 1920s

Absalom, Absalom!

1936 William Faulkner Concerns itself with the life and death of Thomas Sutpen, a poor white who moves to Mississippi with the intention of become rich and powerful. Sutpen does so, with all the attendant riches of an antebellum southern dynasty. After the Civil War, Sutpen is unable to restore his home to its former glory, and the story becomes tangled in the literal and figurative pairings of Sutpen with his slaves. Quentin Compson is the primary narrator. He tells the story to his Harvard roommate, Shreve, in fragments, with some help from his father and his earlier memories of the story from his grandfather and Rose Coldfield.

Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet

A 14-line poem rhyming abbaabba cdecde. The first eight lines are called an octave. The final six lines (composed of two groups of three, or tercets) are called a sestet. Ex. John Milton's "When I consider How My Light is Spent"

English, or Shakespearean Sonnet

A 14-line poem with three quatrains, ending in a couplet. Rhymes abab cdcd efef gg.

Dr. Faustus

Christopher Marlowe The story of a sorcerer who sells his soul in return for power. In Marlowe's telling of the tale, Faustus is served and persecuted by Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Mephistopheles. Blank verse and prose "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships..." Faustus character: goes from a mere magician becomes a man thirsting for infinite power, ambitious to be 'great Emperor of the world'.

Aphra Behn

Considered the first professional female prose writer and dramatist who lived in the 17th-century. Style: Characteristically makes the narrator part of the action and draws the reader close

Divine Comedy

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) Books: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso Divided into 100 Canti Recounts Dante's journey through the ten circles of hell Terza rima Names: Dante, Virgil, Beatrice

Heroic couplet

Do not refer to content but simply an an aabbcc rhyme scheme (a series of rhymed pairs, called couplets) in iambic pentameter

Structuralism

Dominated continental Europe. Ferdinand de Saussure, among others Closely related to semiotics Structuralism holds that meaning is never or rarely intrinsic--meaning is only produced by structure. The fundamental unit of structure is relative difference. Phrases such as "story architectures" and "center" and "perimeter" in an almost literal geometric sense Keywords: sign, signifier, signified; binary opositions, spatial metaphors

Archetype or Myth Criticism

Drawn from Freud and Carl Jung, and James G. Frazer (developed also by Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces) and Northrop Frye). Myth criticism looks for recurring symbols, motifs, character types, character types, and plots, finding them in sources as disparate as "The Epic of Gilgamesh", Superman comics, Arthurian legend, and T.S. Eliot. Myth critics believe that the existence of these persistent, powerful, ever-repeated stories and characters points to needs and urges deep within the human psyche, and that the study of such stories can reveal the collective unconscious of humankind.

George Chapman

Early English translator of the Greeks (Homer) Subject of poems by Swinburne and Keats A crucial figure in a secret society of freethinkers called the School of Night, of which Marlowe, Harriot, and Matthew Roydon were also members. As poet and dramatist, Chapman is most often seen as a genius whose learning and energy were never sufficently disciplined. Famous lines from Bussy D'Ambois: "Man is a torch borne in the wind; a dream But of a shadow, summ'd with all his substance"

Ottava Rima Stanza

Eight-line stanza (usually iambic pentameter) rhyming abababcc; Ex. Lord Byron's Don Juan

A Room of One's Own

Essay by Virginia Woolf Asserts that for a woman to fulfill her artistic talent, she needs a room of her own and a source of income "All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point--a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Uses an extended story of Shakespeare's invented sister Judith to demonstrate the various impediments that would block Judith from ever having the freedom to write as her brother William had.

Sturm und Drang

In this kind of work, a youthful romantic hero confronts the arbitrary or unnatural laws of society, flouts them, and ultimately pays the price Protagonists: Goethe, Schiller

Charon

Ferryman of Greek mythology who carries dead souls across the river styx to the underworld

Deconstruction

Focuses on the displacements, the excesses, and the gaps, that structuralists dismiss as exceptional. Deconstructionists hold that these "exceptions" are absolutely integral to the creation of meaning. Keywords: erasure, trace, bracketing, difference, slippage, dissemination, logocentrism, indeterminacy, decentering, sign, signifier, multiplicity

Romantics

For romantics, imagination was linked to the divine in humans and was an inexhaustible source of goodness Names: Blake (early Romantic)

George Sand (Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin)

French Novelist

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

German Writer Works: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust (the protagonists soul is bartered in exchange for knowledge, and Faust deals with a single satanic agent, Mephistopheles) Associated with the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement was a young man

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

German poet, dramatist, scholar Works: Faust, Sorrows of Yuong Werther (semi-autobiographic, epistolary novel) Influence on Carlyle, Arnold, and G. Eliot Classical, art, sciences

Personification

Giving an inanimate object human qualities or form.

