GRE Literature in English Subject Test (II)

The Tatler

Richard Steele; early 18th century; periodical; this is where Steele published his "lubrications" under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff prior to starting the periodical The Spectator w/ Addison

Sir Thomas Malory

15th century; late Middle English; wrote Le Morte D'Arthur while he was in prison

"You taught me language, and my profit on't/ Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you/ For learning me your language!"

Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest

The Miller

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; 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; he knows and uses the tricks of the trade when it comes to weighing out grain; tells the tale of a carpenter (or Reeve) getting cuckolded by his boarder Nicholas

The Franklin's Tale

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; romantic tale about lover Aurelius, faithful wife Dorigen, and Dorigen's husband Arveragus

The Miller's Tale

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; a cuckold is tricked into sleeping on his roof in a washtub while his wife consorts with various suitors

The Reeve's Tale

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; a greedy miller named Simkin has his wife and daughter enjoyed by a pair of clerks, John and alan, whom he'd swindled earlier; Reeve's response to the miller's tale about the foolish carpenter

Doctor's Tale

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; a woman, Virginia, who has her father kill her in order to avoid falling into the clutches of Apius, an evil judge

Claudius

Hamlet's uncle; after the death of Hamlet's father, marries Hamlet's mother Gertrude; killed by Hamlet

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Hamlets "friends" who went to England w/ Hamlet with instructions that the recipient of the letter should kill him; not bright, and Hamlet alters the letter so they are killed

Leda

figure fr/ Greek mythology who was raped by Zeus, who came to her in the form of a giant swan; mother of Clytemnestra, twins Castor and Pollux, Helen of Troy; in most versions of the story, Helen is conceived when Leda is raped

Mr. Lockwood

first narrator of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

Starbuck

first-mate in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick

Minotaur

housed in King Minos's labyrinth, created by Daedalus

Roger Chillingworth

husband in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Judas Iscariot

identifies Jesus by kissing him in plain sight of the soldiers who arrest Jesus; paid 30 pieces of silver for his betrayal; eventually kills himself for the guilt

Pearl

illegitimate offspring of Hester and Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Aegisthus

in Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy, marries his lover Clytemnestra after they murder her husband, Agamemnon (technically Aegisthus's cousin); eventually killed by Orestes and Electra, who avenge death of their father Agamemnon

Iphigenia

in Aeschylus's Oresteia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, sacrificed in order to create fair wind to sail to Troy; victim of the curse on the House of Atrius

Thomas Sutpen

William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!; poor white who moves to Mississippi to become rich and powerful, but Civil War "ruins" things

Yoknapatawpha novels

William Faulkner; focus on the successive generations of a few families: the Snopes, Compsons, Sartorises; Quentin given to a Compson in each generation, but the first is a young Mississippi man who harbors a deeply felt, guilt-provoking incestuous passion for his sister Caddy leading to his suicie

Absalom, Absalom!

William Faulkner; life and death of Thomas Sutpen, poor white who moves to Mississippi with the intention of becoming rich and powerful; does so, with all the attendant riches of an antebellum Southern dynasty; so much is ruptured for the American South after its defeat in the Civil War that 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, telling the story to his Harvard roommate in fragments

The Plough and the Stars

O'Casey (early 20th century); Irish nationalism; sparked outrage at its premiere for presenting an unidealized vision of the Irish folk

400-1300

Old English (c. 1000, the English language became strongly influenced by medieval French); Battle of Hastings; authors: Caedmon (c. 670); author of Beowulf, (c. 750)

She Stoops to Conquer

Oliver Goldsmith; example of restoration comedy; late 18th century

Piers Plowman

William Langland (late 14th century); long poem composed of a series of eight allegorical visions, wherein Will, in his dreams, seeks out Truth; masterpiece of the revival of the alliterative verse from the 14th century

Sigurd the Volsung

William Morris; Nieblung legend

Othello (the work)

William Shakespeare; Othello is a war hero married to Desdamona (daughter of Duke of Venice, who is slow to accept marriage); Othello appoints Cassio as lieutenant, sparking Iago's jealousy; Iago convinces Othello that Cassio and Desdamona are lovers, leading Othello to strangle Desdamona; Othello kills self when realizes; engages issues of race (Othello is a "Moor," a black man ruling white subjects); major characters: Iago (typical antagonist, forebear of Milton's Satan)

As You Like It

William Shakespeare; pastoral comedy; follows its heroine Rosalind as she flees persecution in her uncle's court, accompanied by her cousin Celia to find safety and, eventually, love, in the Forest of Arden. In the forest, they encounter a variety of memorable characters, notably the melancholy traveller Jaques who speaks many of Shakespeare's most famous speeches; lines "all the world's a stage," "A fool! A fool! I met a fool in the forest," "too much of a good thing"

"She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways"

William Wordsworth (1800); one of the "Lucy" poems; well-known and often alluded to; theme similar to Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard"--death of one lovely person unknown to larger society

Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (late 18th/ early 19th century); contain some of the poets' finest works; typical romanticism

The Country Wife

William Wycherley (late 17th century); example of Restoration comedy; characters: Mr. Horner, Pinchwife, Sir Jasper Fidget, Mrs. Squeamish, Mrs. Dainty Fidget

Dainty Fidget

William Wycherley's The Country Wife

Jasper Fidget

William Wycherley's The Country Wife

Mr. Horner

William Wycherley's The Country Wife

Mrs. Squeamish

William Wycherley's The Country Wife

Pinchwife

William Wycherley's The Country Wife

Electra

in Aeschylus's Oresteia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, sister of Iphigenia and Orestes; she and Orestes murder Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus to avenge their father's death

Orestes

in Aeschylus's Oresteia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; murders Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus to avenge father's death; plagued by the Furies for killing w/in family but in trial Athena declares a tie in his favor, finally breaking curse on House of Atrius

Cassandra

in Aeschylus's Oresteia, daughter of Trojan King Priam, abducted by Agamemnon after the war

Jefrey Aspern

fictionalized version of Lord Byron devised by Henry James in his novella The Aspern Papers

The Fates

in Greek mythology, choose a man's destiny and life span

Urania

in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); astronomy

* Thalia (the muse)

in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); comedy

Terpsichore

in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); dance

*Calliope

in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); epic poetry

Clio

in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); history

* Erato

in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); love/ lyric poetry

The School for Scandal

Richard Sheridan (late 18th century); example of Restoration comedy; characters: Sir Peter Teazle, Maria, Lady Sneerwell; Sir Benjamin Backbite, Charles Surface

Charles Surface

Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal

Lady Sneerwell

Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal

Maria

Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal

Sir Benjamin Backbite

Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal

Sir Peter Teazle

Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal

Euterpe

in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); lyric poetry

Polyhymnia

in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); songs to the gods

* Melphomene

in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); tragedy

Thalia (the grace)

in Greek mythology, one of the three "graces" (daughter of Zeus and Eurynome); good cheer

Euprosyne

in Greek mythology, one of the three "graces" (daughter of Zeus and Eurynome); mirth

Aglaia

in Greek mythology, one of the three "graces" (daughter of Zeus and Eurynome); splendor

The Furies

in Greek mythology, punish crimes

The Naiads, Nereides, Oceanides

in Greek mythology, three classes of water nymphs

Titans

in Greek/ Roman mythology, ruled the earth before the Olympians overthrew them; ruled by Chronos/ Saturn

Chronos/ Saturn

in Greek/ Roman mythology, ruler of the Titans

Structuralism

in continental Europe while New Criticism was in US and England; related to semiotics; buzzwords: sign, signifier, signified, binary oppositions

Paul Lawrence Dunbar

late 19th century; African-American poet; used idioms of black speech in verse

George Meredith

late 19th century; Victorian novelist and poet; early novels largely conformed to Victorian literary conventions, his later novels demonstrated a concern with character psychology, modern social problems, and the development of the novel form; influenced by Keats and Tennyson; wrote An Essay on Comedy; "The Lark Ascending," The Egoist (comic novel)

Charles Swinburne

late 19th century; Victorian poet; known for rebellious attitude toward Victorian morality and excellent sense of rhyme and meter

George Eliot

mid 19th century English novelist whose real name was Marian Evans

ballad

typical stanza of folk ballad; length of lines determined by stressed syllables only; ABCB rhyme scheme (EX: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner")

infinitive

unconjugated verb w/ "to" in front of it; (EX: "to be or not to be")

Sir Fopling Flutter

George Etherege's The Man of Mode

Faust

Goethe; differs from Marlowe's telling in that protagonist's soul is bartered in exchange for knowledge and Faust deals with a single satanic agent, Mephistopheles

Gertrude

Hamlet's mother; after husband's death, marries brother in law Claudius; drinks a poisoned cup intended for Hamlet

Charles Bingley

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Elizabeth Bennet

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

George Wickham

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Colonel Brandon

Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

Edward Ferris

Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood

Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

John Willoughby

Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

Lucy Steele

Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

The Monk

M.G. "Monk" Lewis; gothic novel

My Antonia

Willa Cather; story of the hard-scrabble Nebraska pioneer life of Jim Burden and Antonia Shimerda

"Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/ In the forests of the night,/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

William Blake's "The Tyger" (late 18th century)

"The Second Coming"

William Butler Yeats (early 20th century); probably the most quoted poem of the 20th century

The Way of the World

William Congreve (late 17th/ early 18th century); example of Restoration comedy; characters: Millimant (woman); Mirabell (man); Mr. Fainall, Lady Wishfort, Foible (a woman), Mincing (woman)

Lady Wishfort

William Congreve's The Way of the World

Mincing

William Congreve's The Way of the World

Mr. Fainall

William Congreve's The Way of the World

A Hazard if New Fortunes

William Dean Thomas; late 19th century

Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder

biblical allusion

Jean Toomer's Cane

biblical allusion

Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh

biblical allusion

Hestia/ Vesta

goddess of the hearth and home

George Gascoigne

mid 16th century

Anne Bradstreet

mid 17th century

Samuel Butler (the former)

mid 17th century; wrote Hudibras (hence the term hudibrastic); had a genius for bad poetry

Jonathan Swift

mid 18th century; Restoration comedy; wrote Gulliver's Travels

Henry Fielding

mid 18th century; tone of comic irony; wrote Tom Jones; parodied Samuel Richardson

Thomas Gray

mid 18th century; wrote "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard"

JS Mill

mid 19th century

RH Dana, Jr.

mid 19th century

Emily Dickinson

mid 19th century American poet; distinctive verse style: short, clipped lines, radiant mystic intensity; frequent use of dashes; lived in the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts her entire life, seldom traveled, did not marry; prolific w/ extraordinary inner life

The Castle of Otranto

Horace Walpole; first gothic novel

Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls

"Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It rolls for thee" -John Donne sermon

auxiliary

"Helping verb;" often a form of "be," "have," or "do;" (EX: I am working on it)

"veni, vidi, vici"

"I came, I saw, I conquered"

"cognito ergo sum"

"I think therefore I am"

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury

"It is a tale/ told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ signifying nothing" -William Shakespeare's Macbeth

"honi soit qui mal y pense"

"Shame on him who thinks this evil;" motto of a British order of chivalry

Jean Genet

"Theater of the Absurd;" French; one of the great antisocial authors of world lit. and spent much of his time in jail; turns the moral universe on its head, aestheticizing and eroticizing vice, crime, and cruelty in a gorgeously fevered, baroque prose; not prolific, but masterful; wrote: novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief's Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers; plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens

China Achebe's Things Fall Apart

"Things fall apart; The center cannot hold" -William Butler Yeat's "The Second Coming"

*Marxist theory

"left wing" criticism; economic situation surrounding lit; texts are not timeless; inspired: New Historicism, feminist criticism, black criticism, post-colonial criticism, identity criticism; buzzwords: base (material economic reality), superstructure (cultural superstructure built upon it), class, proletariat, means of production, bourgeoisie, imperialism, dialectical materialism

Beowulf

(ca. 750) Beowulf slays monster Grendel and Grendel's mother and becomes king; years later, he is killed by a dragon and Wiglaf becomes king; characters: Beowulf, Grendel, Grendel's mother, Hrothgar, Beaw, Scyld Scefing, Heorot (not a person--Beowulf's mead-hall), Wiglaf

Thomas Carew

(early 17th century) wrote "An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul's, Dr. John Donne"

Mikhail Bakhtin

(early-mid 20th century) buzzword: heteroglossia; Russian critic rediscovered in 1970s; the novel as a form is characterized by the play of the microlanguages that exist within a language; dialects "do battle"

Carson McCullers

(female) American southern gothic writer; early-mid 20th century; wrote The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

The "Pearl" Poet

(late 14th century) supposed to have written Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience, Cleanness

Mosca

(the fly) Volpone's friend in Ben Johnson's comedy

Volpone

(the fox) main character of Ben Johnson's comedy Volpone, or The Fox

Corvino

(the raven) character in Ben Johnson's comedy Volpone

sonnet

14-line form composed of rhyming iambic pentameter lines

Spenserian sonnet

14-line poem rhyming ABAB BCBC CDCD EE; has 1 final couplet plus 2 couplets in the body (EX: Edmund Spenser's "One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand")

English/ Shakespearean sonnet

14-line poem rhyming ABAB CDCS EFEF GG; has 1 final couplet (EX: Shakespeare's Sonnet 73)