William Dean Howells

Held literature as something potentially injurious. Best known for his avowal of "realist" technique in fiction, his socialist politics, and his criticism's crusty moralizing Novelist, playwright Edited Harper's and Atlantic Monthly Works: The Rise of Silas Lapham (a nouveau riche Bostonite loses his wealth but learns about the things that really matter)

Songs of Innocence and Experience

Innocence: "The Lamb" Experience: "The Tyger" Child-like simplicity of meter and syntax

Iliad

Homer Set in the tenth year of the Trojan War, fought by the Achaeans under Agamemnon in order to recover Helen, his brother Menelaus' wife. The Achaeans' best warrior, Achilles, refuses to fight out of rage with Agamemnon. When his great friend Patroclus is killed by the Trojan champion Hector, Achilles returns to battle and kills Hector beneath the walls of Troy. He then refuses to give up the body for burial, until old King Priam is brought through the night by the god Hermes, to beg for the body of his son. We know that what will immediately follow will be the death of Achilles and the fall of Troy, foreshadowed in the poem but not narrated. The heroes know that they cannot avoid what is destined by the gods.

Analogy

Illustration of an idea by means of a more familiar idea that is similar or parallel to it in some significant features, and thus said to be analogous to it. Analogies are often presented in the form of an extended simile, as in Blake's aphorism: 'As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.'

W.E.B. Du Bois

Important African American writer Works: Souls of Black Folk Instrumental in the formulation of the NAACP Critical of Booker T. Washington's accommodationist politics

Countee Cullen

Important African American writer of the Harlem Renaissance Traditional and academic in verse

Psychological criticism

In its broad outlines, examines and emphasizes precisely those things Marxist-influenced criticism does not. Psychological criticism is concerned with universals of human consciousness and the ways in which essential aspects of the human psyche manifest themselves in literature. Psychological criticism considers the personality and biographical particulars of the individual author as legitimate fields of inquiry.

Thomas Chatterton

In the 1760s, he fabricated the poems of fictional poets of earlier times, the best of the poems being "by" a fictional fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley. Chatterton went so far as to forge supporting documents, such as correspondence and titles. Not until the late nineteenth-century was the hoax conclusively settled. Killed himself at 18, apparently in despair at his poverty

"The Dead," The Dubliners

James Joyce A volume of short stories by Joyce, published in 1914. Focusing on life in Dublin, the stories follow a pattern of childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life, culminating with the longest, 'The Dead'. "The Dead" is the final, and longest in his short story collection The Dubliners Setting: Dublin at Christmas, circa 1900 Characters: Gabriel Conroy Gabriel attends a party with his wife Greta. A series of events, including Greta's solemn reaction to one of the songs sung at the party, reveal a side of Greta's past of which Gabriel had no previously been aware (a girlhood lover, Michael Furey, who died from illness). This "epiphany" ruptures the almost pastoral construction of the rest of the story. Famous Lines last lines: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." Joyce's most accessible work

The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce Characters: Stephan Daedalus (James Joyce's fictional self) Semi-autobiographical Free-indirect-discourse (begins with a kind of babyspeak and ends with pages from Stephen's journal) It describes the development of Stephen Dedalus from his early boyhood, through bullying at school and an adolescent crisis of faith inspired partly by the famous 'hellfire sermon' preached by the Jesuit Father Arnall and partly by the guilt of his own precocious sexual adventures, to student days and a gradual sense of his own destiny as poet, patriot, and unbeliever. Famous lines: "The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails" (taken as Joyce's artistic credo)

Finnegan's Wake

James Joyce Joyce's toughest novel Central theme: a cyclical pattern of history, of fall and resurrection Written basically in English, but incorporating as many as seventy different languages to create a kind of dreamspeak. Famous passage: (narrating the dialogue of two washerwomen) "Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it." Characters: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Anna Livia Plurabelle, their sons Shem and Shaun, and their daughter Isabel Humour Lyrical beauty

Ulysses (1922)