Italian/ Petrarchan sonnet

14-line poem rhyming ABBAABBA CDECDE; first 8 lines called the octave and last 6 called the sestet; has 0 final couplets (EX: John Milton's "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent")

Geoffrey Chaucer

14th century; Middle English

William Langland

14th century; contemporaneous with Chaucer; Middle English; wrote Piers Plowman

Richard Steele

18th century; Irish; wrote The Spectator with Joseph Addison, The Tattler, The Conscious Lovers (sentimental comedy)

Aphra Behn

18th century; first woman to make her way writing; she and her successors Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood denounced for scandalous lives; wrote: The Rover

Joseph Addison

18th century; wrote The Spectator with Richard Steele

villanelle

19-line form rhyming ABA AB1 AB3 AB1 AB3 AB13 w/ repetition of 1st and 3rd lines throughout the poem (EX: Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night")

M.G. "Monk" Lewis

19th century; gothic novelist; wrote The Monk

Maya Angelou

20th century; wrote "On the Pulse of Morning;" best known for her autobiographies, esp. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

terza rima

3-line stanzas w/ interlocking rhyme scheme ABA BCB CDC etc... (EX: Dante's Divine Comedy)

sestina

39-line poem of 6 stanzas of 6 lines each and a final stanza (called an envoi) of 3 lines; not rhymed--instead, repeated end words (EX: Rudyard Kipling's "Sestina of Tramp-Royal")

Aeschylus

5th century BCE Greek tragedian; drew upon a set of stories concerning an ancient familial curse on the House of Atreus (abduction of Menelaues's wife and subsequent Trojan War, ill wind for Greek fleet and subsequent sacrafice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia to turn the wind, offending Achilles, etc...) write his Oresteia trilogy; also wrote Prometheus Bound

spenserian

9-line stanza that Spenser created for The Faerie Queene; first 8 lines are iambic pentameter, final line in iambic hexameter is an alexandrine; rhyme scheme ABABBCBCC (EX: Spenser's The Faerie Queene); has also been used by noble poets up into 20th century

"To an Athlete Dying Young"

AE Housman; four-line stanzas of heroic couplets

Prometheus Bound

Aeschylus; Prometheus is an (immortal) Titan who befriends and helps to civilize man; bestows fire upon mankind, which he stole fr/ god of fire and craftsmen, Hephaistos; enrages Zeus, who has Prometheus bound to a cliff and tormented; ea. day a vulture eats his liver

Agamemnon (the work)

Aeschylus; part of the Oresteia; Clytemnestra, angry with husband Agamemnon for sacrificing their daughter and for bringing home his prescient love slave Cassandra, conspires with her lover Aegisthus to murder Agamemnon

Choephoroe/ "the Libation Bearers"

Aeschylus; part of the Oresteia; based on the advice of an oracle, Orestes (Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's exiled son) decides to avenge his father's murder; he and his sister Electra murder Clytemnestra and lover Aegisthus, but Orestes is tormented by the Furies

The Eumenides/ "Benevolent Ones"

Aeschylus; part of the Oresteia; one of three works about the cursed House of Atreus; Athena presides over a precedent-setting murder trial: Orestes vs. the Furies for the murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus; the jury is hung; Athena decides in favor of Orestes but placates the Furies by offering to share the ruling of Athens

Seven against Thebes

Aeschylus; story of house of Thebes (ie: Oedipus's offspring); war btw/ the brothers Eteocles and Polyneices, who can't agree to share the throne

The Stranger

Albert Camus; begins with the death of the narrator's mother; centers around seemingly motiveless killing of a stranger on a beach and the subsequent trial; disaffected, matter-of-fact narrator

"Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old/ It is the rust we value, not the gold/ Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learn'd by rote/ And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote"

Alexander Pope

The Dunciad

Alexander Pope (late 17th/ early 18th century); mock epic (compare to Rape of the Lock); savage assault on bad poetry and writing by anyone who'd crossed Pope's path or otherwise offended him, esp. Colley Cibber, poet laureate of England; concentrates on the coronation ceremony of Bayes as the poet laureate of Dulness, during which everyone in attendence falls asleep; suggests that Dulness will ultimately prevail over arts and sciences

Belinda

Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock; modeled after Arabella Fermor, whose hair was cut by Lord Petre

"Ulysses"

Alfred Lord Tennyson (mid 19th century); incl. many 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; famous lines: "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."

"In Memoriam A.H.H."

Alfred Lord Tennyson (mid 19th century); popular and influential poem; exemplifies "in memoriam" stanza form, composed of four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming ABBA; famous line: "Nature, red in tooth and claw"

"Nature, red in tooth and claw"

Alfred Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H."

"...All the charms/ Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you;/ For I am all the subjects that you have,/ Which first was mine own king..."

Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest

William Carlos Williams

American modernist; spare but warm verse associated with the imagist school of poetry; "no ideas but in things;" easily accessible language and quotidian imagery; wrote: Paterson (concerns life in hometown of Paterson, NJ, where he practiced medicine), "This is just to say" ... I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox...

Sylvia Plath

American poet; married to Ted Hughes for several years before committing suicide in late 20th century; poems about stormy relationships with father; wrote: Ariel (collection known for the haunting, violent, bitter, pitiless poems), The Bell Jar (recounts the events surrounding her nervous breakdown)

"To His Coy Mistress"

Andrew Marvell (late 17th century); epitomizes recurring theme among 17th century cavalier poets: come and have sex with me immediately because before you know it we'll be rotting in our graves; famous line: "But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near;/ And yonder all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity"

"But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near;/ And yonder all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity"

Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"

The Mysteries of Udolpho

Anne Radecliffe (late 17th/ early 18th century); inspired by Horace Walpole's gothic aesthetic; example of gothic explique (summing up and revealing the true causes of seeming impossibilities), laying the foundation for the Detective Story

Frogs

Aristophanes; pokes fun at the Greek tragedians Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus

Clouds

Aristophanes; ridicules the philosopher Socrates

Lysistrata

Aristophanes; title character's name means "she breaks up armies"

hamartia

Aristotle's word for "tragic flaw" but doesn't imply fate--instead, implies an inherrent psychological flaw in tragic character (EX: Oedipus's hasty temper; Macbeth's lust for power)

Vautrin

Balzac's Lost Illusions and Pere Goriot; criminal mastermind

La Comedie Humaine

Balzac; panorama of Post-Napoleonic French life

Lost Illusions

Balzac; young, handsome, talented man, Lucian de Rubempre, travels to Paris with a married woman to make his literary name; loses the woman, betrays his talent, sells out not only himself but his family, mistresses, etc; dies after making an unlikely comeback orchestrated by Balzac's criminal mastermind, Vautrin

Volpone, or The Fox

Ben Johnson; set in Venice; Volpone and his confederate Mosca try to bilk everyone who comes across their path, esp. Volpone's heirs; 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 ways to the authorities, bringing ruin on them both; characters named according to personalities animals are given by folclore

"To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare"

Ben Jonson (early 17th century); references many other poets (incl. Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont, Lyly, Kyd (wrote The Spanish Tragedy), Marlowe, Eschylus, Sophocles ; comprised of rhymed couplets; famous lines: "He was not of an age, but for all time!" "Sweet Swan of Avon" "Star of Poets"

Baptista

Bianca and Katharina's father in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew; Padua merchant

Dracula

Bram Stoker; narrated mostly by Jonathan Harker

"Caliban upon Setebos"

Browning; dramatic monologue about the character fr/ The Tempest

1603-1625 (early 17th century)

Caroline period; reign of Charles I; authors: John Donne, John Webster

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Carson McCullers; story of the chaos wrought on a woman's life when her cousing Lymon Willis, a dwarf both deformed and powerfully charismatic, enters her world

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens; partly autobiographical; characters: Mr. and Mrs. Macawber, Uriah Heep, David Copperfield

1649-1660 (mid 17th century)

Charles I executed; Cromwell and the Interregnum; authors: John Milton, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë; Bildungsroman; follow's Janes' love of Mr. Rochester, master of fictitious Thornfield Hall; gradual unfolding of Janes' moral and spiritual sensibility; preoccupied with social criticism and morality

The Nun's Priest's Tale

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Chaunticleer the rooster is kidnapped by sir Russel, a sweet-tongued fox; Chaunticleer gets away when the fox opens his mouth to brag; one of the most frequently studied tales b/c it's a mock-heroic, parodying some of the conventions of classical epic poetry such as the Illiad

Clerk's Tale

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Griselda, a patient wife, who endures trials of her needlessly jealous husband, the Marquis Walter

The Prioress's Tale

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Jews kill a Christian boy; he continues to sing Alma Redemptoris after his throat is slit, allowing murderer to be found; considered to be anti-simetic, though likely not strange for a time when Christians were trying to justify their systematic killing of Jews

The Wife of Bath's Tale

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; King Arthur's knight commits rape; to escape sentencing, he must discover what women desire most; he marries an old witch for the answer (sovereignty); she turns into a beautiful woman

The Merchant's Tale

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Knight January is old and blind; his young wife, May, cheats on him (in a pear tree), but when his sight is restored, May said she did it to cure him

The Wife of Bath

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; a bit deaf, gap-toothed, plump, ruddy, not bad-looking in her preposterous way, wears scarlet stockings, an enormous hat, comfortable both riding a horse and swapping stories with the boys; has had five husbands, feminist philosophies of love, sex, and (re) marriage; tells story of King Arthur's knight trying to learn what women want

The Pardoner

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; thin, vain, smooth-skinned blond with a bag full of pardons "all hot from Rome;" the host calls him a pretty boy, and Chaucer suggests he's not "all man;" nothing more than a successful huckster w/ bits of the true cross, a scrap of St. Peter's sail, and a holy sheep bone that when dunked in a well turns the water into a cure-all potion; the host threatens to cut off his testicles

The Pardoner's Tale

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; three drunkards search for death but instead find a treasure, over which they murder each other; moral is supposedly "Radix malorum est Cupiditas," or "Love of money is the root of all evil"

The Merchant

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; wears motley and a beaver hat, talks about little else but business concerns, which he unfailingly points out are profitable; he's actually in debt, but he bears himself with such calculated dignity that no one suspects it; tells a bawdy story about blind and batty January being cuckolded by young wife

Griselda

Chaucer's Clerk's Tale; patient wife who endures trials of her needlessly jealous husband

Apius

Chaucer's Doctor's Tale; evil judge who wants to take Virginia's virginity

Virginia

Chaucer's Doctor's Tale; has her father kill her in order to avoid falling into the clutches of the evil judge Apius

Dorigen

Chaucer's Franklin's Tale; Averagus's faithful wife

Arveragus

Chaucer's Franklin's Tale; Dorigen's husband

Aurelius

Chaucer's Franklin's Tale; Dorigen's lover

January

Chaucer's Merchant's Tale; old blind knight who is cuckolded by his wife May; gains sight back only to witness the deed being done in a pair tree; naive

May

Chaucer's Merchant's Tale; young wife who cuckolds old husband January in a pear tree; clever enough to convince him that she did the deed only to help him get his sight back

Alison

Chaucer's Miller's Tale; carpenter's wife; cuckolds husband with attractive young Nicholas and tricks other suitor Absalom into kissing her ass

"Handy" Nicholas

Chaucer's Miller's Tale; good-looking, clever young scholar and boarder with the carpenter and his wife; takes a liking to carpenter's wife Allison, with whom he's plays tricks on Allison's lovers

Absalom (Chaucer)

Chaucer's Miller's Tale; suitor who gets farted upon by Alison and Nicholas; sticks Nicholas with a hot poker

Perteltote

Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale; Chanticleer's favorite hen

Chanticleer

Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale; handsome, vain rooster who gets snatched by Sir Russel the fox

Sir Russel

Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale; silver-tongued fox

John and Alan

Chaucer's Reeve's Tale; clerks whom Simkin the miller swindles and they later "enjoy" Simkin's wife and daughter

Simkin

Chaucer's Reeve's Tale; greedy miller (designed to upset Chaucer's Miller); has his wife and daughter enjoyed by a pair of clerks

"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"

Christopher Marlowe (late 16th century); often alluded to; famous line "Come live with me and be my love/ And we will all the pleasures prove;" 4-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter with AABB rhyme scheme

Tamburlaine the Great

Christopher Marlowe (late 16th century); story of a Scythian shepherd, Tamburlaine, who becomes an extraordinarily ferocious and successful conqueror in Asia Minor; characters: Tamburlaine, Zenocrate (main female character)

Dr. Faustus

Christopher Marlowe (late 16th century); story of a sorcerer who sells his soul in return for power; Faustus is served and persecuted by Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Mephistopheles

"Come live with me and be my love/ And we with all the pleasures prove"

Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love;" often quoted and alluded to by English poets like Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, Robert Herrick, and C. Day Lewis

Tamburlaine

Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great; Scythian shepherd who becomes an extraordinarily ferocious and successful conqueror in Asia Minor

The Review

Daniel Defoe; 18th century; periodical

"Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry"

Denise Levertov's "The Secret" (1960s)

Pip

Dickens' Great Expectations

Mr. and Mrs. Macawber

Dickens's David Copperfield

Uriah Heep

Dickens's David Copperfield

Cantos

Ezra Pound; story of Odysseus; rhythm suggests Old English caesura; by alluding to Anglo-Saxon epic form, mimics the antiquity of Homer's ancient Greek; opening line: "And then went down the ship,/ Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea"