James Joyce Stephen Daedalus's story is continued in Ulysses, where he acts as a kind of Telemachus to Leopold Boom's Odysseus. The book follows the travels of Bloom in Dublin on an unremarkable day in 1904. Each episode is based on an episode from Homer's epic. Famous line: "yes I said yes I will Yes." This is the conclusion of the "Penelope" episode, a stream of consciousness from the perspective of Bloom's wife, Molly. Style: highly allusive, employs a variety of techniques (stream of consciousness, parody, ranges from extreme realism to fantasy)

Absalom and Achitophel

John Dryden A long, allegorical poem that uses biblical figures to represent the players in a political upheaval of Dryden's time. The issue under dispute was the problem of the relations of power among Catholicism, Protestantism, the King, and Parliament. King David: Charles II (Dryden supports his position delicately in the poem, while trying to appear unbiased) Absalom: Duke of Monmouth Achitophel: Earl of Shaftsbury Dryden's handling of the sensitive political situation is remarkable Heroic couplets

Mac Flecknoe

John Dryden A withering, satirical attack upon the dramatist Thomas Shadwell. The poem relates the succession of Shadwell (Mac Flecknoe) to the throne of dullness. Mock epic. Allusions to literary figures, past and present Inspiration for Pope's Dunciad

Anne Radcliffe

Mysteries of Udolpho Gothic novelist Took Walpole's aesthetic and added an important twist The Radcliffe formula presents events that appear supernatural but at the book's end are revealed to have perfectly real-world explanations Portrayals of the raptures and terrors of her characters' imagination in solitude One of the first novelists to include vivid descriptions of landscape, weather, and effects of light Plots: wild and improbable Expert at maintaining suspense and devising striking incidents Other works: The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, A Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest

Freudian/Psychoanalytic Criticism

Keywords: Oedipal complex, libido, id, ego, superego, subconscious, repression, resistance Harold Bloom: His theory of authorial production states that authors subconsciously position their work against that of another, earlier author who functions as a kind of literary father figure (strongpoet: those writers whose works exert this powerful influence on writers who follow them)

Symbolist movement

Late nineteenth-century phenomenon of French origin; An artistic and poetic movement or style using symbolic images and indirect suggestion to express mystical ideas, emotions, and states of mind. Important figures: Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Redon.

Feminine Rhyme

Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. A pair of lines ending "running" and "gunning" would be an example of feminine rhyme. Properly, feminine rhyme (and not simply a double rhyme) the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllable unstressed.

Hades

Lord of the underworld

The Niebelungenlied

Main character: Siegfried Concerns the romances, marriages, wars, betrayals, and murders that occur over time as an enormous treasure called the Niebelung hoard changes hands and places. An earlier version of the the same legend was used by William Morris as the source for his Sigurd the Volsung

Jacobean Masque form

Masques are derived from the religious spectacles and plays of medieval times. By the Jacobean age, the masque had evolved into a lavish production involving spectacular sets, costumes, and even machinery. Many of the players were drawn from the court. Although dramatic, masques called for much dancing and music as well. Names associated with masques: Ben Jonson, John Milton (Comus)

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400)

Master ironist Works: The Canterbury Tales, Parliament of Fowels

Culture and Anarchy

Matthew Arnold The central thesis of this work is that culture (the arts) ideally nourishes , promotes, and calls for the best in humankind The first chapter is devoted to his concept of culture as 'sweetness and light', a phrase adopted from Swift's The Battle of the Books Arnold presents culture as the classical ideal of human perfection, rather than 'a smattering of Greek and Latin'. Subsequent chapters set forward his definitions of Barbarians, Philistines, and the Populace, and contrast the spirit of Hebraism (as manifested in primitive Christianity and Protestantism) with that of Hellenism, with its aim of seeing 'things as they really are'; both are important contributions to human development and should not be mutually exclusive.

Thalia

Muse of comedy

Calliope

Muse of epic poetry

Erato

Muse of lyric poetry

Melpomene

Muse of tragedy

Virgil

Roman poet Works: Aeneid (about the Trojan, Aeneas), the Eclogues (ten pastoral poems, blending traditional themes of Greek bucolic poetry with contemporary political and literary themes), the Georgics (a didactic poem on farming, treats the relationship of human beings to nature)

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Poet and essayist In his maturity Arnold turned increasingly to prose, writing essays on literary, educational, and social topics that established him as the leading critic of the day Arnold was a devout classicist and very much a believer in sweetness and light. Works: Culture and Anarchy (uses sweetness and light), "Dover Beach" (poem) "Sweetness and light": coined by Swift in Battle of the Books; refers to the quality and beneficial values of classical literature (particularly "Hellenism") Style is not particularly distinctive Content calls on prior ages, especially ancient Greece, as models of virtue and culture Arnold sharply criticized the provincialism, philistinism (tacky middle-class tastes), sectarianism, and utilitarian materialism of English life and culture, and argued that England needed more intellectual curiosity, more ideas, and a more comparative, European outlook The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Creative power should be ranked higher than critical power

John Ruskin (1819-1900)

Predominantly an art critic Originated the critical term "pathetic fallacy" Works: The Stones of Venice (a brilliant architectural study of Venice in which Ruskin "reads" the economic, social, and moral history of Venice through its permanent structures)

Neoclassical Unities

Principles of dramatic structure derived (and applied somewhat too strictly) from Aristotle's "Poetics." They are called the neoclassical unities because of their popularity in the neoclassical movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The essential unities are of time, place, and action. -To observe unity of time, a work should take place within the span of one day. -To observe unity of place, a work should take place within the confines of a single locale. -To observe unity of action, a work should contain a single dramatic plot, with no subplots.

Enlightenment

Prominent figures: Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot Characterized by a belief in the powers of reason

Tamburlaine the Great

Published 1590, performed 1587 Christopher Marlowe 2 parts The story of a Scythian shepherd, Tamburlaine, who becomes an extraordinarily ferocious and successful conquerer in Asia Minor. Main female character: Zenocrate Martial Advancement of blank verse The political thinker (Marlowe) who emerged in Tamburlaine was a dissident who opposed monarchy yet was obsessed with "republican" (antimonarchical) thinking to the 1590s Prologue announces Marlowe's intention to revolutionize English verse, to set it free from the 'jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits' and fill it instead with 'high astounding terms'. Contemporary rhetorical techniques

"The Passionate Shepherd and His Love"

Published 1599 Christoper Marlowe Opening lines: "Come live with me and be my love / And we will all the pleasures prove"; Quoted by Sir Walter Raleigh ("The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd), John Donne, Robert Herrick, C. Day Lewis Rhyme: aabb ccdd eeff ...

Frame-tale

Refers to the larger story that contains the other stories within it. Example: In The Canterbury Tales, the narrator relates the pilgrim's journey to Canterbury. This is the frame-tale within which the pilgrims tell their individual tales

W. H. Auden

Remarkable for his ability to take the somewhat too-pat (to contemporary ears) rhythms and rhymes of earlier poetic forms, and rehabilitate them--through delicate modulations, half-rhymes, near rhymes, eye-rhymes, and enjambments--producing poetry of astonishing grace

Julia Poems

Robert Herrick "Upon Julia's Breast" "Upon Julia's Clothes" "The Night Piece, To Julia"

"Corinna's Going A-Marrying"

Robert Herrick iambic pentameter (2) iambic tetrameter (4) and repeat

An Apology for Poetry

Sir Phillip Sidney

Marxist Criticism

Socialism buzzwords: base and superstructure (material economic reality and the cultural superstructure built upon it), class, proletariat, means of production, bourgeoisie, imperialism, dialectic materialism Economic situation from which literature emerges and is consumed Texts are not timeless, fixed creations subject to universal standards of evaluation and interpretation, nor does Man possess essential unchanging qualities that works of "great literature" address across ages. Rather, a given individual, his consciousness, and the products of that consciousness are themselves the products of a specific cultural and historical context Class relations, historical materialism

Nadine Gordimer

South African novelist

Flannery O'Connor

Southern gothic writer whose works often comment the religious preoccupations typical of the south

Eudora Welty

Southern gothic writer whose works often comment the religious preoccupations typical of the south (not as extreme as O'Conner) Focuses on human relationships

Dylan Thomas

Style: Extravagantly musical verse, gorgeous prose Works: "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" (villanelle)

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Style: sparse and terse Works: "Now I Lay Me", The Sun Also Rises (Jake Barnes, sexually dysfunctional, mysteriously injured war veteran), A Farewell to Arms (story of a love affair between an American lieutenant and an English nurse during the war on the Italian front), For Whom the Bell Tolls (Spanish Civil War), The Old Man and the Sea; short story collects: Men Without Women, Winner Take Nothing Fishing

New Criticism

T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, I.A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, and F.R. Leavis were all New Critics. England and the US New Critics thought earlier critical approaches were polluted by unsustainable speculations about authorial intent and subjective effusions about the beauty and emotion of a work. For New Critics, the words were there on the page; one need only examine them closely. This method of analysis is called close reading. Close reading takes writing and subjects it to a word-by-word scrutiny, showing how the words of a poem bounce off one another within the poem to create dense packages of irony, ambiguity, symbol, and meaning Intentional fallacy Affective fallacy The heresy of paraphrase: "What Great Writer X was trying to say"

In Memorium A.H.H"

Tennyson Four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming ABBA "Nature, red in tooth and claw"

Flat and round characters

Terms coined by E.M. Forster to describe characters built around a single dominant trait (flat characters), and those shaded and developed with greater psychological complexity (round characters).