Howard's End

E.M. Forster; early 20th century

Aspects of the Novel

EM Forster; literary criticism; formulation of flat and round characters

1500-1558 (early 16th century)

Early Tudor period; reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary; authors: John Skelton, Thomas More

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton; early 20th Century

The Faerie Queene

Edmund Spenser (late 16th century); exemplifies the 9-line Spensarian stanza: ABAB BCBC C with first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the last in iambic hexameter, known as an alexandrine

Axel's Castle

Edmund Wilson's collection of essays; popularized the play Axel by Le Compte Villiers De L'isle Adam

The Female Spectator

Eliza Haywood

1558-1603 (late 16th century)

Elizabethan period; reign of Elizabeth I; authors: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare

"No coward soul is mine/ No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere"

Emily Bronte's "No Coward Soul Is Mine"

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë; stark depiction of mental and physical cruelty; challenged Victorian ideals; characters: Heathcliff (orphan, in love with Catherine), Catherine, Edgar Linton, Nelly Dean, Lockwood,

"Death is a dialogue between the spirit and the dust"

Emily Dickinson

Long Day's Journey into Night

Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical play; not performed until after his death

Medea

Euripides; a woman who, outraged at being ungratefully abandoned by her lover, Jason, kills his bride-to-be, the bride's father Creon, and her own children (by Jason); she gets away with it, too

Agamemnon

FR/ HOMER'S ILIAD: Spartan; attempts to seize Troy b/c Paris stole his brother's wife Helen of Sparta; abuses power as commander in chief and takes Achilles's lover, Bryseis; eventually apologizes to Achilles; FR/ AESCHYLUS'S ORESTEIA: after the "successful" Trojan war, returns to Sparta w/ Cassandra, Priam's daughter, as his mistress; wife Clytemnestra jealous and murders Agamemnon (justified by fact that Agamemnon had earlier sacrificed daugther Iphigenia in order to sail to Troy); all of this is a product of the curse on the House of Atrius

Sentimental Education

Flaubert; extended reworking of first part of Lost Illusions; main character, Frederick Moreau, is stuck with an obsesive love for a married bourgeois which comes to naught; as ever, Flaubert pitilessly exposes everyone and everything as petty, vain, despicably commercial, and utterly unable to live up to his or their own ideals

Beatrice

Florentine woman of whom Dante thought highly enough to make her his guide through Heaven in Paradiso; their meeting (when both were 9 years old) is possibly the single most famous example of love at first sight in literary history--recorded in Dante's Vita Nuova

George Sand

French novelist whose real name was actually Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin

Psychoanalytic/ Freudian theory

Freud, Herald Bloom; interpretation of dreams where unconscious comes first and language mapped onto it; buzzwords: oedipal complex, libido, id, ego, superego, subconscious, repression, resistance

Abraham

Genesis; had a son named Ishmael with his wife's servant Hagar and then a son named Isaac with his wife Sarah; asked by God to sacrifice Isaac but stopped last minute

Cain

Genesis; son of Eve (along w/ Abel and Seth); "a tiller of the ground" who slays Abel after Lord appreciates Abel's offerings more; as punishment driven out of God's sight to take up residence in East of Eden, but is marked by God's protection

Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer (late 14th century); written in Middle English; a group of pilgrims, including the author, journeys to the religious shrine at Canterbury, telling stories on the way to pass the time; written in several different meters, but rhyming couplet used in prologue predominates

The Prioress

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; dainty, materialistic, sentimental about her little dogs; wears a well-pleated wimple, a rosary made of coral, and a golden brooch with "Love conquers all" inscribed upon it; tells a tale about the miracle of a Christian boy singing after death

The Nun's Priest(s)

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; in Prologue, three priests accompany the prioress; one of them tells the story of Chaunticleer the rooster escaping the fox's mouth

The Knight

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; valorous, chivalrous, polite; everything you'd expect a knight to be; tells a tale about two knights fighting for love

Arcite

Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale; aided by Mars to fight for Emily's hand; wins the battle but dies so that opponent Palamon gets the girl

Palamon

Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale; aided by Venus to fight for Emily's hand; after buddy Arcite dies, he gets the girl

"murder will out"

Geoffrey Chaucer's Prioress's Tale

The Knight's Tale

Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales; Arcite and Mars fight Palamon and Venus for Emily; Arcite wins but dies and Palamon gets Emily; first tale told following the general prologue

Mrs. Warren's Profession

George Barnard Schaw; scandalous Irish play having to do with Prostitution

The Man of Mode

George Etherege (late 17th century); example of Restoration comedy; characters: Dorimant, Sir Fopling Flutter, Mrs. Loveit

Dorimant

George Etherege's The Man of Mode

Mrs. Loveit

George Etherege's The Man of Mode

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God, it will flame out, like shining from shook foil"

Gerard Manley Hopkins's "God's Grandeur"

"No worst, there is none. Pitched past with grief,/ More pangs will, schooled at forelands, wilder wring."

Gerard Manley Hopkins's "No worst, there is none;" example of sprung rhythm

bildungsroman

German term meaning "novel of education;" typically follows a young person over years fr/ naivete and inexperience through the first struggles w/ harsher realities and hipocrisies of the adult world (EX: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; The Catcher in the Rye)

"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"

Gertrude Stein's "Sacred Emily"

Epeius

Greek craftsman who built the Trojan horse

Pan

Greek god of goatherds and shepherds; plays a fife and has a goat-like appearance)

Eris

Greek goddess of strife

Apollo/ Phoebis

Greek/ Roman god of healing, intellectual pursuits, fine arts, prophesy; later, god of sun and light

Eros/ Cupid

Greek/ Roman god of love

Hephaestus/ Vulcan

Greek/ Roman god of smiths and weavers

Ares/ Mars

Greek/ Roman god of war; in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, Mars helps Arcite win the battle for Emily's hand

Dionysus/ Bacchus

Greek/ Roman god of wine

Aphrodite/ Venus

Greek/ Roman goddess of love and beauty; in Virgil's Aenid, Venus is Aeneas's mother and convinces Aeneas to flee Troy in search of new home in Italy; in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, Venus helps Palamon in the battle for Emily's hand

Demeter/ Ceres

Greek/ Roman goddess of the harvest

Artemis/ Diana

Greek/ Roman goddess of the hunt; twin of Apollo

Persephone/ Proserpine

Greek/ Roman goddess of the underworl

Athena/ Minerva

Greek/ Roman goddess of wisdom

Hera/ Juno

Greek/ Roman goddess; protector of marriage

Hades/ Pluto

Greek/ Roman lord of the dead/ underworld (but not death itself)

Hermes/ Mercury

Greek/ Roman messenger god; leads dead to underworld; inventor of music

Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Hamlet allusion; two dummies whom Hamlet has killed in order to save his own life

Horatio

Hamlet's best friend and confidante; suggested at the end of the play that he will tell Hamlet's story

*Linguistic theory

Hegel; examines the philosophy of language and linguistics; aim to professionalize discipline in early 20th century; inspired: formalist criticism, new criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism

Goody Brown

Henry Fielding's Tom Jones

Molly

Henry Fielding's Tom Jones

Tom Jones

Henry Fielding; characters: Goody Brown, Molly

Hotspur

Henry IV's rival in Shakespeare's play of the same name

The Aspern Papers

Henry James; novella about the unsuccessful attempts of the biographer of a famous long-dead poet Jeffrey Aspern to secure some papers from the poet's aged former mistress and her homely daughter; set in Venice; protagonist encourages the daughter's growing infatuation with him in order to get the papers

Daisy Miller

Henry James; young, flirtatious American girl in Europe; candid yet ambiguously unwitting sexuality shakes the Old World sensibilities that surround her and ultimately prove to be her undoing

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville (mid 19th century); characters: Ishmael, Queequeg, Dashoo, TAshtego, Starbuck; ship's name is Pequod

"Bartleby the Scrivener"

Herman Melville (mid 19th century); short story about the bizarrely alienated Bartleby, whose mantra, whenever asked to do anything is "I prefer not to"

Billy Budd

Herman Melville (mid 19th century); story of a handsome sailor (a stock seafaring character elevated to Christlike status in this tale) undone by his own goodness and the plottings of the repulsive Claggart

"Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spaced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all storms, the Typoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudeless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town"

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, "The Candles"

Telemachus

Homer's Odyssey; Odysseus's son; almost killed by angry suitors; helps Odysseus slaughter the suitors and the servants who had helped suitors

Penelope

Homer's Odyssey; Odysseus's wife, beset by suitors in Odysseus's long absence but manages to put them off with ruses and sheer obstinacy

Polyphemus

Homer's Odyssey; cyclops that Odysseus and his men encounter and blind on their way home, leading father, Poseidon, to be enraged

Calypso

Homer's Odyssey; goddess who detains Odysseus on the island of Ogygia for 7 years (the point where the poem begins) but finally releases him at Zeus's command

Circe

Homer's Odyssey; lives on the island of Aenea and turns Odysseus's men into pigs but after a year lets them leave the island as humans

Scylla and Charybdis

Homer's Odyssey; two monsters which Odysseus has to sail around

The Oddysey

Homer, 8th century BCE (though author and date are in dispute); epic poem; Odysseus tries to return home after sacking Troy (see the Iliad); cursed by Poseidon, he drifts at sea for ten years, has various adventures (cyclops Polyphemus, giants, Circe who turns men into pigs, the monsters Scylla and Charybdis, the Siren's song, Zeus striking down men who killed cows of Helios, Calypso's island, an angry cyclops daddy and sea god Poseidon sending him to land of Scheria) and finally gets home to find wife Penelope fending off avid suitors; he and Telemachus get rid of the lot

The Iliad

Homer, 8th century BCE (though author and date are in dispute); epic poem; describes events that took place in 12th century BCE Troy (modern Turkey); Agamemnon and Achilles of Sparta besiege Troy b/c Paris of Troy stole married Helen of Sparta; Achilles's best friend dies as the Trojans beat back the Spartan Greeks (including Odysseus); Achilles avenges his death by killing Paris's brother, Hector

Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen (late 18th/ early 19th century); parody of Anne Radcliffe's gothic novels; characters: Catherine Morland, the Allens, Henry Tilney, John Thorpe

Frank Churchill

Jane Austen's Emma

Harriet Smith

Jane Austen's Emma

Jane Fairfax

Jane Austen's Emma

Miss Bates

Jane Austen's Emma

Mr. Knightley

Jane Austen's Emma

Emma Woodhouse

Jane Austen's Emma; "handsome, clever and rich"

Fanny Price

Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Catherine Morland

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

Henry Tilney

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

John Thorpe

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

Anne Elliot

Jane Austen's Persuasion

Elizabeth Elliot

Jane Austen's Persuasion

Playboy of the Western World

JM Synge (early 20th century); play; morally unflattering portrayal of the Irish working class drew protest and angry criticism even as Synge's language was praised for its poetic richness

Lacanian theory

Jacques Lacan; signifiers are substitutions w/o clear referent (compare to Saussure or Hegel); language structures the unconscious (compare to Freud, the other way around); marriage of linguistic and psychological theory; buzzwords: mirror, phallus, signifier/ signified, substitution, desire, jouissance, objet petit a, imaginary order, symbolic order, real order

"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"

James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake

Stephen Dedalus

James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; name comes fr/ creator of the labyrinth that housed the Minotaur

Leopold Bloom

James Joyce's Ulysses; "Odysseus"

"The Dead"

James Joyce; part of short story collection Dubliners; Gabriel Conroy attends a party with his wife Gretta; a series of events, including Gretta's solemn reaction to one of the songs sung at the party, reveal a side of Gretta's past that Gabriel didin't know--a girlhood lover, Michael Furey, who died from illness; epiphany ruptures the pastoral construction of the rest of the story, ending with Gabriel's meditation on the snow

Ulysses

James Joyce; sequel to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Stephen Dedalus becomes the Telemachus to Leopold Bloom's Odysseus; follows the travels of Bloom throughout Dublin in an unremarkable day in 1904; structurally analogous to Homer's epic, and each of the episodes of the book based on an episode of in the epic; famous for its difficulty; incl. famous stream-of-consciousness from "Penelope," Leopold Bloom's wife Molly Bloom ending w/ the famous line "yes I said yes I will Yes"

Finnegans Wake

James Joyce; tough language, English incorporating a variety of languages into a kind of dreamspeak

Little Billham

James's The Ambassadors

Lambert Strether

James's The Ambassadors; main character; tries to convince Little Billham to live life to the fullest

Isabel Archer

James's The Portrait of a Lady

Mansfield Park

Jane Austen (late 18th/ early 19th century); characters: Bertrams of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, Mrs. Norris

Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen (late 18th/ early 19th century); characters: Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Lucy Steele, Edward Ferris, John Willoughby, Colonel Brandon

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen (late 18th/ early 19th century); characters: Elizabeth Bennet, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Charles Bingley, George Wickham

Emma

Jane Austen (late 18th/ early 19th century); characters: Emma Woodhouse (handsome, clever, rich); Mr. Knightley, Miss Bates, Frank Churchill, Harriet Smith, Jane Fairfax

Persuasion

Jane Austen (late 18th/ early 19th century); characters: Sir Walter Elliot, Elizabeth Elliot, Anne Elliot, Frederick Wentworth, Kellynch Hall (a manor, not a person)

Frederick Wentworth

Jane Austen's Persuasion

Sir Walter Elliot

Jane Austen's Persuasion

"But love is blind, and lovers cannot see/ the pretty follies that themselves commit... What, must I hold a candle to my shames?"

Jessica in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

Dreamsongs

John Berryman; mordant style; characters: Henry, Mr. Bones

The Pilgrim's Progress

John Bunyan (late 17th century); allegory of the believer's journey toward redemption; protagonist, Christian, slogs through life, passing places like the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair on his way to the Celestial City

"The Flea"

John Donne (late 16th/ early 17th century); class example of early Donne because playful and sensual; similar theme to Marvell's poetry

"The Sun Rising"

John Donne (late 16th/ early 17th century); class example of early Donne because playful and sensual; upset with sun for waking him from lover's sleep

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main"

John Donne's sermon (the same sermon that includes "for whom the bell tolls")

Absalom and Achitophel

John Dryden (late 17th century); uses biblical characters to analogize a political crisis during the reign of Charles II; hedonistic Charles (King David in the story) spent so much time with his mistress that he had plenty of offspring but no legitimate (Protestant) heir, which left his Catholic brother, James, successor to the throne; characters: Absalom, Achitophel, King David; uses heroic couplets, poetic handling of sensitive situation

Mac Flecknoe

John Dryden (late 17th century); withering satirical attack upon dramatist Thomas Schadwell; relates the succession of Shadwell (Mac Flecknoe) to the throne of dullness; told in the form of a mock epic, strewn with allusions wot literary figures

King David (Dryden)

John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel; allegorical character representing Charles II

Absalom (Dryden)

John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel; allegorical character representing the Duke of Monmouth

Achitophel

John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel; allegorical character representing the Earl of Shaftesbury

Paradise Lost

John Milton (late 17th century); epic entirely concerned with first two chapters of Genesis; written in blank verse with merciless torture of English sentence structure;

Comus

John Milton (mid 17th century); example of a masque (also known as A Mask, Presented at Ludlow Castle); a lady lost in the woods is, upon falling asleep, captured by the lecherous Comus and carried back to face a series of erotic harassments

Areopagitica

John Milton (mid 17th century); political prose; defense of free expression and condemnation of censorship blocking God's word; argues that free press is God's will because published books are the means by which man will hear God's Revelation; famous line: "...as good almost kill 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."

Lycidas

John Milton (mid 17th century); written as pastoral elegy for Milton's recently passed friend Edward King; name comes from Theocritus's Idylls and from Herodotus; Lycidas is point of contact between some shared pastoral past, classical tradition, and Christian tradition; includes irregular rhythms and rhymes and heavily wrought allusiveness that makes his poetry so difficult

"But, oh! the heavy change, now thou art gone,/ Now thou art gone and never must return!"

John Milton's Lycidas

"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise/ (That last infirmity of noble mind)/ To scorn delights and live in laborious days"

John Milton's Lycidas

"Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth:/ And/ O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth"

John Milton's Lycidas

"Without the meed of some melodious tear"

John Milton's Lycidas

"Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more"

John Milton's Lycidas; exemplifies mixture of nature and poetry as Lycidas becomes point of contact between pastoral past, classical tradition, and Christian tradition

"Thou art my father, thou my author, thou my being gav'st me; whom should I obey but thee, whom follow?"

John Milton's Paradise Lost; late 17th century

Apologia Pro Vita Sua

John Newman (mid 19th century); example of Victorian essay; details reasoning behind controversial switch fr/ Anglican faith to Roman Catholicism

The Idea of a University

John Newman (mid 19th century); example of Victorian essay; eloquent essay espousing the value of a liberal arts education

The Stones of Venice

John Ruskin (mid to late 19th century); example of Victorian essay; brilliant architectural study of Venice in which Ruskin "reads" the economic, social, and moral history of Venice through its permanent structures

On Liberty

John Stuart Mill (mid 19th century); example of Victorian essay; argues that in democracy, the rights of individuals must be safeguarded against the tyranny of the majority

What Is Poetry?

John Stuart Mill (mid 19th century); example of Victorian essay; defines poetry as the expression of the self to the self, as opposed to "eloquence," which is the expression of the self to another

The Subjection of Women

John Stuart Mill (mid 19th century); excoriates--on the moral, rational, and practical levels--the social fact of its title

The Duchess of Malfi

John Webster; early 17th century; macabre, tragic play; begins as a love story about a duchess (known only as The Duchess) who marries beneath her class; ends as a nightmarish tragedy in which two brothers (Ferdinand and The Cardinal) exact their revenge, undoing themselves in the process

Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift (early/ mid 18th century); example of Restoration comedy; incl. Liliput (where everyone is six inches tall), Brobdingnag (where everyone is enormous), Laputa (a flying island); The Struldburgs (unhappy immortals who wish they could die); Houyhnhnms (intelligent, clean-living, right-thinking horses); Yahoos (idiotic, dirty, violent creaturs who turn out to be people, or at least look like them)

The Examiner

Jonathan Swift; 18th century; periodical

Battle of the Books

Jonathan Swift; coined the phrase "sweetness and light"

The Spectator

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele; 18th century; periodical

Nostromo

Joseph Conrad

"Youth"

Joseph Conrad; seafaring story in which the main character undergoes a terrible ordeal at sea and loves it because he is young and craves experience/ having his mettle tested

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad; set in colonial Africa and told aboard a ship

Tybalt

Juliet's cousin

Bianca

Katherina's younger and more desirable sister in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew

Growth of the Soul

Knut Hamsun; story of a rustic Norwegian's stoic, self-reliant determination to perservere in a hard land

Remembrance of Things Past

Marcel Proust; epic masterpiece which deals with his memories of ordinary childhood

"Dover Beach"

Matthew Arnold (mid 19th century)

Culture and Anarchy

Matthew Arnold (mid 19th century); example of Victorian essay; attacks philistinism in favor of classical "sweetness and light"

"Such, I say, is the wonderful virtue of even the beginnings of perfection, of having conquered even the plain faults of our animality, that the religious organisation which has helped us to do it can seem to us something precious, salutary, and to be propagated, even when it wears such a brand of imperfection on its forehand as this"

Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (late 19th century)

"On the Pulse of Morning"

Maya Angelou; read at the inauguration of Bill Clinton;

Jason

Medea's lover in Euripides's play of the same name

Cleanthe Brooks

New Critic; buzzwords "paraphrase," "irony," "paradox;" wrote "The Heresy of Paraphrase" in The Well-Wrought Urn, "Irony as a Principle of Structure"

1300-1500 (14th-16th centuries)

Middle English; Battle of Agincourt; Gutenberg Bible; authors: William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Malory

Henry

NOTE: in modern poetry, when you see the name Henry or the name Mr. Bones, the author is probably John Berryman

The Blithedale Romance

Nathaniel Hawthorne (mid 19th century); characters: Miles Coverdale, Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla; much of the action takes place on Blithedale Farm, based on an actual transcendentalist utopian community called Brook Farm (founded by prominent Boston social and literary figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau)

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne (mid 19th century); characters: Roger Chillingworth, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne, Pearl

The House of Seven Gables

Nathaniel Hawthorne (mid 19th century); characters: the Pyncheons, esp. Hepzibah Pyncheon, old Maule, Phoebe, Holgrave, Clifford; theme: the sins of the fathers visited upon later generations

Hollingsworth

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance

Miles Coverdale

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance

Priscilla

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance

Zenobia

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance

Hepzibah Pyncheon

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables

old Maule

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables

Clifford

Nathaniel Hawthorne's the House of Seven Gables

Phoebe

Nathaniel Hawthorne's the House of Seven Gables

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"

Shakespeare's Hamlet

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Rainer Maria Rilke's most important prose work; series of almost autobiographical musings; poetry-like

"Goodnight" lines in TS Eliot's The Waste Land

Ophelia's (fr/ Hamlet) final and craziest lines before she drowns

Prometheus Unbound

P.B. Shelley; uses Aeschylus's version of the Prometheus story

"I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated/ To closeness and the bettering of my mind..."

Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest

The Rambler

Samuel Johnson; 18th century; periodical

1660-1714 (late 17th/ early 18th century)

Restoration, Reign of Charles II; authors: William Congreve, George Etherege, John Bunyan, John Dryden

"My Last Duchess"

Robert Browning

the "Julia" poems

Robert Herrick (mid 17th century); includes "Upon Julia's Breasts," "Upon Julia's Clothes," and "The Night Piece, to Julia," inspired other poets to invent mistresses for themselves about which to write poems

"To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time"

Robert Herrick (mid 17th century); same theme as Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"--which is come and have sex with me immediately because before you know it we'll be rotting in our graves

Julia

Robert Herrick's so-called "Julia" poems, including "Upon Julia's Breasts," "Upon Julia's Clothes," and "The Night Piece, to Julia"

Benvolio

Romeo's cousin

Mercutio

Romeo's fabulous, hot-headed friend; responsible for the Queen Mab speech; death in a fight with Tybalt avenged by Romeo

Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett; pair of bums, Vladimir and Estragon (ie: Didi and Gogo), who await the arrival of the mysterious Godot, who fails to appear; another pair of bums, Lucky and Pozzo, also briefly but disturbingly take the stage

Hudibras

Samuel Butler; foolish knight errant (muddle-headed squire is Sir Ralpho), similar to Don Quixote; responsible for term "hudibrastic"

Rasselas

Samuel Johnson (mid/ late 18th century); melancholy novel about the Prince of Abyssinia's unsuccessful quest for a happy and fulfilling "choice of life"--a subject no doubt influenced by the fact that Johnson wrote it in a week in order to settle debts arising from his mother's funural

"Water, water, every where,/ And all the boards did shrink;/ Water, water, every where,/ Nor any drop to drink."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (late 18th century)

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's masterpiece; dramatic poem where Coleridge's 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

Biographia Literaria

Samuel Taylor Coleridge; outlines aesthetic principles--that imagination is the supreme faculty of the human intellect, and its cultivation is both the prerequisite and the aim of poetry; imagination is the process of keenly perceiving the phenomena of the world (not just fantasy), then re-expressing that phenomena through creative faculties of mind and soul, rational and irrational

The Country of the Pointed Firs

Sarah Orne Jewett; quiet and lyrical

The Adventures of Augie March

Saul Bellow; coming-of-age novel set in depression-era Chicago

Saussure's theory

Saussure; discontinuity btw/ signifiers and signifieds, where signifiers float in endless chain of substitution

Henry IV, Part II

Shakespeare history; extension of aspects of Henry IV, Part 1, rather than a straightforward continuation of the historical narrative, placing more emphasis on the highly popular character of Falstaff and introducing other comic figures as part of his entourage, including Ancient Pistol, Doll Tearsheet and Justice Robert Shallow

Henry IV, Part I

Shakespeare history; part of series that deals with successive reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V; depicts a span of history that begins with Hotspur's battle at Homildon in Northumberland against Douglas; ends with the defeat of the rebels at Shrewsbury in the middle of 1403

Jacques

Shakespeare's As You Like It; provides a sharp contrast to the other characters in the play, always observing and disputing the hardships of life in the country; responsible for the speech that includes "the seven ages of man" and "All the world's a stage..."

Imogen

Shakespeare's Cymbeline; embodiment of goodness

Falstaff

Shakespeare's Henry IV and V plays; In The Merry Wives of Windsor, he is the buffoonish suitor of two married women; comic: fat, vain, boastful; important quotes: "eaten out of house and home," "the world is my oyster"

"Nothing shall come of nothing"

Shakespeare's King Lear

Albany

Shakespeare's King Lear

Edgar

Shakespeare's King Lear

Edmund

Shakespeare's King Lear

Gloucester

Shakespeare's King Lear

Cordelia

Shakespeare's King Lear; Lear's "good" daughter

Goneril

Shakespeare's King Lear; one of Lear's daughters

Regan

Shakespeare's Kong Lear; one of Lear's daughters

"I kissed thee ere I killed thee, no way but this,/ Killing myself, to die upon a kiss"

Shakespeare's Othello

"Put out the light, and then put out the light"

Shakespeare's Othello

"She swore in faith 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange,/ 'Twas pitiful, 'twas wonderful pitiful."

Shakespeare's Othello

"For when my outward action doth demonstrate/ The native act and figure of my heart/ In compliment extern, 'tis not long after/ But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve/ For daws to peck at. I am not what I am"

Shakespeare's Othello; Iago

"Men should say what they seem;/ Or those that be not, would they might seem none!"

Shakespeare's Othello; Iago

"O! beware, my lord of jealousy;/ It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on"

Shakespeare's Othello; Iago

"Make use of time, let not advantage slip;/ Beauty within itself should not be wasted;/ Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime/ Rot and consume themselves in little time."

Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis

King Lear

Shakespeare; King asks his daughters Regan, Goneril, Cordelia (the good one) who loves him more, and they all fawn over him in a big power play; King goes nuts in the Heath; characters: Gloucester, Edmund, Edgar, Albany; "Nothing shall come of nothing"

Richard III

Shakespeare; Richard, duke of Gloucester, states his intension to wrest the kingship fr/ brother King Edward IV; first kills other brother George, Duke of Clarence; Edward falls ill but decides to pass crown to young sons (not Richard); upon Edward's death, Richard kills princes in Tower of London and Edward's widow Elizabeth flees with sons fr/ 1st marriage; Richard plans to marry Elizabeth's daughter, but Richard killed in battle started by Henry Tudor, and HT crowned king

Troilus and Cressida

Shakespeare; early 17th century

King John

Shakespeare; late 16th century

"I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you."

Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

"The devil can cite Scripture for purpose./ an evil soul producing holy witness/ Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,/ A goodly apple rotten at the heart./ O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!"

Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

Jessica

Shylock's daughter in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice; runs off w/ Lorenzo, causing Shylock to want to seek revenge on anyone and everyone, especially anti-semites; receives some money fr/ Antonio after he took it fr/ Shylock in complicated deal

An Apology for Poetry

Sir Philip Sidney; probably the most important piece of literary criticism fr/ the 16th century; humorously uses ironically hyperbolic praise and scorn to offset author's genuine passion for the subject

Morte D' Arthur

Sir Thomas Malory (late 15th century); late Middle English King Arthur story, though draws from a French source; NOTE: prose, so doesn't use the same bob-and-wheel structure as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Oedipus at Colonus

Sophocles; one of three works about Oedipus; Oedipus goes to Colonus with daughters Antigone and Ismene; his sons fight each other to the death for his vacated throne

Antigone

Sophocles; one of three works about Oedipus; despite penalty of death, Antigone attempts to bury her brother Polyneices; King Creon, her uncle, banishes her to a cave where she hangs herself; Creon's son Haemon, her lover, stabs himself in grief

Oedipus the King

Sophocles; one of three works about Oedipus; the Oracle prophesies that King Laius will have a son who will kill Laius and marry Queen Jocasta; but instead of killing newborn Oedipus to avoid the prophesy, they give him up for adoption; grown-up Oedipus solves a sphinx's riddle and marries the Queen; when incest is revealed, Jocasta commits suicide and Oedipus blinds himself

"Ash Wednesday"

T.S. Eliot; first long poem Eliot published after his conversion to Anglicanism; marks a stylistic turning point of Eliot's career in which he began to rely more heavily on traditional forms of melody and prosody; famous lines: "Because I do not hope to turn again"

The Red and the Black

Stendhal; built around notice Stendhal chanced across in the newspaper: a young man of humble origins and formerly a seminary student had been executed for the attempted murder of a woman he loved

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

Stephen Crane; dystopic story of a girl who is raised in wretched poverty by a hideous, alcoholic mother; heroine, Maggie, is driven to prostitution after having been manipulated, seduced, and cast aside by her lover Pete; ultimately kills herself

"Hamlet and his Problems"

T.S. Eliot; "objective correlative"; impersonality

"The Hollow Men"

T.S. Eliot; commonly seen as the last great poem of the early phase of Eliot's career; difficulty of search for meaning in post-war Europe; famous lines: "This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but with a whimper."

"Tradition and the Individual Talent"

T.S. Eliot; critical work acting as a poetic manifesto for Eliot's pre-conversion work; offers sustained argument in favor of impersonal poetry; tradition is not a collection of cultural artifacts from the past but an order for timeless work, uniting past and present; great artists attach themselves to tradition instead of breaking with it (compare w/ Joyce, where artist is "like the God of creation")

"The Waste Land"

T.S. Eliot; one of the greatest works of Anglophone Modernism; split into 5 sections and supplemented by 7 pages of notes; fragmented, polyglot vocabulary, dense cultural allusions; famous line: "April is the cruelest month" (allusion to Canterbury Tales)

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

TE Lawrence; account of involvement in the Arab revolt against the Turks at the time of World War I; suggestion of homosexual practice in the British army ranks (scandal!)

"Tithonus"

Tennyson; a man is granted eternal life but not eternal youth

Maggie Verver

The Golden Bowl

Augustus Carmichael

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Charles Tansley

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

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

Thomas Carew (early 17th century); celebrates Donne's masterfully-crafted verse; famous line: "The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds/ O'erspread, was purged by thee; the lazy seeds/ Of servile imitation thrown away,/ and fresh invention planted..."

Sartor Resartus

Thomas Carlyle (early to mid 19th century); means "the tailor reclothed," concerns the relationship of outward appearances and inward essences; relates Carlyle's spiritural growth; characters: Professor Teufelsdröckh (ie: the Wanderer), Weissnichtwo (professor's hometown), Everlasting Yea, Everlasting No

"For not this man and that man, but all men wake up mankind, and their united tasks the task of mankind"

Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (mid 19th century)

Professor Teufelsdröckh

Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus; ie: the "Wanderer"

"Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard"

Thomas Gray (mid 18th century); meditation upon death, especially death without worldly fame/ recognition/ full expression of one's gifts; ending epitaph likely written for Gray's friend Richard West; tremendously popular in it's time means many famous lines: "Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest,/ Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood"

"Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest,/ Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood"

Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard"

Utopia

Thomas More; prose work in Latin; translation into Engl. important for the prestige of the language; frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs; reminiscent of life in monasteries; characters: Mr. Windbag, Nonsenso

Lily Briscoe

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Minta Doyle

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Paul Rayley

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Anchises

Virgil's Aenid; Aeneas's father; carried out of a war-torn Troy on Aeneas's back

Laocoon

Virgil's Aenid; Trojan priest who warned against accepting the gift of the Trojan horse before being eaten by two giant sea snakes

Aeneas

Virgil's Aenid; Trojan soldier and son of Venus; leads fleet to find a new home in Italy (as prophesied), but not before he has an intense love affair with Dido, leaving her in a pit of despair and ultimate suicide

Evander

Virgil's Aenid; king of the Latins who teams up w/ Aeneas to combat Turnus (later killed) and the Rutuli

Dido

Virgil's Aenid; queen of Carthage; Aeneas's lover, but left behind when Aeneas continues journey to Rome; kils herself ofgrief, vowing that Carthage will avenge her (for Virgil's contemporary audience, Rome's recent wars w/ Carthage, known as the Punic wars, fulfill this prophesy); Dido is the subject of many allusions and often lumped along with other tragic women like Eve, Philomela (fr/ Ovid's Metamorphoses), Cleopatra, and Ophelia

The Aenid

Virgil; begins in medias res; after the Greek defeat of Troy, it prediction that the Trojans will found a great nation in Italy; Trojan soldier Aeneas tries to find new home, but Juno's wrath blows them off course; in Carthage, Aeneas woos Carthaginian Queen Dido and fills in what happened btw/ end of Iliad and now (Ulysses' Trojan Horse led the Trojans to flee) but then leaves to fulfill duty, causing Dido's grief and eventual suicide; Aeneas and his men partake in a series of battles on the shores of Italy, eventually to settle there

"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"

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (early 20th century)

Peter Walsh

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

Sally Seton

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf; describes the Ramsay family's two separate visits to a lighthouse; concerned with effects of passage of time; split into three sections, including middle section that is an elliptical prose experiment; invested in epistemological questions, particularly as they are inflected by temporality and characters' psychological experience of events; characters: Lily Briscoe, Charles Tansley, Augustus Carmichael, Paul Rayley, Minta Doyle

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf; narrates a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she readies her home for a party; novel eschews traditional beginning-middle-end form and foregrounds the minor details of the lives of the characters; written in stream-of-consciousness; interested in characters' interiority; characters: Septimus Smith, Richard Dalloway, Sally Seton, Peter Walsh

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf; one of the most important statements in 20th century feminist aesthetics; woman must be afforded the autonomy that men enjoy if they are to write; uses the 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 had

"nothing is merely one thing"

Virginia Woolfe's To the Lighthouse

Humbert Humbert

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita; creepy stepfather

Dolores Haze

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita; nicknamed Lolita by stepfather Humbert Humbert, with whom she becomes sexually involved

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov; controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a middle-aged literature professor called Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather

Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov; told through annotations to a mediocre poem; annotator is an insane academic named Charles Kinbote

Candide

Voltaire; Candide lives in a sort of Eden of optimism; he goes on adventures with Professor Pangloss and learns that optimism isn't so great after all

"The Emperor of Ice Cream"

Wallace Stevens; ambiguously about death; characteristic Stevens: use of odd and vivid imagery to convey a zen-like vision of the cosmos

"O Captain, My Captain"

Walt Whitman; poem memorializing Abraham Lincoln

"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

Walt Whitman; poem memorializing Abraham Lincoln

Romantic poets

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats

The Countess of Cathleen

Yeats's first published play (late 19th century); dramatizes an Irish fable concerning people who sell their souls in order to obtain food during a famine

skeltonics

a form of humorous poetry, using very short, rhymed lines and a pronounced rhythm, made popular by John Skelton; NOTE: the only real difference btw/ a skeltonic and doggerel is the quality of thought expressed (EX: "O Ye wretched Scots,/ Ye puant pisspots,/ It shall be your lots,/ To be knit up with knots" - Skelton's "How the Doughty Duke of Albany")

substantive

a group of words acting as a noun (EX: "playing the banjo is annoying")

epic poem

a long narrative about sustained heroicism; often begins w/ invocation of muse and in medias res (in the midst of things) and includes epic catalogs (long descriptions/ lists of equipment of participants), epic simile (lengthy comparison), interfering supernatural beings who toy with human participants, and a great battle/ contest/ or deed at the end; EX: Homer's Illiad

"Call me Ishmael," Herman Melville's Moby Dick

biblical figure Ishmael (Abraham's first son by servant Hagar); NOTE: book also alludes to the story of Jonah

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 getting out of jail (EX: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn; Defoe's Moll Flanders is a rare example of a female picaresque)

madrigal

a part-song for several voices, especially one of the Renaissance period, typically unaccompanied and arranged in elaborate counterpoint; "melodious birds sing madrigals" in Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love"

caesura

a pause that breaks a line of Old English verse; OR a particularly deep pause in a line of poetry (EX: "Lo! We Spear-Danes/ in days of yore" -Beowulf; "I sing of arms and the man,/ who first from the shores of Troy..." -Aenid)

metonymy

a phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature of the person (EX: "The pen is mightier than the sword" where the pen represents the written word and the sword represents violence -Edward Bulwer-Lytton's play Richelieu)

apostrophe

a speech addressed to someone not present or to an abstraction; innate grandiosity often leads to parody (EX: "Busy old fool, unruly sun,/ Why dost thou thus,/ Through windows, and through curtains call on us?" -John Donne's "The Sun Rising")

gerund

a verb acting as a noun clause; usually using the "-ing" form of the verb; (EX: "Eating worms is bad for you")

subordinate conjunction

a word that introduces a subordinate clause (EX: "Since you're awake, I'll just turn on the TV")

Virgil/ Vergil

admirer and student of Homer; wanted to write an epic that could be for the Romans what the Iliad and Odyssey had been for the Greeks; the formal qualities true of Homer's epics are also true of Virgil's; writing in Latin means great influence over later works (EX: Virgil leads Dante through Inferno and Purgatorio; structure of Milton's Paradise Lost lifted fr/ the Aenid; George Bernard Shaw's play Arms and the Man an allusion to poem's first line); wrote the Aenid

John Dryden's long poem Absalom and Achitophel

allegorical telling of King David's son Absalom, who tried to usurp throne

William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

allegorical telling of King David's son Absalom, who tried to usurp throne

Friedrich Schiller's essay "Laocoon"

alludes to a statue that was inspired by Virgil's description of Laocoon's cruel fate (Laocoon was a Trojan priest who tried to warn against the surprise attack on the Trojans before being eaten by two giant sea snakes)

Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

alludes to the character of Dido from Virgil's the Aenid

Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"

allusion (reply) to Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"

James Joyce's Ulysses

allusion to Homer's the Odyssey (using Latin name for Odysseus); previous poets had favored Virgil over Homer b/c Latin historically more accessible, so Joyce's use of Homer is somewhat anomalous

Thomas Mann

also wrote a Faust myth

Dante's Inferno

among many other allusions, Dido from Virgil's the Aenid appears in the second circle of hell, punished for all eternity for her lust

Homer

ancient Greek author; supposedly blind; wrote the Iliad and the Oddysey

Hellenism

ancient Greek culture; fascinated authors like Matthew Arnold

Hester Prynne

bearer of the Scarlet A of adultery in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Caedmon

c. 670; Anglo-Saxon; cared for animals at monastery; wrote: Caedmon's hymn; contemporaneous w/ time Beowulf was written down

Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage

character fr/ Virgil's the Aenid

old English verse

characterized by internal alliteration (rather than rhyme) and strong midline pause called a caesura; lines structured according to number of accented syllables only; fallen into disuse by 1100, but Middle English revived many of the elements, incl. alliteration (EX: "Protected in war; so warriors earn/ Their fame, and wealth is shaped with a sword" -Beowulf; later, Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight simulated some Old Engl. qualities)

pathetic fallacy

coined by John Ruskin; ascribing emotion and agency to inanimate objects (EX: "the cruel crawling foam" -Ruskin)

"writing on the wall"

comes fr/ Daniel's interpretation of drunk and terrified King Belshazzar's dreams

T.S. Eliot's character Lil in "A Game of Chess" in The Waste Land

composite of abandoned lovers, including Dido fr/ Virgil's the Aenid

May Sarton

contemporary New England poet, novelist, diarist

Daedalus

created the labyrinth to house the Minotaur; name later used in James Joyce's character Stephen Daedalus in the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses

Post-Structuralism

critiques and makes use of structuralism; includes: deconstruction; buzzwords: mimesis, alterity, marginality, desire, lack

Clytemnestra

daughter of Leda; in Aeschylus's Oresteia, Agamemnon's wife; becomes angry over sacrifice of daughter and mistress in the house, so she and her lover Aegisthus murder Agamemnon; killed by Orestes and Electra, who avenge death of their father Agamemnon

Salome

daughter of king Herod, who requested the head of John the Baptist on a plate (and later got it)

Setebos

deity Caliban and his witch mother Sycorax worship in Shakespeare's The Tempest

euphism

derived fr/ Lyly's Euphues (1580) to characterize writing that is self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech; popular and influential mode of speech and writing in 16th century (EX: "To thine own self be true," "Neither a borrower nor a lender be," "Brevity is the soul of wit" -Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet

hudibrastic

derived fr/ Samuel Butler's Hudibras; couplets of rhymed tetrameter/ 8-syllable lines which Butler employed; OR any deliberate, humorous, I'll-rhymed couplets (EX: "We grant, although he had much wit/ He was very shy of using it")

georgic

derived fr/ Virgil's Georgics; not to be confused w/ pastoral (ie: idealization of life in countryside); describes poetry that deals w/ ppl laboring in the country side (EX: Virgil's Georgics is a poem about the virtues of farming life)

doggerel

derogatory term used to describe poorly written poetry of little to no lit. value (EX: Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors employs doggerel in dialogue btw/ Dromio twins for comedic effect)

Willa Cather

early 20th century; associated with the West and Midwest; wrote: My Antonia

tour de force

display of technical virtuosity in a work of art (EX: in Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," the speaker's voice has a natural quality though obeying the formal rules of traditional metered verse)

masque

dramatic form that flourished in 17th century in which all entertainment systems are go in music, singing, dancing, acting, stage design; offered in performance as tribute to the patron; EX: Milton's Comus, or A Mask, Presented at Ludlow Castle

Lorraine Hansberry

dramatist

Hugh Latimer

early 16th century

John Skelton

early 16th century English poet; poet laureate during time of the Tudors; responsible for "skeltonics" (short verses of irregular meter; satyrical/ protest; similar to doggerel)

Thomas More

early 16th century humanist; wrote Utopia for an international in Latin, but its later translation into English added some prestige to the Engl. language; beheaded for treason after his refusal to take a position of unequivocal support for Henry VII in the king's conflict with the Pope

Ben Jonson

early 17th century; acute observer of urban manners; wrote "To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare"

Daniel Defoe

early 18th century; among the founders of the Englsih novel; wrote Robinson Crusoe, The Review

Alexander Pope

early 18th century; wrote verse almost exclusively in heroic couplets, consistently ending lines on natural pauses; wrote An Essay on Criticism, the Dunciad, and The Rape of the Lock

Walter Savage Landor

early 19th century

James Fenimore Cooper

early 19th century American; frontier tales of men who live freely, communing with nature; wrote Leather-Stocking Tales, the Last of the Mohicans

Honoré de Balzac

early 19th century novelist and playwright; known for his examinations of bourgeois life in Paris; wrote: Pere Goriot, Lost Illusions, La Comedie Humaine

Jane Austen

early 19th century; knwon for understated ironic treatment of character; wrote Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion

Edna St. Vincent Millay

early 20th century

Ernest Hemingway

early 20th century

T.S. Eliot

early 20th century American poet and literary critic; towering figure in pre-WWII letters, and influence extends even today; buzzword "objective correlative;" wrote "The Waste Land," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Ash Wednesday," "The Hollow Men," "Tradition and Individual Talent," "The Metaphysical Poets;" heavy use of allusion to Biblical, classical, and literary sources; bleak sense of cultural emptiness and barrenness; mash-up of poetry and prose styles

Gertrude Stein

early 20th century American, though lived and worked abroad; founder of Modernism; literary-historical figure, living with her partner Alice B. Toklas in Paris; coined the term "lost generation" to mean literary ex-pats in the 1920s; wrote Three Lives (incl. "The Good Anna," "Melanctha," and "the Gentle Lena"), "Sacred Emily," The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Ezra Pound

early 20th century American, though spent lots of time in Europe; modernism; influenced by Asian poetry and contemporary economics; fond of juxtapositions of images and the importation of quotes and allusions into his work; fan of Yeats; edited TS Eliot The Wasteland; wrote "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (rhyming satyric poem), "The Cantos" (long, difficult, possibly fascist, life's work); proficient translator of Old English, Chinese, Latin, modern languages (though booted from his first college teaching position)

WEB Du Bois

early 20th century American; Harvard-educated; instrumental in formation of NAACP; strongly critical of Booker T. Washington's accommodationist politics; wrote: The Souls of Black Folk

Virginia Woolf

early 20th century American; incredibly prolific with profound impact on literature as both novelist and literary critic; wrote Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own

James Joyce

early 20th century American; stream of consciousness; famously difficult; wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Dubliners, "The Dead," Finnegan's Wake,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

early 20th century American; wrote: This Side of Paradise, Tender is the Night, The Great Gatsby, many short stories

DH Lawrence

early 20th century British

WH Auden

early 20th century British (later became American citizen); wrote love poems such as "Funeral Blues," poems on political and social themes such as "The Shield of Achilles," poems on cultural and psychological themes like The Age of Anxiety; noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content; wrote plays in collaboration with Isherwood; end rhyme

Joseph Conrad

early 20th century British; wrote Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, "Youth"

George Orwell

early 20th century English novelist, autobiographist, journalist; remarkable life including jobs as a colonial policeman in Burma and a hotel dishwasher in Paris, experiences in war, passionate but undogmatic commitment to social justice; wrote: Animal Farm, 1984, Homage to Catalonia

Andre Gide

early 20th century; French author known for his novels and diaries; symbolism; anticolonialism

EM Forster

early 20th century; coined terms flat and round character; examine the intricacies of human relationships in critical work Aspects of the Novel; also wrote: Howard's End

Hart Crane

early 20th century; finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope; wrote The Bridge

TE Lawrence

early 20th century; ie: "Lawrence of Arabia;" wrote: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

William Butler Yeats

early 20th century; known for poetry but also contributed to Irish theater; interested in symbolism; wrote "The Second Coming," The Countess of Cathleen

Earnest Hemingway

early 20th century; wrote A Fairwell to Arms; famous character: Nick Adams

Dos Passos

early 20th century; wrote: anti-war poetry, USA trilogy (experimental)

George Chapman

early English translator of the Greeks; subject of Keats's poem "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer;" called "High Priest of Homer" by Charles Swinburne

1790-1820 (late 18th/ early 19th century)

early Romantic period; second 30 years of reign of George II; Sturm und Drang in Germany; authors: Anne Radcliffe, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Jane Austen

John Donne

early/ mid 17th century poet and sermon-giver; young (courtier playboy) vs. old (religious career as Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral) poetry differs greatly; overlap btw/ sexual and religious love; wit, razor-sharp intellect, direct, clear, beautiful, original; wrote "The Sun Rising," "The Flea"

John Webster

early/ mid 17th century; Jacobean dramatist (overlapped w/ end of Shakespeare's life); wrote: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi (tragedy)

Washington Irving

early/ mid 19th century American short story writer, essayist, biographer, diplomat; success in England inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe; wrote: "Rip Van Winkle," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,"

Edgar Allan Poe

early/ mid 19th century American; inspired by Horace Walpole and Anne Radcliffe's gothic conventions, which he formed into the detective novel; wrote "The Murders on the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter"

Thomas Carlyle

early/ mid 19th century Victorian essayist; prolific, often exasperating, opinionated, inventive, passionate, humorous, sometimes downright weird, strong sense of the ridiculous; wrote Sartor Resartus; student of German philosophy

Alfred Lord Tennyson

early/ mid 19th century; wrote "Ulysses," "In Memoriam A.H.H.," "Tithonus"

John Dos Passos

early/ mid 20th century

Malcolm Lowry

early/ mid 20th century

Robert Frost

early/ mid 20th century

Jorge Luis Borges

early/ mid 20th century; Argentinian poet and short story writer; like Kafka, came to international attention through short stories; characteristic stories less concerned with the portraiture of individual actors than with the philosophical exploration of modernist anxieties concerning the self and meaning; becoming lost; wrote Ficciones and El Aleph

Eugene O'Neill

early/ mid 20th century; can seem sentimental, windy, tedious, sloppy, ill-constructed, implausible, incomprehensible, but no other playwright since Shakespeare has worked successfully and repeatedly on so large a scale, or created characters of such epic weight; Irish-American origin, troubled family life, profound melancholy at the heart of much of his rok, paralels btw/ his work and Greek tragedy; overall sense of enormous and powerful emotion; wrote: Long Day's Journey into Night

William Faulkner

early/ mid 20th century; main author of High Modernist tradition in the US; work focused on American South; stream-of-consciousness; major themes: perspective, race, effects of history on life in the present; unique style identifiable b/c of regular perspectival shifts and employment of italics to indicate internal reflection; invented the name Yoknapatawpha County; wrote The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!

William Empson

early/ mid 20th century; wrote Seven Types of Ambiguity, Some Versions of the Pastoral; literary critic; buzzword "ambiguity"

ottava rima

eight-line stanza (usually iambic pentameter) rhyming ABABABCC (EX: Lord Byron's Don Juan)

"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 to her."

ending lines of John Milton's Comus

bob-and-wheel

ends the stanzas of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the "bob" is a single very short line (one foot) and the "wheel" that follows is a short quatrain of trimeter lines rhyming (with the bob) ABABA; EX: "And he falls in his fury and floats down the water,/ ill-sped./ Hounds hasten by the score/ To maul him, hide and head;/ Men drag him in to shore/ And dogs pronounce him dead." -Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Raskolnikov

eventually repentant murderer (kills noxious landlady with an ax) in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment

vocative

expression of direct address; differs fr/ imperative, which is just the version of verb used to express a command, in that it can be a whole phrase (EX: "Sit, Lily, sit!")

Sancho Panza

fat, ignorant, lovable, faithful squire of Don Quixote, the main character of the eponymous novel by Miguel de Cervantes

Millimant

female character in William Congreve's The Way of the World

Charon

ferryman of Greek mythology who carries dead souls across the River Styx to the underworld

heroic stanza

four-line stanza, usually in iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB (though ballad stanza can sometimes take this form, too)

Moses

fr/ Exodus; adopted by Pharoah's daughter in real mother's attempt to save fr/ Pharoah's Hebrew hate; commanded by burning bush to lead Hebrews fr/ bondage; miracles of a rod that turns into snake and leprous hand; when Pharoah won't let ppl go, 10 plagues (hence, Passover); parting of the red sea in final escape; 10 commandments

Fortinbras

fr/ Hamlet; "strong armed" Prince of Norway who is constantly pressing on the Danes fr/ without; appears at the end looking to meet w/ Claudius but finds only the dead; Hamlet crowns Fortinbras king of Denmark just before his death and Fortinbras orders an honorable burial for Hamlet

Achilles

fr/ Homer's Iliad ;Greek's ablest warrior and leader of the fierce Myrmidon fighters; refuses to continue siege of Troy b/c angry at Agamemnon for abusing power as commander in chief and taking Bryseis (with whom Achilles is in love); after Agamemnon apologizes, eventually helps defend the ships fr/ oncoming Trojans with the help of his friend Patroclos; upon Patroclos's death, seeks revenge in killing Hector and dragging body through dirt on a chariot until Priam asks for it back

Odysseus/ Ulysses

fr/ Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; Greek captain in Trojan war; convinces Agamemnon to apologize to Achilles; after sacking Troy, attempts to return home to Ithaca with men and 12 ships but met w/ variety of obstacles which he alone survives; in Virgil's Aenid, Ulysses was responsible for creating the Trojan Horse that ultimately allowed Troy's defeat

Patroclos

fr/ Homer's Iliad; Achilles's best friend; leaves siege w/ Achilles and the rest of the Myrmidons; allowed to wear Achilles's magnificent armor, but killed by Hector anyway and armor is lost

Bryseis

fr/ Homer's Iliad; Achilles's love, taken by Agamemnon, sparking a feud between the two warriors, where Achilles takes his army elsewhere

Menelaus

fr/ Homer's Iliad; Atrius's son Agamemnon's brother--therefore subject to curse on house of Atrius; Helen's husband, whose upset over stolen wife starts the Trojan War

Thetis

fr/ Homer's Iliad; Greek demigod; Achilles's mother; provides Achilles w/ armor fr/ Hephaestus

Hector

fr/ Homer's Iliad; Priam's son, Paris's brother; Trojan champion who drives the Greeks away fr/ the walls of Troy

Helen

fr/ Homer's Iliad; conceived when Leda was raped by the "swan" Zeus; wife of Menelaus; stolen by Priam, sparking the Trojan war

Paris

fr/ Homer's Iliad; prince of Troy; son of Priam and brother of Hector; stole Helen, sparking the Trojan war

Priam

fr/ Homer's Iliad; ruler of Troy; father of Paris, Hector, Cassandra; grief moves Achilles to return Hector's body