Linguistic Criticism

That broad area of critical thought concerned primarily with language. Roots in early twentieth century, when critics felt the need to professionalize their discipline, to make its methodology more rigorous and less speculative.

The Doctor (The Canterbury Tales)

The Doctor tells the tale of a woman, Virginia, who has her father kill her in order to avoid falling into the clutches of Apius, an evil judge.

The Knight (The Canterbury Tales)

The Knight: Valorous, chivalrous, polite The Knight's tale: The first tale; Arcite and Palamon both fall in love with Emily while locked in a tower. They fight it out, Arcite prays to Mars and Palamon prays to Venus. Arcite wins the battle but dies in the process, thus Palamon gets Emily

James Boswell (1740-1795)

The Life of Johnson Wrote a gushing biography of Samuel Johnson Friend/disciple of Johnson Discussed Johnson in a genial, sympathetic style Writes about Johnson as a supremely witty and erudite conversationalist with a deep melancholic streak; generosity of spirit, outbursts of irritability Biographical innovation: shows Johnson "in life", rather than simply describing or discussing him A drunk

The Merchant (The Canterbury Tales)

The Merchant: Wears motley and a beaver hat, talks about little but his business concerns. He's in debt, but tries to say his business is profitable. Bears himself with dignity, so no one suspects The Merchant's tale: January, an old knight, marries the youthful and beautiful May. January enjoys her greedily. Then January goes blind and gets jealous, so he keeps May an arm's reach from him at all times. May meets with her lover, Damien, in a tree while January is on the ground. Pluto restores January's sight while May and Damien are having sex. She says she committed adultery to restore his vision.

The Miller (The Canterbury Tales)

The Miller: a huge, strong, hard-drinking, rough-talking, fight-picking, unpleasantly coarse fellow, with a shovel-sized red beard and a big, hairy wart on his nose. The Miller's tale: Drunk when he tells the tale; perhaps the most vulgar of all the tales; A carpenter and his pretty, young wife board a scholar named "Handy" Nicholas. Nicholas is good looking, clever, and young. The carpenter respects him as learned in astrology. Nicholas and Alison decide to spend the night together, so Nicholas tells the carpenter that a flood is coming and that he must sleep on the roof in the washtub. Alison and Nicholas are interrupted by another of Alison's suitors, Absalom. Alison promises Absalom a kiss out the window, but sticks her butt out instead. Furious, Absalom comes back with a hot poker, and when Nichoals sticks his butt out, he gets the poker. Crying "Water!" he wakes up the carpenter, who thinks the flood has come, and cuts the washtub free and crashes down from the roof

The Nun's Priest(s) (The Canterbury Tales)

The Nun's Priest(s): Accompany the Prioress. Later the three priests described morph into one. They are no described individually The Nun's Priest's tale: Chaunticleer, a handsome, vain rooster noted for his singing; Perteltote, a beautiful hen, Chaunticleer's favorite; Sir Russel, a fox; C dreams he will be eaten by a strange creature, and P chides him for being a coward and believing in dreams. The fox comes along, flatters C into singing with his eyes closed, the snatches him. As he is eating, the fox opens his mouth to gloat, at whihc point C escapes. The Fox tries to coax him back, but C has learned his lesson. Mock-heroic-epic

The Pardoner (The Canterbury Tales)

The Pardoner: a thin, vain, smooth-skinned blond with a bag full of pardons "all hot from Rome." Chaucer suggests the pardoner isn't "all man" and portrays him as a no more than a successful huckster The Pardoner's tale: The host calls on the pardoner for a moral tale, after hearing one of the more bawdy tales. The Pardoner's prologue is a frank confession of his own hypocrisy. Tale's theme: Radix malorum est Cupiditas ("the love of money is the root of all evil"). Three immoral drunkards set out to find death, who has taken one of their drinking buddies. They are told to look at death under a tree, where they instead find a bunch of treasure, which they murder each other for. Host and pardoner fight after the tale, and the Knight breaks them up.

The Prioress (The Canterbury Tales)

The Prioress: dainty, materialistic, sentimental about her dogs; wears a well-pleated wimple, a rosary made of coral, and a golden brooch with "love conquers all" inscribed upon it The Prioress's tale: Told in staid rhyme royal; the story of a little boy who is killed by Jews for singing the Christian hymn "Alma Redemptoris" in a Jewish neighborhood. The murder is discovered because the boy miraculously continues singing

The Reeve (The Canterbury Tales)

The Reeve: A sometime carpenter, administrative overseer, tells his tale in response to the Miller's tale about the carpenter The Reeve's tale: A greedy miller named Simkin has his wife and daughter enjoyed by a pair of clerks, John and Alan, whom he'd swindled earlier

The Wife of Bath (The Canterbury Tales)

The Wife of Bath: A bit deaf, gap-toothed, plump, ruddy, not bad looking. Wears scarlet stockings, an enormous hat, and is comfortable riding a horse and swapping jokes with men. She has had five husbands. Her prologue recounts the story of her five husbands, and more importantly, her feminist philosophies of love, sex, and remarriage The Wife of Bath's Tale: One of King Arthur's Knights rapes a maiden. Arthur sentences him to death, but the Queen protests, saying that she will spare his life if he can tell her what women want above all else. The knight encounters a repulsive witch, who says she will tell him the answer if he marries her. He does so, and the witch turns into a beautiful maiden, revealing the answer is sovereignty.

Anthropomorphism

The assigning of human attributes, such as emotions or physical characteristics, to nonhumans, most often plants and animals. It differs from personification in that it is an intrinsic premise and an ongoing pattern applied to nonhuman throughout.

The Clerk (The Canterbury Tales)

The clerk tells the tale of Griselda, a patient wife, who endures the trials of her needlessly jealous husband, the Marquis Walter

Octave

The first eight lines of a sonnet, almost always an Italian sonnet

Aristotle

The great Greek philosopher Works: Poetics (a wellspring of English literary criticism and the source of neoclassical studies) Catharsis

Antagonist

The main character opposing the protagonist. Usually the villain.

Protagonist

The main character, usually the hero.

Enjambled lines

The opposite of an end-stopped line: the meaning runs on to the next line and there is no natural pause

Caesura

The pause that breaks a line of Old English verse. Also, any particularly deep pause in a line of verse.

Voice

The perspective from which a story is written. Literature is most often written from the first person or the third person, though there are rare instances of artists utilizing the second person or the first person plural. It is difficult to find an entire literary work that exemplifies each, as the voice often changes within a particular literary work.

Poetic inversion

The practice of inverting the customary order of words

"She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways"

William Wordsworth Subject: Lucy Theme: The death of one lovely person unknown to larger society

The Lake Poets

William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey (also the essayist Charles Lamb) Long residence in the Lake District of England

Mary Rowlandson

Works: A Puritan woman who vividly recorded her abduction by Native Americans

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Works: Em dashes at the end of several short lines are a giveaway that its Emily Dickinson Typically short, clipped lines Radiant, mystic intensity Famously blank biography: lived in the family home in Amherst, seldom traveled, and did not marry

Arther Rimbaud

Works: Poet, literary innovator Colorful and rebellious life As a theorist, in his mounting disgust with the poetry of his contemporaries led him to formulate a program for becoming more than a poet. He decided to become a visionary, a seer. Practiced a "derangement of the senses" through alcohol and drugs. Gave up writing at an early age and become a trader in North America

Robert Southey (1774-1843)

Works: A lake poet He became friendly with S. T. Coleridge and together they planned their utopian Pantisocratic society. Moved from extreme radicalism in the 1790s to a gloomy conservatism by the 1810s

Francois Villon

Works: Poet of the seedy, seamy side of life medieval Paris. Though educated, he enjoyed thieving, drinking, prostitutes, and living against the grain. He popped in and out of jail, some of his best poetry being witty excoriations of jailers he detested

Thomas Carew

Works: "An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul's, Dr. John Donne"

Robert Burns

Works: "Auld Lang Syne", "The Cotters Saturday Night" Writes in tradition Scottish dialect

Robert Browning

Works: "Caliban upon Setebos" (Setebos is the deity that Caliban and Sycorax worship), "My Last Duchess" (Duke of Ferrara, whose previous wife is dead, most likely at his behest), Pauline; A Fragment of a Confession, Men and Women Many of Browning's works are in the dramatic monologue form Uses heroic couplets, often enjambed, which gives them an elegant, internal quality Creation of drama

Thomas Gray

Works: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

Peter Shaffer

Works: "Epuus" (violence, a play about a teenager who sadistically and inexplicably binds horses)

Langston Hughes

Works: "Harlem" (what happens to a dream deferred?) Harlem Renaissance Experiments with African American vernacular and blues and jazz rhythms

Allen Ginsburg

Works: "Howl" Often uses long lines and emphatic repetitions Hero: Walt Whitman

Ezra Pound

Works: "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (satiric poem), "The Cantos" (long, difficult, possible fascist, life's work, Odysseus) Towering figure of literary modernism Influence: Asian poetry, contemporary economics Style: Fond of juxtapositions of images and the importation of quotes and illusions into his work Fan of Yeats Edited T.S. Eliot's Wasteland A proficient translator of Old English, as well as classical Chinese and Latin

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Works: "I Dreamed I Moved Among the Elysian Field" (a fantasy wherein Millay meets women of myth)

John Keats

Works: "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", Endymion, Hyperion, Romantic, The Eve of St. Agnes, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, To Autumn Egotistical sublime: describe his version of Wordsworth's distinctive genius. Wordsworth possesses imaginative self‐obsession, a 'devouring egotism', in contradistinction to Shakespeare, 'who was the least of an egoist that it was possible to be'. Negative capability: a phrase used to characterize the capacity of the greatest writers to pursue a vision of artistic beauty even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty, as opposed to a preference for philosophical certainty over artistic beauty

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

Works: "Youth" (narrator: Marlow; a seafaring story in which the main character undergoes a terrible ordeal at sea and loves it because he is young and craves experience), "Heart of Darkness", Nostromo (the intrigue and corruption surrounding a hoard of silver in the imaginary Latin-American state of Costaguana) Modernist, has been called an Impressionist His narrative technique is characterized by a skillful use of breaks in time‐sequence and he uses a narrator, Marlow, who provides a commentary on the action not unlike that of a Greek chorus

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Works: "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Biographia Literaria (outlines his aesthetic principles), Morning Chronicle (collection of sonnets), "Fears in Solitude," "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison," "The Nightingale", "Frost at Midnight", "Kubla Khan", "Christabel" Romantic poet: imagination Imagination is the supreme faculty of the human intellect, and its cultivation is both the prerequisite and aim of poetry. Coleridge Understands imagination to be more than the operation of mere fantasy; it is the process of keenly perceiving the phenomena of the world and the self, and then re-expressing phenomena through creative faculties through the poet's whole being. Primary imagination: occurs spontaneously, a similar concept to that of artistic inspiration Secondary imagination: somewhat less profound because it occurs only when one is conscious of the act of imagining something Later works develop Coleridge's leading critical ideas, concerning Imagination and Fancy; Reason and Understanding; Symbolism and Allegory; Organic and Mechanical Form; Culture and Civilization. The dialectical way he expresses them is one of his clearest debts to German Romantic philosophy; his final position is that of a Romantic conservative and Christian radical Close friends with Wordsworth Turbulent life with addiction, quarrels with friends, and divorce

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Works: "She lived amongst th' untrodden was" (Lucy poem), "Imitations of Immorality", Lyrical Ballads (with Preface), Tintern Abbey Lucy is associated with Wordsworth Lucy poems: "Strange Fits of Passion have I known", "Three Years She Grew", "A Slumber did my Spirit Seal", I traveled Among Unknown Men" Close friends with Coleridge Values: Rustic people, rural settings, nonacademic language Sublime, picturesque

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Works: "Song of Myself", "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", Leaves of Grass, "When Lilacs Las in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and O Captain, My Captain" (memorialize Abe Lincoln) Often uses long lines and emphatic repetitions Exuberant diction and rhythm Exceptionally long individual lines of free verse that repeat words and phrases Much of his poetry celebrates the fellowship of humanity, often in the context of the Civil War Ardor for the innate brotherhood of man and the spiritual virtues of democracy Grew up in Brooklyn, early career involved newspaper work. Wandered along the Atlantic seaboard, the south, and the Midwest Writing took a dramatic turn in his mid thirties. Turned from the undistinguished, conventional, and even sappy stuff of his newspaper days into the radically original and uniquely American celebration of self, spirit, and democracy. He spent much of the Civil War in D.C. as a volunteer nurse to wounded on both sides

Wallace Stevens

Works: "The Emperor of Ice Cream" (about death but ambiguously) Characteristic of Stevens: ambiguous death, use of odd and vivid imagery to convey a zen-like vision of the cosmos, modernist weirdness, unsettling ambiguities, arresting images, peculiar syntax

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Works: "The Escorial", "The Wreck of the Deutschland" Formalized the concept of the sprung rhyme Energetic cadences Difficulty reconciling his faith and his poetry Earliest poems: Keatsian sensuousness, a Ruskinian zest for natural detail, and a distinctive flair for aural and rhythmic effects; God and nature, crises of faith His surviving prose writings, including journals, letters, and sermons, articulate Hopkins's profound responsiveness to nature and beauty, his acumen as a literary critic and theorist of prosody, his playful wit, devoted friendliness, and spiritual and theological insights.

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

Works: "The Odour of Chrysanthemums" (story set in English coal mining town; main character awaits her husband's return from work in the mines, but he's dead; inner solitude resembles "The Dead"), Lady Chatterly's Lover (Constance, Sir Clifford, Oliver Mellors) Mystically inclined Moralist Disliked war Wanted to be free of the weight of formalism but not, as he said, to 'dish up the fragments as a new substance'. At times uneven, his poetry always has the immediate and personal quality of his prose

John Donne (1572-1631)

Works: "The Sun Rising", Holy Sonnets Donne's work falls into two distinct periods -Early poetry: "The Sun Rising", "The Flea", lighthearted and saucy, poetry of the ambitious sixteenth-century playboy and soldier/adventurer Career took a nosedive when he eloped with the daughter of an influential nobleman; entered the church Later career: Holy Sonnets; Poetry is searchingly religious, passionate sense of the Divine, a hard-nosed intelligence, a pointed wit; passionate, original, searching Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral Some of Donne's best known lines come from his sermons Notoriously obsessed with death Laudably direct, unpretentious style Abstained from classical references Language: direct, clear, and forthright without sacrificing beauty and originality Metaphysical Poet

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

Works: "The Vanity of Human Wishes", The Lives of the English Poets, essays for the journal The Rambler (which he edited and pretty much wrote), the first modern English Dictionary (contains tongue-in-cheek definitions, such as "lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge), Rasselas (a melancholy novel about the Prince of Abyssinia's unsuccessful quest for a happy and fulfilling "choice of life") Success came late Struggled with poverty until his forties

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Works: "The Yellow Wallpaper" (feminist; first-person; draws on gothic conventions to narrate the mental decline ofa women taken by her physician husband to an isolated estate to undergo a "rest cure"), Herland (feminist utopian; three male social scientists stranded in a blissfully all-female society)

Andrew Marvell

Works: "To His Coy Mistress"

A.E. Housman

Works: "To an Athlete Dying Young" (four-line stanzas of heroic couplets) Regular meter and rhyming scheme

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Works: "Ulysses," "Tithonus" (about a man granted eternal life but not eternal youth), "Crossing the Bar"

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

Works: "What is Poetry?" (defines poetry as the as the expression of the self to the self, as opposed to "eloquence," which is the expression of the self to another), On Liberty (argues that in democracy, the rights of individuals must be safeguarded against "tyranny of the majority"), The Subjection of Women, Autobiography (sig: account of melancholia) Committed social theorist and reformer One of the leading thinkers of the Victorian Age right from his youth. Much of Mill's writing concerns the importance of an individual's rights in relation to the demands of the State. Mill suffered from extreme depression as a young man. In struggling with that depression, he revised many of his philosophical views Keywords: utilitarianism (Mill's father, James, was a utilitarian), Jeremy Bentham, Individualism

Piers Plowman

ca. 1380 William Langland Composed of a series of eight allegorical visions where Will seeks out Truth in dreams. Written at the same time as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Written in alliterative verse (the masterpiece of the revival of alliterative verse form in the 14th century)

Beowulf

ca. 750 (sung by scops, Anglo-Saxon Bards, for centuries before being put to paper) Concerns a questioning hero who must battle supernatural monsters Names: Beowulf, Hrothgar, Grendel, the Geats (Beowulf's people), Wiglaf, Beaw, Heorot (the meadhall), Scyld Scefing Written in strong stress verse, internal organized by alliteration across the caesura, unstressed syllables not counted in the rhythm