Portia

fr/ Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice; beautiful Venetian heiress; father says in will that daughter's suitors must choose her picture fr/ one of thee casks in order to marry her; disguises as a male lawyer in order to save Antonio

Bassanio

fr/ Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice; young Venetian who decides to marry Portia for fortune

Sycorax

fr/ Shakespeare's The Tempest; Caliban's mother, former head of the island; imprisoned Ariel in a tree

Ferdinand

fr/ Shakespeare's The Tempest; falls in love w/ Miranda; married after long servitude to Prospero

Prospero

fr/ Shakespeare's The Tempest; former Duke of Milan whose power was usurped by brother Antonio; flees to island w/ daughter Miranda

Alonso

fr/ Shakespeare's The Tempest; king of Naples, shipwrecked on a mysterious island on their way home fr/ daughter's wedding

Daniel

fr/ book of Daniel in the Bible; associated w/ "court tales" of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; during Babylonian captivity of Jerusalem, rose fr/ servant to King's confidant; interpreted king's dreams, predicting famine and saving the kingdom; cast into den of lions b/c he was a Hebrew but survives b/c fof Lord's protection; "writing on the wall" phrase comes fr/ interpretation of king Belshazzar's dreams

Saul

fr/ books of Samuel and Kings in the Bible; first king of Israel; killed in a battle w/ the Philistines

Samuel

fr/ books of Samuel and Kings in the Bible; prophet, last of Hebrew judges; anointed first kings of Israel

David

fr/ books of Samuel and Kings in the Bible; second king of Israel in struggle to usurp throne fr/ Saul; before being crowned, makes early name for himself by defeating Goliath; composed many Psalms; had sons Solomon w/ wife Bathsheba; had son Absalom (tried to usurp David's throne)

John Caryll

friend of Alexander Pope's; suggested Pope write The Rape of the Lock; invoked as a kind of "muse" in the opening of the poem

Charles Kinbote

insane annotator in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire

*Psychological theory

investigates the personality and biography of author and reader as sources of overarching meaning (ie: the things which Marxist theory misses); concerned w/ universals of human consciousness; inspired: freudian/ psychoanalytic criticism, archetype/ myth criticism

epic invocation/ epic question

invocation of a muse at the beginning of an epic poem; often a request for the muse to help the poet remember the past

pastoral elegy

lament for a beloved, dead poet sung by a shepherd, who is a stand-in for the author (EX: Milton's "Lycidas;" Shelley's "Adonias" for John Keats)

Dante Alighieri

late 13th/ early 14th century

William Shakespeare

late 16th century

Edmund Spenser

late 16th century (close contemporary of Shakespeare, though uses older-looking syntax to give work an antique flavor); wrote The Faerie Queene

John Lyly

late 16th century poet, playwright, politician; mannered literary style; wrote: Eupheus

Sir Walter Raleigh

late 16th century; "an adventurer (ie: spy), poet, and confidante to Queen Elizabeth;" quoted Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd"

John Ruskin

late 19th century Victorian essayist; art critic; originated the critical term "the pathetic fallacy (projection of author's sentiment onto inanimate object); wrote The Stones of Venice

Philip Sidney

late 16th century; Renaissance literature and rhetorical culture (convincing); wrote Defense of Poesy, which argued that poetry's ability to create perfect worlds was also a moral power, encouraging readers towards virtue

Christopher Marlowe

late 16th century; pioneered blank verse; wrote: Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, "The Passionate Shephard to His Love"

Sir Philip Sidney

late 16th century; wrote An Apology for Poetry (probably the most important statement of literary criticism of the 16th century)

Samuel Pepys

late 17th century

William Wycherley

late 17th century; Restoration comedy; wrote The Country Wife

George Etherege

late 17th/ early 18th century; Restoration comedy; wrote The Man of Mode

William Congreve

late 17th/ early 18th century; Restoration comedy; wrote The Way of the World

John Bunyan

late 17th/ early 18th century; preacher; wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners

John Dryden

late 17th/ early 18th century; wrote Absalom and Achitophel, Mac Flecknoe; prolific, both in poetry and in plays

Horace Walpole

late 18th century

Robert Burns

late 18th century

Mary Wollstonecraft

late 18th century; English; wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women; mother of Mary Shelley

Laurence Sterne

late 18th century; Irish novelist and Anglican clergyman; wrote: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, sermons

Richard Sheridan

late 18th century; Restoration comedy; wrote The School for Scandal

Thomas Chatterton

late 18th century; also known as Thomas Rowley; denounced by Horace Walpole; unusual life (raised in poverty, exceptionally studious, poison self) of interest to romantic poets

William Cowper

late 18th century; respect for good judgement of ordinary people; able to write only between recurring bouts of suicidal madness; wrote: The Task

James Boswell

late 18th century; wrote a gushing biography of Samuel Johnson called The Life of Johnson; Johnson's disciple but in no way peer; paints Johnson as a supremely witty and erudite conversationalist with a deep melancholy streak--both generosity of spirit and outbursts of irritability; notably, shows Johnson "in life" in conversations of the day; famous literary drunk

Charles Lamb

late 18th/ early 19th century; London essayist and friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge; wrote a response to Lyrical Ballads; took note of difference between Lake Poet's muddy-boots-and-daffodils joys vs. pleasures of urbanity; adopted the name Elia in charming, witty, sophisticated Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

John Keats

late 18th/ early 19th century; Romanticism; reputation didn't grow till after death; odes most well known; wrote "Bright Star," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightengale,"

Anne Radcliffe

late 18th/ early 19th century; gothic novelist; wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho

Robert Southey

late 18th/ early 19th century; one of the Romantic "Lake" Poets (resided in England's Lake district)

Samuel Coleridge

late 18th/ early 19th century; one of the Romantic "Lake" poets (lived in England's Lake District); wrote Biographia Literaria, Lyrical Ballads (with Wordsworth), "Rime of the Ancient Mariner;" believed in the power of imagination

William Wordsworth

late 18th/ early 19th century; one of the Romantic "Lake" poets (lived in the Lake District of England); wrote "Lucy" poems, including "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways," "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known," "Three Years She Grew," "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," "I Traveled Among Unknown Men;" also wrote "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," Lyrical Ballads (w/ Coleridge); value rustic people, rural settings, nonacademic language; wrote "Intimations of Immortality"

Percy Bysshe Shelley

late 18th/ early 19th century; wrote "Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude" (Milton-esque, inverted writing style), The Cenci (deemed unstageable on political grounds)

Lord Byron

late 18th/ early 19th century; wrote Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

William Blake

late 18th/ early 19th century; wrote Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, "The Tyger," (exemplifying childlike simplicity of meter and syntax); also wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughtors of Albion (exemplifies no-holds-barred visionary mystic, elaborate personal theology); interested in the reconciliation of opposites; early Romantic--had a profound effect upon Romantic movement; displeased by enlightenment thinking, believing its over-reliance on rationality left no place for the visionary; instead, interested in contradiction and the illogical (put Blake at odds with Voltaire and Newton)

Irving Babbitt

late 18th/ early 20th century; like Matthew Arnold, master of the humanist agenda; saw art has having a primarily moral/ educational function

Arthur Rimbaud

late 19th century

Kate Chopin

late 19th century

Oscar Wilde

late 19th century

Mark Twain

late 19th century American

Henry James

late 19th century American, moved to Britain; long sentences w/ clause upon clause, heavy use of pronouns w/o antecedents; Americans experiencing Europe; character pt. of view, unreliable narrator; wrote: The Ambassadors, The Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl, The Bostonians, The Wings of the Dove, The Aspern Papers; famous characters Isabel Archer, Maggie Verver, Daisy Miller, Lambert Strether

Symbolism

late 19th century phenomenon of French origin; practiced by Yeats

Anton Chekov

late 19th century; doctor of medicine, playwright, short story writer; plays typically set in upper-middle-class Russian homes; wrote intricately plotted and dramaturgically innovative plays, noteworthy ability to convey characters' inner life

George Eliot Gerard

late 19th century; wrote Daniel Deronda

Thomas Hardy

late 19th century; wrote Tess of the D'Urbervilles (serious work)

A.E. Housman

late 19th/ early 20th centuries; scholar of classical literature; poetry records interior life; dealt with death b/c of war; wrote: "To an Athlete Dying Young" in the collection A Shropshire Lad

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

late 19th/ early 20th century

George B. Shaw

late 19th/ early 20th century

Marcel Proust

late 19th/ early 20th century

Wyndham Lewis

late 19th/ early 20th century

Sherwood Anderson

late 19th/ early 20th century American novelist/ short story writer; subjective, self-revealing works; nervous breakdown that caused him to abandon business and become a writer; inspired Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck; style similar to Hemingway's; wrote Dark Laughter (inspired by time in New Orleans in 1920s), Winesburg Ohio (short story collection)

Allen Ginsburg

late 19th/ early 20th century; Beat writer; inspired by Walt Whitman--similar style of long lines and emphatic repetition; wrote: "Howl"

Rainer Maria Rilke

late 19th/ early 20th century; known for lyric "object poems" (attempts to describe physical objects so that there is no separation between observer and object being observed; wrote: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

William Dean Howells

late 19th/ early 20th century; prolific novelist/ playwright; realism, social politics, moralizing; saw literature as potentially injurious; wrote: The Rise of Silas Lapham (novel in which a nouveau riche Bostonite loses his wealth but learns about the things that really matter)

Edith Wharton

late 19th/ early 20th century; style similar to Henry James; polished

Nadine Gordimer

late 20th century (still alive); South African novelist

Eudora Welty

late 20th century; like Flannery O'Connor, Southern gothic writer whose works often comment on the religious preoccupation typical of the South, but not as extreme as O'Connor

Wallace Stevens

late 20th century; modernism; use of odd and vivid imagery to create zen-like vision of the cosmos; wrote: "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Anecdote of the Jar," "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Sunday Morning," "The Snow Man," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

Thomas Pynchon

late 20th century; wrote The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity's Rainbow; V. Oedipa Maas; Tyrone Slothrop; encyclopedic, heavily allusive (to lit, history, and pop-culture), dense prose; postmodernism

1837-1869 (mid 19th century)

late Romantic and Victorian periods; first 32 years of reign of Victoria; Transcendentalism in US; British authors: Thomas Macaulay, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning; American authors: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph-Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville

alexandrine

line of iambic hexameter; ends a Spensarian stanza (EX: "A needless alexandrine ends the song/ that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along" -Alexander Pope, "Essay on Criticism"

feminine rhyme

lines rhymed by final 2 syllables; penultimate syllable stressed and ultimate syllable unstressed (EX: "A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted/ Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;/ A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted/ With shifting change, as false as woman's fashion" -Shakespeare's Sonnet 20)

Kenneth Burke

literary critic; buzzwords "symbols," "pentad," "literature as equipment for living"

Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale

lover in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Natty Bumppo

main character of James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking Tales; also known as "Deerslayer," "Hawkeye," and "Leather-stocking;" nature lover and a crack shot who always does the righteous thing

Siegfried

main character of Niebelungenlied

Shamela Andrews

main character of a book Fielding wrote in parody of Richardson's Pamela

Gilgamesh

main character of ancient Assyrian work called the Gilgamesh Epic (at least 1500 yrs. older than The Iliad); like Beowulf, concerns a questing hero who must battle supernatural monsters

Zenocrate

main female character in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great

Jonathan Harker

main narrator of Dracula

Mirabell

male character in William Congreve's The Way of the World

"All lost! to prayers, to prayers! All lost"

mariners in Shakespeare's The Tempest

Friar Laurence

marries Romeo and Juliet

John Stuart Mill

mid 19th century Victorian essayist; committed social theorist and reformer; father was the founder of Utilitarianism; suffered fr/ depression in early life b/c education favored logic over fine arts; wrote: Autobiography, On Liberty, "What Is Poetry?," The Subjection of Women; character: Jeremy Bentham

John Newman

mid 19th century Victorian essayist; converted fr/ Anglican to Roman Catholicism; wrote Apologia Pro Vita Sua, The Idea of a University; remarkable religious clarity and logic, without pedantry

Matthew Arnold

mid 19th century Victorian essayist; poet and essayist; wrote "Dover Beach;" no distinctive style; works tend to call on prior ages, esp. on ancient greeks, as models of virtue and culture; attackes "philistinism" (tacky middle class tastes) and sings the praises of classical "sweetness and light" (phrase taken fr/ Jonathan Swift's Battle of the Books)

Elizabeth Gaskell

mid 19th century novelist; along with Charles Kingsley and Benjamin Disraeli, interested in the condition of England during industrial revolution; wrote: North and South, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Mary Barton, Cranford, Wives and Daughters

Anne Brontë

mid 19th century; used the pen name Acton Bell

Fydor Dostoyevsky

mid 19th century; wrote Crime and Punishment

Charlotte Brontë

mid 19th century; wrote under the pseudonym Currer Bell; oldest Brontë sister; wrote: Jane Eyre

Albert Camus

mid 20th century

John Berryman

mid 20th century

Countee Cullen

mid 20th century poet of the Harlem Renaissance; peer of Langston Hughes; African-American; traditional/ academic verse

Amiri Baraka

mid 20th century; African-American poet, playwright, novelist, belles-lettrist; wrote: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (collection of poetry), The Dutchman (play), Blues People (study of jazz in America)

Dylan Thomas

mid 20th century; known for extravagantly musical verse, gorgeous prose; wrote: "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night"

Vladimir Nabokov

mid 20th century; moved fr/ Russia and wrote later novels in English; characterized by erudite, self-conscious style put to humorous effect; proclivity for experimentation with form; wrote: Lolita, Pale Fire

Langston Hughes

mid 20th century; responsible for original "raisin in the sun" quote that Lorraine Hansberry later adopted in the title of her play; experimented with African-American vernacular and blues and jazz rhythms

Flannery O'Connor

mid 20th century; wrote Mystery and Manners; advocated violent means to get her vision across to a hostile audience; writes about the South, which "still believes that man has fallen and that he is only perfectible by God's grace, not by his own unaided efforts;" Southern gothic writer

Andrew Marvell

mid/ late 17th century; colleague and friend of Milton; metaphysical poet; wrote: "To His Coy Mistress," "Upon Appleton House," "The Garden" (evocations of aristocratic country house)

John Milton

mid/ late 17th century; wrote Paradise Lost, Areopagatica, Comus, Lycidas, influential divorce tracts; enjoyed blank-verse and torturing English sentence structure; interested in separated spheres of spiritual and temporal authority

Robert Herrick

mid/ late 17th century; wrote a series of "Julia" poems and "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time"

Walt Whitman

mid/ late 19th century American; distinct and influential style: long, rolling, exuberant lines, use of repetition instead of rhyme lends structure to otherwise shaggy verse; grew up in Brooklyn where early career involved newspaper work; in mid-thirties spent wandering, writing took turn: sappy to celebratory; influenced fr/ German metaphysical philosophers like Hegel, Hindu religious texts like Upanishads, Emerson's transcendental philosophy; loved brotherhood and democracy--spent much of Civil War as volunteer; wrote "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "O Captain, My Captain"

Henry David Thoreau

mid/ late 19th century American; transcendentalism; wrote Walden, Civil Disobedience

Ralph Waldo Emerson

mid/ late 19th century American; transcendentalism; wrote: "The American Scholar"

Herman Melville

mid/ late 19th century American; wrote Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, "Bartleby the Scrivener"

Nathaniel Hawthorne

mid/ late 19th century American; wrote The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance, The House of Seven Gables

Thomas Macaulay

mid/ late 19th century; applauded England's progress during Victorian era

Robert Browning

mid/ late 19th century; wrote "My Last Duchess"

Charles Dickens

mid/ late 19th century; wrote David Copperfield (funny!); industrial; Victorian Londoner; characters include: Bounderby, Gradgrind, Coketown

Emily Brontë

mid/ late 19th century; wrote under the pseudonym Ellis Bell; wrote Wuthering Heights

Samuel Butler (the latter)

mid/ late 19th century; wrote: Erewhon (NOTE: anagram for nowhere), The Way of All Flesh (semi-autobiographical work)

Samuel Beckett

mid/ late 20th century; Irish-born playwright, novelist, poet who wrote all but his earliest works in French; plays are Spartan in decor and the cast is rarely larger than four; characters always in some way disabled (physically, mentally, economically, spiritually) and inhabit a bleakly absurd world of futility, alienation, discomfort in which things typically go from awful to perfectly hideous, though gloom is enlivened by moments of humor, violence, and even lyricism; along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet, "Theater of the Absurd;" wrote: Waiting for Godot

1820-1837 (early/ mid 19th century)

middle Romantic period; Reign of George IV; reign of Wiliam IV; British authors: Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson; American authors: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe

1901-1939 (early 20th century)

modernism; British authors: William Butler Yeats, Joseph Conrad, DH Lawrence, WH Auden, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf; American authors: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, WEB Du Bois

Sisyphus

mythology; man condemned to push a rock up a hill ad infinitum

Ishmael

narrator and soul survivor in Melville's Moby-Dick, named after the insignificant first son of Abraham before miraculous birth and near-sacrifice of second son Isaac (fr/ Genesis)

Scheherazade

narrator of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights; uses the suspense of interrupted stories to keep from being beheaded by the Sultan

decorum

neoclassical principal of drama; relation of style to content in the speech of dramatic characters--for example, a character's speech should be appropriate to social station (EX: in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, characters rarely exhibit decorum in speech)

Sarah Orne Jewett

nineteenth century New England writer; wrote The Country of Pointed Firs

Ophelia

object of Hamlet's affection and recipient of famous "Get the to a nunnery!" command; father Polonius accidentally killed by accident and brother Laertes kills Hamlet in a duel; goes crazy, singing songs to herself and in the end drowns in a lake

Samuel Johnson

one of the best Engl. literary minds of late 18th century; achieved success late in life b/c struggled with poverty into his 40s; wrote "The Vanity of Human Wishes," The Lives of English Poets, essays/ edits for the journal The Rambler, the first modern English Dictionary, Rasselas, Volpone

"This is the story of an angry man"

opening line of Homer's Illiad, which begins in medias res (10 years into the Trojan war); refers to Achilles

"Now is the winter of our discontent [...] I am determined to prove a villain/ And hate the idle pleasures of these days"

opening line spoken by Richard in Shakespeare's Richard III; direct address example of how the play is much more about Richard himself than the narrative action; plotting or evildoing

Deconstruction

opposite of structuralism: focuses on displacements, excesses, and gaps where struturalism posits a tidy, orderly structure to meaning; buzzwords: erasure, trace, bracketing, differance, slippage, dissemination, logocentrism, indeterminacy, decentering

King Minos

ordered Daedalus to create a labryth on the island of Crete to house the Minotaur

prosopopoeia

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

voice

perspective fr/ which a story is written; incl. 1st person, 3rd person, 2nd person, 1st person plural

synecdoche

phrase that refers to a person or object by single important feature (EX: "pair of ragged claws" represents the whole animal in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")

indicative

plain old verb in present tense (EX: "John plays with the ball")

"Song of Myself"

poem in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass

Gwendolyn Brooks

poet

Nikki Giovanni

poet

Ted Hughes

poet laureate of Great Britain before death in late 20th century; unflinching investigation of the darker side of human nature, people portrayed as beasts; wrote: Crow (collection)

neoclassical unities

principles of dramatic structure outlined in Aristotle's Poetics; popular in 17th and 18th centuries; incl. unity of time (happens in single day), unity of place (happens in single locale), unity of action (contains single dramatic plot w/o subplots)

Archetype/ Myth criticism

product of Freudian theory; Carl Jung, James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough (study of myth and ritual), Joseph Campbel, Northrop Frye; looks for recurring symbols, motifs, character types, plots; buzzword: collective unconscious

Herald Bloom's theory

product of Freudian theory; authors subconsciously position their work against an earlier author "father" figure or "strong-poet"

New Historicist theory

product of Marxist theory; specifics of culture matter profoundly and institutions shape societal consciousness known as "ideology;" tendency for dominant class to have the voice--struggling voice of the oppressed (hence, feminist criticism, black criticism, and post-colonial criticism)

Feminist theory

product of New Historicism; bring awareness to gender, esp. using male to represent all; buzzword: patriarchy, marginalization, other, phallocratic hegemony (white male dominance of systems of power)

Formalist criticism

product of linguistic criticism; fr/ 1920s Russia; attempts to discern the underlying laws/ features that shape literature; belief that certain devices make literature familiear and aesthetic; buzzword: defamiliarization, devices

New Criticism

product of linguistic criticism; fr/ mid-century US and Britain; TS Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, IA Richards, John Crowe Ransom, FR Leavis; focus on the words on the page; buzzwords: intentional fallacy (speculation about authorial intent), affective fallacy (subjective effusions about the beauty of literature), heresy of paraphrase (trying to extract the germ of content); close reading

Harold Bloom

prolific literary theorist; wrote "The Anxiety of Influence;" buzzwords "misreading" and "misprision"

Denis Diderot

prominent figure of Enlightenment

Voltaire

prominent figure of Enlightenment, along with Rousseau and Denis Diderot; wrote Candide

Rosseau

prominent figure of Enlightenment, along with Voltaire and Denis Diderot

Mary Magdalene

prostitute whom Jesus reformed

Petruccio

proto-macho-man to Kate's proto-feminist in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew; breaks Kate down until she assumes subservient position (NOTE: Italian-sounding names common in this play: Lucentio, Grumio, Gremio, Hortensio, Tranio, Vincentio)

Lazarus

raised fr/ the dead by Jesus

Reader-Response criticism/ Reception Aesthetics

reader's experience of a text is the literary event; involve an implied or ideal reader; judge whether a work broke a horizon of expectations in its time

John the Baptist

recognized Jesus as the Son of God w/o being introduced; baptizes Jesus

1714-1727 (early/ mid 18th century)

reign of Anne, the last Stuart monarch; authors: Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope

1727-1760 (mid 18th century)

reign of George I of the House of Hanover; authors: Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Thomas Gray

1760-1790 (late 18th century)

reign of George II; Enlightenment; first 30 years of reign of George III; American Revolution; The Gothic Novel; authors: Samuel Johnson, Lawrence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Thomas Chatterton, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Cowper

homeric epithet

repeated descriptive phrase, as found in Homer's epics (EX: "rosy-fingered dawn," "the wine-dark sea," "the ever-resourceful Odysseus")

sprung rhythm

rhythm created and used by 19th century Gerard Manley Hopkins; like Old English verse, fits a varying number of unstressed syllables in a line and only the stresses count in scansion (EX: "Glory be to God for dappled things--/ For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow" -Gerald Manley Hopkins "Pied Beauty")

Dashoo

savage harpooner in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick

Queequeg

savage harpooner in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick

Tashtego

savage harpooner in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick

Identity criticism

school of literary theory that investigates definitions/ constructions of the self; EX: feminist criticism, black criticism, post-colonial criticism

1869-1901 (late 19th century)

second 30 years of reign of Victoria; Realism; British authors: John Ruskin, George Meredith, Charles Swinburne, George eliot Gerard, M. Hopkins, Thomas Hardy; American authors: Mark Twain, Henry James

rhyme royal

seven-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ABABBCC (EX: "They flee from me that sometimes did me seek/ With naked foot stalking in my chamber./ I have seen the gentle, tame, and meek,/ That now are wild, and do not remember" -Sir Thomas Wyatt's "They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek")

Septimus Smith

shellshocked veteran whose story offers a partial parallel to Clarissa's in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

in memoriam

stanza composed of four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming ABBA (EX: Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H.")

Lucy

subject of William Wordsworth's so-called "Lucy" poems, including "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways," "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known," "Three Years She Grew," "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," and "I Traveled Among Unknown Men"

Niebelungenlied

tenth-century epic poem concerning romances, marriages, wars, betrayals, and murders that occur over time as an enormous treasure called the Niebelung hoard changes hands and places; earlier version of the same legend used by William Morris as the source for his Sigurd the Volsung

flat character

term coined by E.M. Forrester to describe characters built around a single dominant trait (EX: Mrs. Micawber in Charles Dickens' David Copperfield)

round character

term coined by E.M. Forrester to describe characters shaded and developed w/ greater psyvhological complexity (EX: Anna Karenina in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina)

metaphysical poets

term coined by Samuel Johnson in his The Lives of English Poets to describe 17th century English poets loosely related by their use of conceits, or extended metaphors; highly intellectualized, use strange imagery, frequent paradox, complicated thought, wit; incl. Abraham Cowley, John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan

participle

the "-ed" form of a verb (EX: "John has played with the ball many times")

Antonio

the "merchant" of Venice fr/ Shakespeare's play; lends friend Bassanio three thousand ducats to woo Portia, but only after making deal w/ Shylock involving a pound of his flesh as punishment; anti-simetic

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

the Pearl Poet (late 14th century); long poem that draws on the legend of Arthur and the court of Camelot; an enormous, mysterious, entirely green knight shows up at a New Year's party and issues a challenge: anyone who desires can behead him, but he who fails must in turn be beheaded; Gawain succeeds, but the knight re-heads himself; Gawain shows up for his own beheading but the Green Knight (really a lord) spares him; written in distinct verse stanzas of alliterative lines, ending with a bob and wheel

George Bernard Shaw's play Arms and the Man

title alludes to the first line of Virgil's epic poem the Aenid, "I sing of arms and the man..."

Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

title is a biblical allusion to Ecclesiastes

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night

title is a phrase fr/Keat's "Ode to a Nightengale"

Philomela

tragic character fr/ Ovid's Metamorphoses

blank verse

unrhymed iambic pentameter (EX: "One equal temper of heroic hearts,/ Made weak by time and fate, but strong will/ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." -Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses"

free verse

unrhymed verse w/o strict meter (EX: Walt Whitman "Song of Myself")

epithalium

work, esp. poem, to celebrate a wedding (EX: Spencer's "Epithalium")

Bram Stoker

wrote Dracula

Mary Shelley

wrote Frankenstein; daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and wife of PB Shelley

Euripides

wrote Medea

Samuel Richardson

wrote huge epistolary novels Pamela and Claressa in a work called Shamela; tiresome habit of lecturing people how to live, parodied by Henry Fielding

Aristophanes

wrote the comedies Lysistrata, Clouds, Frogs

Miguel de Cervantes

wrote: Don Quixote

Sturm und Drang

youthful, romantic hero confronts the arbitrary or unnatural laws of society, flouts them, ultimately pays the price; EX: Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther