GRE Literature Test

The Flea by John Donne

'Tis true; then learn how false, fears be: Just so much honor, when thou yield'st to me, Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee

Hudibrastic

Couplets of rhymed tetrameter lines (or eight syllables long), or more generally any deliberate, humorous, ill-rhymed couplets. Derived from Samuel Butler's "Hudibras".

Jacques Lacan

Created Lacanian Criticism in the 1930s.

Sprung rhythm

Created in the 19th century by Gerard Manley Hopkins, fitting a varying number of unstressed syllables in a line - only the stresses count in scansion.

Thomas Hardy

English novelist and poet, Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, influenced by Romanticism (esp. Wordsworth) and highly critical of Victorian society. Major works include Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and The Mayer of Casterbridge (1886).

Freudian criticism

Matters more because of continuous influence on other thinkers, associated with Psychoanalytic critics. Buzzwords: Oedipal complex, libido, id, ego, superego, subconscious, repression, etc.

compurgation

Medieval English practice of acquittal from a charge or accusation, obtained by statements of innocence given by witnesses under oath.

Margery Kempe

Medieval figure who had a long marriage and bore several children before devoting her life to Christ at the age of 40, at which point she began wandering through Europe proselytizing for the Church. She dictated her autobiography, called "The Book of Margery Kempe

Epic catalogs

Background information and descriptions of equipment or participants in the form of a long list.

Jonathan Swift

Besides Gulliver's Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729), famous for his essays and political pamphlets, he was a Whig and then a Tory, and he was known for two styles of satire, Horatian and Juvenalian. His deadpan ironic style in A Modest Proposal made him the foremost satirist in the English language, at least in prose.

Arthur Miller

Best known for "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible"

Robert Herrick

Best known for Hesperides, a book of poems which includes To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time, which has the line "gather ye rosebuds while ye may". Also wrote "Corinna's Going A-Maying". Buzzwords: Julia

John Webster

Best known for The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, also known for having overlapped with Shakespeare (sad life), he's ridiculously macabre and likes a lot of gore, TS Eliot refers to him in "Whispers of immortality" saying he "always saw the skull beneath the skin"

Mansfield Park Characters

Betrams, Fanny Price, Mrs. Norris

T. E. Lawrence

Better known as Lawrence of Arabia, he was a British archaeologist, military officer, diplomat, and writer, known for his roles in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign and Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Major work is Seven Pillars of Wisdom, memoirs of his experiences during the war and highly influenced by The Wasteland.

The Pilgrim's Progress

Book by John Bunyan, 1678 Christian allegory. Dream sequence presented by an omniscient narrator.

Thomas Macaulay

British historian and Whig politician, several majorly important historical works and popular poems about Roman history, such as Horatius. His political writings are famous for their ringing prose and dogmatic emphasis on a progressive model of British history. Late Romantic/Victorian period.

Alfred Tennyson

British poet in the Romantic/Victorian period, famous for many of his short lyrics such as "Break, Break, Break" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade". Worked through classical mythological theme. Wrote notable blank verse such as "Ulysses," and contributed a number of commonplace phrases ("'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all"). Poet laureate of England for a time.

Linguistic criticism

Broad area of critical thought concerned primary with language, largely literary language or a philosophy of language. Roots in the early 20th century, includes formalist criticism, New Criticism, etc.

Julia Kristeva

Bulgarian-French critic, still living, The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, the trilogy Female Genius. Her sizeable body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history. She is prominent in structuralist and poststructuralist thought. Key words include The "semiotic" of the pre-mirror stage and Nature of abjection

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell (1681)

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

Northanger Abbey Characters

Catherine Morland, the Allens, Henry Tilney, John Thorpe

Marxist influence on criticism

Central insight is that texts are not timeless, but rather, a given individual and his consciousness and products of said consciousness, are themselves the products of specific cultural and historical context, which must then be addressed. This led to the creation of New Historicism and related schools. Developed in the 1920s.

William Cowper

Changed direction of 18th century poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside, a forerunner of Romantic poetry. He also wrote hymns and antislavery poetry such as "The Negro's Complaint" in 1788, which was later quoted by MLK Jr. His main achievement is a blank verse poem, The Task: A Poem, in Six Books (1785) which features mock-Miltonic passages. The first book is called The Sofa and is literally about a sofa. Also "able to write only between recurring bouts of suicidal madness".

Old English Verse

Characterized by the internal alliteration of lines and a strong midline pause called caesura. Ex: Beowulf.

Archetype or myth criticism

Chasing symbols or tropes across seemingly disparate works to try to argue that the reappearance of a certain archetype points to a deep urge in the human psyche to represent that figure. Drawn from theories of Carl Jung and James G. Frazer. Looks for recurring symbols, motifs, character types, and plots. Collective unconscious.

Flat and round characters

Coined by E.M. Forster (1897-1970) author of "A Room With a View," "Howard's End," and "Passage to India" in his book "Aspects of the Novel".

Heteroglossia

Coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, coexistence of distinct varieties within a single language

Sonnets from the Portuguese (1847)

Collection of 44 love sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (yes, Browning's wife), published at his encouragement. Most famous are #33: Yes, call me by that name,—and I, in truth, With the same heart, will answer and not wait, and #43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Colombian writer, 1927-2014, most famous for One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe (1599)

Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

Lysistrata

Comedy by Aristophanes in which Spartan and Athenian women, tired of their husbands' perpetual absence, ally to offer their husbands the ultimatum that they won't have sex with them until wars stop.

Frogs

Comedy by Aristophanes which makes fun of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus

Clouds

Comedy by Aristophanes which ridicules Socrates

The Relic by John Donne

Coming and going, we Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals; Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free; These miracles we did, but now alas, All measure, and all language, I should pass, Should I tell what a miracle she was.

Ben Jonson

Contemporary (friend and rival) of Shakespeare that often gets listed with Shakespeare in Milton's poetry, wrote Volpone in 1606, he popularized the comedy of humors, wrote "To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare".

Athol Fugard

South African playwright, director, and novelist, b. 1932 most famous for political plays opposing the system of apartheid

New Historicism

Specifics of culture matter in a work and produce discernible effects in the consciousness of society's members; basically these cultural effects manifest as noticeable things also in the products of consciousness such as literature, and this presence is often known as ideology.

Beowulf

Sung by scops (Anglo-Saxon bards) before being put to paper around CE 750. Titular character is a Swedish hero who slays the monster Grendel (and Grendel's mother, after she comes to avenge his death) at the request of Danish king Hrothgar. Returns home famous and rich, becomes king of the Geats. When he is old, mortally wounded in fighting a dragon, alongside a young warrior Wiglaf, who proves his worth in this fight. Titular character appoints Wiglaf his successor and dies. Written in strong stress verse, internally organized by alliteration with caesuras. Names to know: Titular, Grendel, Grendel's mother, Hrothgar, Beaw, Scyld Scefing, Heorot (the mead hall), and Wiglaf.

The Tables Turned by William Wordsworth (1798)

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder to dissect.

Andrew Marvell

TO HIS COY MISTRESS. Eliot described his style as "more than a technical accomplishment.... it is a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace" and he's also metaphysical sort of

The Merchant (Canterbury Tales)

Talks only about his profitable business concerns, although he is actually in debt. Wears a motley and a beaver hat. His tale features January, an old blind knight, who marries May, a beautiful young girl. He gets really jealous and insists on keeping May within arm's reach at all times. May meets up with her young lover, Damian, and tricks January by having him hold onto a tree trunk while they have sex in a tree. For fun, Pluto decides to restore January's sight in the middle of this, but May saves herself by claiming she did it to restore January's sight.

The Clerk (Canterbury Tales)

Tells the tale of Griselda, a patient wife who endures the trials of her needlessly jealous husband, the Marquis Walter.

The Doctor (Canterbury Tales)

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

Participle

The "-ed" form of the verb

A Description of a City Shower by Jonathan Swift (1710)

"Careful observers may foretell the hour/ (by sure prognostics) when to dread a shower:...Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow/And bear their trophies with them as they go...Sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts, and blood, / drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, / dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood." In heroic couplets, ends with a stanza of three.

Phillip Larkin

!922-1985, an English poet, writer, and librarian. Influenced by Yeats. Wrote Dockery and Son.

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859)

"The rules that obtain among themselves [a people] appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. This all but universal illusion is one of the examples of the magical influence of custom, which is not only, as the proverb says, a second nature, but is continually mistaken for the first. The effect of custom, in preventing any misgiving respecting the rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to others, or by each to himself."

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift (1729)

"and it is exactly at one year old that I propose to provide for them in such a manner as instead of being a charge upon their parents or the parish, or wanting food and raiment for the rest of their lives, they shall on the contrary contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing, of many thousands."

John Ruskin

(1819-1900) Leading English art critic of the Victorian Era. Emphasized connections between nature, art, and society. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognized as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft. Also involved in a famous love triangle.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

(1844-1889) One of the leading Victorian poets. His manipulation of prosody (particularly his invention of sprung rhythm and use of imagery) established him as an innovative writer of verse. Two of his major themes were nature and religion. Catholic. Look for energetic cadences.

E. M. Forster

(1897-1970) Author of "A Room With a View," "Howard's End," and "Passage to India". English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. Many of his novels examined class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. He was also a critic, and in his book "Aspects of the Novel," he coined terms 'flat' and 'round'.

Middle English period

1300-1500 AD, writers include William Langland (1380), Geoffrey Chaucer (1380) and Thomas Malory (1450)

Geoffrey Chaucer

1380, wrote the Canterbury Tales!! Father of English literature, legitimized the use of English vernacular. Also known for his subtle irony.

Sir Thomas Malory

1415ish to 1471, author of Le Morte d'Arthur. Knight, landowner, and member of Parliament. His exact identity and biographical information is unclear. More important is the fact that Le Morte d'Arthur is the largest and most often used early compilation of Arthurian mythological material, making it a significant source material. Note that this is prose.

Early Tudor period

1500-1558, reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary, authors include John Skelton, Thomas More

George Gascoigne

1534-1577. An English poet, soldier, and unsuccessful courtier. Considered them most important poet of the early Elizabethan era, other than Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard. First poet to deify Queen Elizabeth I. Wrote the first comedy in English prose, used as a source for The Taming of the Shrew, as well as A Discourse of the Adventures of Master FJ and The Supposes.

Elizabethan period

1558-1603, Queen Elizabeth I reigned!! Authors include Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare

George Chapman

1559-1634, English dramatist, translator, and poet. Most famous for his translations of Homer, but also notable because he is suspected to be the Rival Poet in Shakespeare's sonnets.

Thomas Carew

1594-1650. Part of the Cavalier group of Caroline poets. Several of the poems from his major collection are memorial tributes, such as "An Elegie upon the death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. John Donne", and others such as "To Saxham" celebrate country life. Others are addressed to Celia, apparently his lover.

Jacobean period

1603-1625, notable author is Ben Jonson, this was the reign of James I

Caroline period

1625-1649, this was the reign of Charles I, notable authors were John Donne and John Webster

Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing

1644 prose polemic by John Milton, an influential and impassioned philosophical defense of the principle of a right to freedom of speech and expression, opposes licensing and censorship.

Cromwell reign

1649-1660, Charles I executed, Cromwell and the interregnum, notable authors are John Milton, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell

Restoration

1660-1714, reign of Charles II (1660-1702), notable authors include William Congreve, George Etherege, John Bunyan, John Dryden

Daniel Defoe

1660-1731, most famous for Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), so he was known for writing adventure stories but also for his political pamphleteering resulting in his arrest in 1703, he wrote for The Review, an 18th century periodical

Abasalom and Achitophel

1681, Satirical poem written in heroic couplets by John Dryden, allegorical poem that uses biblical figures to represent the players in a political upheaval surrounding power of Catholics and Protestants. King David represents Charles II.

Reign of Anne

1714-1727, Anne reigned specifically from 1702-14, she was the last Stuart monarch, notable authors were Daniel Defoe and Alexander Pope

Reign of George I

1727-1760, this was the House of Hanover reigning too, major authors include Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, and Thomas Gray

Thomas Chatterton

1752-1770, committed suicide at age 18 and is now the martyr of the Romantic period, published himself at the age of 11 pretending to be a 15th century poet named Thomas Rowley who was imaginary. He basically pretended to be a medieval poet. He fabricated fictional poems of earlier times in the 1760s, including forging supporting documents such as correspondence and titles, a ruse which was not found out until the late nineteenth century.

Enlightenment

1760-1790, Reign of George II, also first 30 years of Reign of George III, ALSO THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (1775-1783), and the gothic novel was invented, notable authors include Samuel Johnson, Lawrence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Thomas Chatterton, Mary Wollstoncraft, and William Cowper

Walter Savage Landor

1775-1864. English writer and poet with a rumbustious character and lively temperament. Famous works include prose work Imaginary Conversations and poem Rose Aylmer. Never became particularly popular.

Early Romantic period

1790-1820, second 30 years of George III's reign, Sterm und Drang happening in Germany, authors include: Anne Radcliffe, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats

Elizabeth Gaskell

1810-1865. An English novelist and short story writer, her novels offer a detailed view of the life of Victorian society, including the poor. Works include Mary Barton, Cranford, North and South, and Wives and Daughters. She also published the first biography of Charlotte Bronte (1857).

R. H. Dana, Jr.

1815-1882. American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts who gained renown as the author of American classic "Two Years Before the Mast," a memoir written after a two year sea voyage from Boston to California on a merchant ship.

Middle Romantic Period

1820-1837, during the Reign of King George IV and King William IV. First clear divide between British and American authors. Writers include Charles Lamb, Jane Austen, Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

1821-1881. Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist. Explores human psychology in troubled social, political, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th century Russia. Most famous works include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. His novella Notes from the Underground is also notable because it is one of the first works of existentialist literature.

Late Romantic and Victorian Periods

1837-1869, characterized by the first 32 years of the reign of Queen Victoria, this was a period of transition between the true Romantic period and the 20th century literature. Major novelists include the Brontes, Dickens, Browning, and Thomas Macaulay.

George Bernard Shaw

1856-1950. Irish playwright and critic who had a great influence on Western theater. Wrote both contemporary satire and historical allegory. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923).

Marcel Proust

1871-1922. French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). One of the most influential writers of the late 19th/early 20th century.

Robert Frost

1874-1963. American poet who frequently employed scenes from New England rural life in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex psychological and social issues. Works include The Road Not Taken, Birches, Fire and Ice, Nothing Gold Can Stay, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, Out, Out, etc.

Rainer Maria Rilke

1875-1926. Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, recognized for his lyricism and mysticism (in German). His best-known works include the poetry collections Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and a collection of ten letters that was published after his death under the title Letters to a Young Poet.

Wyndham Lewis

1882-1957. English painter, writer, and critic, co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and editor of BLAST, their literary magazine. Novels include Tarr, a pre-war novel set in Paris, The Apes of God, an attack on London literary community, and The Human Age, a trilogy set in the afterworld.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

1892-1950. American poet and playwright as well as a feminist activist. She wrote under the name Nancy Boyd. Her works include the homoerotic The Lamp and The Bell, Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare, What Lips My Lips have kissed, and Renascence.

Hart Crane

1899-1932. American poet who was inspired by T.S. Eliot. He wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylistic, and ambitious in its scope. Sought to write a Wasteland-esque epic, called The Bridge, which expressed a more optimistic view of modern, urban culture than its inspiration. Although he committed suicide at 32, many began to view him as one of the most influential poets of his generation. Other works/terms include the logic of metaphor, The Broken Tower, the homosexual text, Voyages, etc.

Villanelle

19 lines, rhymes aba/aba/aba/aba/aba/abaa. Ex: "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas.

Langston Hughes

1902-1967. American poet, social activist, novelist, and playwright. Invented jazz poetry, leader of the Harlem renaissance. Works include Let America be America Again, The Weary Blues, Montage of a Dream Deferred, and The Negro Speaks of Rivers.

Malcolm Lowry

1909-1957. Modernist English poet and novelist best known for his 1947 novel, Under the Volcano. He wrote his other novel while in undergraduate, Ultramarine.

Eudora Welty

1909-2001. Southern Gothic writer whose works often comment on religious preoccupation in the South. Major works include "The Optimist's Daughter" (1973).

Mary Flannery O'Connor

1924-1964. An American writer and essayist, important voice in American literature. Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characteristics. Also reflects Roman Catholicism. Works include "Wise Blood," "The Violent Bear It Away," "A Good Man Is Hard to Find".

A Raisin in the Sun

1959 play by Lorraine Hansberry, the story tells of a black family's experiences in the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood as they attempt to "better" themselves with an insurance payout following the death of the father.

Samuel Butler

19th century novelist, iconoclastic English author of Utopian satirical novel "Erewhon" (1872) and bildungsroman "The Way of All Flesh". Translated Iliad and the Odyssey, too.

Sestina

39-line poem of six stanzas of six lines each and a final stanza (envoi) of three lines. One of six words is used as the end word of each of the poem's lines according to a fixed pattern. "--- of Tramp-Royal" by Rudyard Kipling uses the word "die" in each stanza.

Old English period

400-1300 AD, notable writers include Caedmon (670 ish) and whoever the french toast wrote Beowulf (750), notable events include Battle of Hastings (1066), fun fact THIS WAS ALL OLD ENGLISH AND IT WAS INFLUENCED BY MEDIEVAL FRENCH, at least after 1000AD

Doggerel

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

Typological relation/typology

A doctrine or theory concerning the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament. Events, persons, or statements in the Old Testament are seen as types pre-figuring or superseded by antitypes, events or aspects of Christ or his revelation described in the New Testament.

Pastoral elegy

A lament for the dead sung by a shepherd. Conventionally, the shepherd is a stand-in for the author and the lament is for another poet. Ex: Milton's "Lycidas" and Shelley's "Adonais" (for John Keats)

Alexandrine

A line of iambic hexameter. The final line of a Spenserian stanza.

Transcendentalism

A movement within nineteenth century American literature which called on people to view the objects in the world as small versions of the whole universe and to trust their individual intuitions. Major writers were Emerson and Thoreau. (1837-1869)

Spenserian

A nine-line stanza, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter, ababbcbcc. The stanza Spenser created for The Faerie Queene.

Middlemarch

A novel by George Eliot (1871-2). Included a large cast of characters, comprises several distinct stories that intersect. Look for names like Lydgate, Casubon, and Dorothea Brooke.

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster (1924)

A novel set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. The story revolves around four characters: Dr. Aziz, his British friend Mr. Cyril Fielding, Mrs. Moore, and Miss Adela Quested. During a trip to the fictitious Marabar Caves (modeled on the Barabar Caves of Bihar), Adela thinks she finds herself alone with Dr. Aziz in one of the caves (when in fact he is in an entirely different cave), and subsequently panics and flees; it is assumed that Dr. Aziz has attempted to assault her. Aziz's trial, and its run-up and aftermath, bring to a boil the common racial tensions and prejudices between Indians and the British who rule India.

Picaresque

A novel, typically loosely constructed along an incident-to-incident basis, that follows the adventures of a rogue who is mostly concerned with eating and not being arrested. Ex: Huck Finn, Moll Flanders

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (1912)

A novella that centers around a great writer suffering writer's block who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed, by the sight of a stunningly beautiful youth. Though he never speaks to the boy, much less touches him, the writer finds himself drawn deep into ruinous inward passion; meanwhile, Venice, and finally, the writer himself, succumb to a cholera plague. Look for the names Aschenbach (the writer) and Tadzio (the boy).

Synecdoche

A phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature of that object or person. Ex. T.S. Eliot in Prufrock writes, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws"

Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)

A play cycle by Eugene O'Neill, The story is a retelling of the Oresteia by Aeschylus. The characters parallel characters from the ancient Greek play. For example, Agamemnon from the Oresteia becomes General Ezra Mannon. Clytemnestra becomes Christine, Orestes becomes Orin, Electra becomes Lavinia, Aegisthus becomes Adam Brant, etc. As a Greek tragedy made modern, the play features murder, adultery, incestuous love and revenge, and even a group of townspeople who function as a kind of Greek chorus. Though fate alone guides characters' actions in Greek tragedies, O'Neill's characters have motivations grounded in 1930s-era psychological theory as well. The play can easily be read from a Freudian perspective, paying attention to various characters' Oedipus complexes and Electra complexes.

Tamburlaine the Great

A play in two parts by Christopher Marlowe, published in 1587/1588. Loosely based on the life of the Central Asian emperor Timur, this play marks the turning away from the clumsy language and loose plotting of earlier Tudor dramatists. One of the first popular successes of plays in London. Characterized by martial character of the speech. Story of a Scythian shepherd who becomes an extrodinarily ferocious and successful conqueror in Asia Minor. Zenocrate is the main femaile character. Buzzwords: Babylon, Zenocrate, Mycetes, Scythia.

Arthur Rimbaud

A poet and literary innovator, often told other eminent poets in his teens that their work was shit to their faces. Amazing. As a theorist, his mounting disdain for the poetry of his contemporaries led him to develop a program for being "more than a poet", and decided to become a visionary and a seer. He then embarked on a "derangement of the senses" through alcohol, drugs, and debauchery. He died in 1891.

Blazon

A poetic device which catalogues the physical attributes of a subject, usually female. The device was made popular by Petrarch and used extensively by Elizabethan poets. Comes from the French word for coat of arms or shield

End-stopped

A poetic line in which a pause comes at the end of a syntactic unit (clause, sentence, phrase)

Anne Bradstreet

A prominent early North American poet, the first woman to be recognized as a New World poet and the first Puritan figure in American literature. 1612-1672. Sometimes considered a complementarian. She had a large bulk of work, including works such as "Upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666" and "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America" (her first poem)

Homeric epithet

A repeated descriptive phrase, such as "the wine-dark sea."

Masculine rhyme

A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable.

Tercets

A set/group of three lines rhyming together or connected together by another line.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)

A short story by the 20th-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the story focuses on the author's discovery of the doubly fictional world of ---, whose inhabitants are completely idealistic and live imaginative lives. Speculative fiction. One of the major ideas is that ideas ultimately manifest themselves in the physical world and the story is generally viewed as a parabolic discussion of Berkeleyan idealism, and to some degree as a protest against totalitarianism.

The House of Life (1870, 1881)

A sonnet cycle by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In this continually growing and changing sequence of poems, Rossetti recorded the subtlest shifts in a life torn between two great doomed passions: his love for his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, whom he married in 1860 but who died only two years later; and his love for his mistress, Jane Morris, who was married to his friend, colleague, and business partner William Morris. Eventually had like 108 sonnets.

Amoretti (1595)

A sonnet cycle by Edmund Spenser, describes his courtship and eventual marriage to Elizabeth Boyle.

Apostrophe

A speech addressed to someone not present, or to an abstraction. The innate grandiosity of lends itself to parody.

Rhyme royal

A stanza of seven lines in iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ababbcc. This is the only type of seven-line stanza to have a regularly rhymed meter. Thomas Wyatt uses this in his poem, "they flee from me who sometime did me seek".

Restoration Comedy

A style of drama that flourished in London after the Restoration in 1660, usually with a complicated plot marked by wit and licentiousness. Comedy of manners is a synonym. Featured works by Aphra Behn, John Dryden, etc. Look for a piece that insults itself and insults the audience in a witty way. Frequent names include Dorimant and Lovit, characters from George Etherege's work. Character names will often reflect their foibles.

Metonymy

A term for 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."

Panopticism

A term introduced by Michel Foucault to describe the idea of internal surveillance in his theory of discipline, wherein the gaze of the watcher is internalized to such an extent that the watched becomes their own guard. Introduced in Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of The Prison (1975).

A Doll's House

A three-act play written by Henrik Ibsen, published in 1879. Deals with the fate of a married woman who, at the time in Norway (setting) doesn't have reasonable opportunities for self-fulfillment in a male dominated world. Storm of outraged controversy. Nora is the main character, and she ultimately leaves her husband and children. This play is associated with the phrase "problem play". Tensions involve a woman longing for some freedom from her role as a parlor-wife and the repressive, selfish husband who doesn't understand.

She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways by William Wordsworth (1800)

A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! —Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky.

Epithalamium

A work, especially a poem, written to celebrate a wedding. Ex: Edmund Spenser's poem of this title.

Spenserian sonnet

Abab/bcbc/cdcd/ee, "One Day I wrote Her Name Upon the Strand" by Spenser

The Reeve (Canterbury Tales)

Administrative overseer as well as a sometime carpenter, tells a tale of a greedy miller named Simkin who has his wife and daughter enjoyed by a pair of clerks, John and Alan, from whom he'd swindled earlier. This is partially in response to the miller's tale.

Volpone

Also known as the Fox, this is a comedic play written in 1605-6 by Ben Jonson in which the titular character and his confederate Mosca to withhold money from basically everyone. They outwit everyone except noe another, which ultimately proves their downfall. Buzzwords: Titular Character (the fox), Mosca (the fly), and Corvino (the raven)

John Berryman

American 20th century poet and scholar, a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century. Considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry. Best-known work is The Dream Songs. Buzzwords: Henry, Mr. Bones (in modern poetry)

Kate Chopin

American author of short stories and two novels based in Louisiana, considered by some scholars to be a forerunner to the 20th century feminist authors of Southern/Catholic background. Her most productive period was the 1890s. Her major works include Bayou Folk, A Night in Acadie, Desiree's Baby, The Storm, At Fault, and the Awakening.

Richard Wright

American author, wrote about racial themes related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries. Major works include Native Son, Black Boy, and The Outsider.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the mid-19th century transcendentalist movement. Champion of individualism and critic of society. Major works include the 1836 essay "Nature."

Henry David Thoreau

American essayist, poet, and philosopher. Leading transcendentalist best known for "Walden" and "Civil Disobedience"

William Carlos Williams

American modernist, spare but warm verse. Associated with imagism and his dictum "no ideas but in things." His poems are characterized by easily accessible language and everyday imagery. Masterpiece is book-length poem Paterson (1946-58). (1883-1963)

Herman Melville

American novelist and poet of the American Renaissance period (1830-1860). Major works include Moby-Dick (1851) and Typee (1946)

Edith Wharton

American novelist and short-story writer, she often wrote in an elaborate, delicate, interior and convoluted style comparable to late Henry James. Her most famous works are House of Mirth and Age of Innocence.

John Dos Passos

American novelist of the first half of the 20th century, drove an ambulance in Paris and Italy in WWI and then joined the Medical Corps. Novels include "Manhattan Transfer" (1925), One Man's Initiation: 1917 (1920). Best known for his U.S.A trilogy: The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and the Big Money, experimental works, and antiwar stories/essays.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

American novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer. Most famous works include The House of the Seven Gables, Twice-Told Tales, and The Scarlet Letter. Late Romantic Era.

Jorge Luis Borges

Argentine short-story writer, 1899-1986, influential in Spanish language literature. Best-known work is "Ficciones".

Eugene O'Neill

American playwright. His plays have been accused of every possible dramatic fault - sentimental, windy, tedious, sloppy, ill-constructed, implausible, and incomprehensible but worked successfully on a large scale with characters of epic weight. Pay attention to these ideas: Irish-American origin, troubled family life, profound melancholy at the heart of his work, parallels between his work and Greek tragedy, and overall sense of enormous and powerful emotion. Works include Long Day's Journey into Night, an autobiographical play not produced until after his death. Beginning of 20th century, among the first plays to introduce techniques of realism into American drama, as well as to include speeches in American vernacular and include characters on the fringes of society.

Walt Whitman

American poet, essayist, and journalist. Part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism. Ne of the most influential American poets, called the "father of free verse". Major works include Leaves of Grass, a poetry collection which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.

Maya Angelou

American poet, memorist, and civil rights activist. Most famous work is "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (1969). Read a poem "on the Pulse of Morning" at Clinton's inauguration. Was also the first Black female street-car conductor in SF.

W. E. B. Du Bois

American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer, and editor. Leader of the Niagara Movement. Famous for works such as "the Souls of Black Folk," "Black Reconstruction in America," and "The Crisis".

James Baldwin

American writer and social critic, wrote about palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinction in Western societies, especially mid-20th-century America. Major works include Notes of a Native Son (1955), The Devil Finds Work (1976), and Giovanni's Room (1956). Note that he also had major beef with Richard Wright, the author of Native Son, abut the role of a prominent black artist amongst the racial divisions of the U.S.

Edgar Allan Poe

American writer best known for his poetry and short stories, especially mystery and macabre. Central figure in U.S. Romanticism, as well as generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and contributor to emerging science fiction genre.

Washington Irving

American writer best known for short-stories "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820)

Henry James

American-born British writer, key figure in 19th century realism and beginning of Modernism. Novels often featured Americans encountering Europe and Europeans, explored consciousness and perception via point of view, interior monologue, and unreliable narrators. Major works include The Turn of the Screw, Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, and The Ambassadors. (1843-1916)

The Epic of Gilgamesh

An Akkhadian poem considered the first great work of literature, based on earlier Sumarian poems, as well as the earliest surviving great work of literature. Dates to 18th or 13-10th B.C. Focuses around the titular character, king of Uruk. Buzzwords: Enkidu, Ceder Forest, Ishtar, Siduri, Utnapishtim, the Great Flood.

Sylvia Plath

An American poet known for the haunting, violent, bitter, and pitiless poems of her collection "Ariel," and her autobiography "The Bell Jar," which recounts vents surrounding her nervous breakdown. Her poems often feature her stormy relationship with her father. She was married to Ted Hughes before her suicide in 1963.

The Monk by M. G. "Monk" Lewis

An early and popular Gothic novel

Description of the Bower of Bliss, from Spenser's The Faerie Queen

And in the midst of all a fountaine stood, Of richest substance that on earth might bee, So pure and shiny that the silver flood Through every channell running one might see: Most goodly it with curious ymageree Was overwrought, and shapes of naked boyes, Of which some seemd with lively jollitee To fly about playing their wanton toyes, Whylest others did them selves embay in liquid joyes

Icarus by Ronald Bottrall (1946)

And on the slope above the sea The hard handed-peasants go their round Turning the soil, blind to the body Ambitious and viable, whose pride Will leave no trace in the quenching tide.

The Tyger by William Blake

And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

Dante

Author of The Divine Comedy, 1265-1321, Italian

The House of Mirth (1905)

By Edith Wharton, this tells the story of Lily Bart, a well-born but impoverished woman belonging to New York City's high society around the turn of the last century. Wharton creates a portrait of a stunning beauty who, though raised and educated to marry well both socially and economically, is reaching her 29th year, an age when her youthful blush is drawing to a close and her marital prospects are becoming ever more limited. It traces Lily's slow two-year social descent from privilege to a tragically lonely existence on the margins of society. In the words of one scholar, Wharton uses Lily as an attack on "an irresponsible, grasping and morally corrupt upper class."

Wuthering Heights

By Emily Bronte, published under the pen name Ellis Bell in 1847. Noted for its vivid sexual passion and power of language and imagery, it features Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw, and Edgar Linton

The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

By Henry James, this is the story of a spirited young American woman, Isabel Archer, who, in "confronting her destiny", finds it overwhelming. She inherits a large amount of money and subsequently becomes the victim of Machiavellian scheming by two American expatriates. Like many of James's novels, it is set in Europe, mostly England and Italy. Generally regarded as the masterpiece of James's early period, this novel reflects James's continuing interest in the differences between the New World and the Old, often to the detriment of the former. It also treats in a profound way the themes of personal freedom, responsibility, and betrayal. Characters include Gilbert Osmond (cruel & bad), Madame Merle, Ralph Touchett, Henry Stackpole, and Aunt Lydia.

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759)

By Samuel Johnson, this is an apologue about happiness. The titular character, son of the King of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia), is shut up in a beautiful valley called The Happy Valley, "till the order of succession should call him to the throne". T.C. enlists the help of an artist who is also known as an engineer to help with his escape from the Valley by plunging themselves out through the air, though is unsuccessful in this attempt. He grows weary of the factitious entertainments of the place, and after much brooding escapes with his sister Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah and his poet-friend Imlac by digging under the wall of the valley. They are to see the world and search for happiness in places such as Cairo and Suez. After some sojourn in Egypt, where they encounter various classes of society and undergo a few mild adventures, they perceive the futility of their search and abruptly return to Abyssinia after none of their hopes for happiness are achieved. Local color is almost nonexistent and the main story is primarily episodic,

Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

By William Faulkner, this details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born into poverty in West Virginia who comes to Mississippi with the complementary aims of gaining wealth and becoming a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson to his roommate at Harvard University, Shreve, who frequently contributes his own suggestions and surmises. The narration of Rosa Coldfield, and Quentin's father and grandfather, are also included and re-interpreted by Shreve and Quentin, with the total events of the story unfolding in nonchronological order and often with differing details. This results in a peeling-back-the-onion revelation of the true story of the Sutpens. Rosa initially narrates the story, with long digressions and a biased memory, to Quentin Compson, whose grandfather was a friend of Sutpen's. Quentin's father then fills in some of the details to Quentin. Finally, Quentin relates the story to his roommate Shreve, and in each retelling, the reader receives more details as the parties flesh out the story by adding layers. The final effect leaves the reader more certain about the attitudes and biases of the characters than about the facts of Sutpen's story.

Structuralism

C. 1960, Comes from theories of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, holds that meaning is never or rarely intrinsic, only produced by structure. Closely related to semiotics. This dominated continental Europe in the mid-20th century. Buzzwords: sign, signifier, signified, and theorists often describe texts in terms of binary oppositions. Applied the methods and insights of modern linguistics and anthropolgy to literature.

Dido

Carthaginian Queen and Aeneas' abandoned lover in The Aeneid. She kills herself with grief and vows that Carthage will avenge her, speaking to Virgil's contemporary audiences. Many reference her as an abandoned lover and she appears frequently.

The Prioress (Canterbury Tales)

Dainty, materialistic, sentimental about her little dogs. Her tale, told in rhyme royal, tells of a little boy killed by Jews for singing Christian hymn "Alma Redemptoris" while walking in a Jewish neighborhood. Discovered because boy continues singing after having his throat slit. The phrase "murder will out" comes from this story.

Georgic

Deal w/people laboring in the countryside, pushing plows, raising crops, etc. Derived from Virgil's poem of the same name, a poem about the virtues of the farming life.

Ceres

Demeter, goddess of the harvest, Roman name

New Criticism

Dominant critical approach for several decades mid-20th century, they believed that earlier critical approaches were polluted by unsustainable speculations about authorial intent (intentional fallacy) and subjective effusions about the beauty and emotion of the work (affective fallacy), as well as criticism which tried to paraphrase author (heresy of paraphrase). Only wanted to examine what was physically on the page. Ex: T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, and F. R. Leavis.

George Meredith

English novelist and poet of the Victorian Era, major works include Modern Love, a collection of 50 sonnets about the failure of his first marriage. this is often thought of as one of the first psychological poems.

Ottava Rima

Eight-line stanza, usually iambic pentameter, rhyming abababcc. Ex: Lord Byron's Don Juan.

Sense and Sensibility Characters

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Lucy Steele, Edward Ferris, John Willoughby, Colonel Brandon

Doctor Faustus

Elizabethan tragedy by Christopher Marlowe, based on German stories. In blank verse (main scenes) and prose (comic scenes). Titular character learns necromancy, there's a servant named Wagner, a Bad angel and Good Angel talk to him, a demon Mephistophilis (he serves Lucifer), strikes a pact with Lucifer, wastes his life basically, and then his soul is dragged to hell. Famous line includes "What are thou, ----, but a man condemned to die?"

John Dryden

England's first poet laureate in 1668, dominated the life of restoration England, causing this age to also be known as the Age of ---, known for factual and concentrated poetic style and trying to recreate natural speech patterns through formal structures like heroic couplets, wrote Absalom and Achitephel, and The Hind and the Panther

Charles Lamb

English essayist and poet, best known for Essays of Elia. He was at the center of a major literary circle in England during the early to middle Romantic Period. Famous wit and used pen name Elia.

Jane Austen

English novelist during the Romantic period known for her six major novels discussing the British landed gentry, exploring women's lives. Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the late 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th century literary realism.

D. H. Lawrence

English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic, and painter. Works feature an extended reflection upon dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization; discusses sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. Modernist. Works include Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Kinda into the mystic stuff.

Matthew Arnold

English poet and cultural critic, really into flowery language about "sweetness and light". Talks a lot about culture. Romantic era. Most famous work is "Dover Beach". Key figure regarding Hellenization. (1822-1888)

Charlotte Bronte

English poet and novelist, eldest of the three sisters. She is best known for Jane Eyre, which she published under the pen name of Currer Bell in 1847.

Robert Browning

English poet and playwright, one of the foremost Victorian poets, famed for dramatic monologues. His poems are known for irony, characterization, dark humor, social commentary, historical settings, and challenging vocabulary and syntax. Significant works include the collections Men and Women, and Dramatis Personae, as well as the epic poem "The Ring and the Book". Often used heroic couplets that were enjambed.

John Skelton

English poet and tutor to Henry VIII, wrote The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe, the lament of schoolgirl Jane Scroop for her dead bird

Samuel Coleridge

English poet who helped found the Romantic Movement in England. His most famous works were the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Biographica Literaria. He coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief" and was a major influence on Emerson and transcendentalism. Buzzwords: Imagination, Mariner, Lake Poet/lake

Charles Swinburne

English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic of the late Victorian/realist era. He wrote about taboo topics such as cannibalism, masochism, and anti-theism. His most famous works include Poems and Ballads, which caused a sensation when it was first published. Devised a poetic form called the roundel. Known for his rebellious attitude toward Victorian morality and excellent sense of rhythm and meter.

Lord Byron

English politician and poet, leading figure in the Romantic movement. Hist most famous works ware Don Juan, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and "She Walks in Beauty". He died early (age 36). Often described as flamboyant and notorious.

Charles Dickens

English writer and social critic, and regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. Notable works include A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Oliver Twist.

W. H. Auden

English-American poet noted for stylistic and technical achievement, engagement with politics, and variety in tone, form, and content. Works include "Funeral Blues," "September 1, 1939," "The Shield of Achilles," "The Age of Anxiety," "Horae Canonicae," and "For the Time Being". Look for someone adapting the rhythms and rhymes of earlier poetic forms into delicate modulates, half-rhymes, near rhymes, eye-rhymes, and enjambments.

Pastoral literature

Ex: Christopher Marlowe "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love"

Hugh Latimer

Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and Bishop of Worcester, before the Reformation and later became Church of England Chaplain to King Edward VI. Burned at the stake in 1555 under Catholic Queen Mary, becoming one of the Three Oxford Martyrs of Anglicanism.

Yoknapatawpha County

Fictional Mississippi county in which Faulkner's most important works are set.

Terza Rima

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

Samuel and Kings

Four books, each split into two books, which detail the first kings of Israel, anointed by Samuel. King Saul and King David, then David's son Absalom rebels and tries to usurp the throne, a struggle satirized in John Dryen's "Absalom and Achitphel" (1681-1682).

Sartre

French author best known for formalizing the philosophy known for formalizing existentialism in his work Being and Nothingness. Also had well known short plays No Exit and The Flies. Twentieth century.

Genet

French author of novels and plays also associated with the Theater of the Absurd. Turns moral universe on its head with relentless aestheticization and eroticization of vice, crime, cruelty in a fevered, baroque prose. 20th century.

Balzac

French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was the Comedie Humaine. Also wrote Lost Illusions. Basically all of his works take place in nineteenth-century Paris. Buzzwords: Rastignac, Pere Goriot

Flaubert

French novelist, leading literary realist. Romantic. Best known for Madame Bovary, Correspondence, and Sentimental Education.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

French philosopher and literary theorist, best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. He was co-founder of the International College of Philosophy with Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet, and Gilles Deleuze. Keywords include "grand narratives", "language games" and "phrase regimens"

Harold Bloom

Freudian critic who believed that authors subconsciously position their works in opposition to an "authorial father figure" (the term used is strong-poet), it's basically Oedipal tension across literature and time

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick (1648)

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying.

Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it—— A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot

George Eliot

Mary Anne Evans's pen name; English novelist, poet, and a leading Victorian writer. Major works include Middlemarch (1871-2), Daniel Deronda (1876), and Silas Marner (1861). Works were often set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.

Adam Bede (1859)

George Eliot's first novel, the story's plot follows four characters' rural lives in the fictional community of Hayslope—a rural, pastoral and close-knit community in 1799. The novel revolves around a love "rectangle" among beautiful but self-absorbed Hetty Sorrel; Captain Arthur Donnithorne, the young squire who seduces her; the titular character, her unacknowledged suitor; and Dinah Morris, Hetty's cousin, a fervent, virtuous and beautiful Methodist lay preacher. Hetty agrees to marry Adam but then finds out she is pregnant with Arthur's child, which she (accidentally??) kills. Hetty is tried and sentenced to transportation. The titular character and Dinah, who gradually become aware of their mutual love, marry and live peacefully with his family.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

German writer and statesman, known for epic and lyric poetry, prose and verse dramas, literary and aesthetic criticism, and four novels. Active in the later part of the 18th century. His first book was The Sorrows of Young Werther, also wrote verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, book Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and the drama Faust. Associated in his youth with the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement, a work in which a youthful romantic hero confronts the arbitrary or unnatural laws of society, flouts them, and ultimately pays the price.

Thalia

Grace of Good Cheer, daughter of Zeus and Eurynome, sister to Aglaia and Euphrosyne.

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell (1681)

Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love's day.

Alexander Pope

Known for satirical verse and his use of the heroic couplet, most famous for The Rape of the Lock (1712), but also wrote Essay on Man (1732-34), a philosophical poem of heroic couplets in an attempt to "vindicate the ways of God to Man", which is a play on the Paradise Lost-style philosophy of justifying God's ways, addressed to Lord Bolingbroke

Redemption by George Herbert (16-17th cent)

Having been tenant long to a rich lord, Not thriving, I resolvèd to be bold, And make a suit unto him, to afford A new small-rented lease, and cancel th' old.

In Memoriam A. H. H. by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1849)

He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.

J. F. Cooper

Known for writing frontier tales of men who live freely, communing with nature. Wrote books like Leatherstocking Tales (hero: Natty Bumppo) and The Last of the Mohicans.

Emily Bronte

Her only novel, Wuthering Heights, is a classic of English literature. She wrote under the pen name "Ellis Bell" and is a major Romantic Period author.

The Wife of Bath (Canterbury Tales)

Her prologue recounts the story of her five husbands and her uniquely feminist philosophies of love, sex, and (re)marriage. Her tale features a knight in King Arthur's court who is sentenced to death for rape, but the queen says she will spare him if he gets an answer to the question "what do women desire most?" The knight agrees to marry a repulsive and sinister witch, who promises she will then reveal the answer to him. The answer, sovereignty, is revealed and the witch turns out to be beautiful.

Epitaph at the end of Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard by Thomas Gray (1751)

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown. Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth, And Melancholy mark'd him for her own. Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere, Heav'n did a recompense as largely send: He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear, He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend. No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose) The bosom of his Father and his God.

Vesta

Hestia, goddess of the Hearth's, Roman name.

The Red and the Black

Historical psychological novel by Stendhal. Shows a provincial young man, Julien Sorel, trying to rise with a combination of talent, hard work, deception, and hypocrisy. Both a psychological portrait of the Romantic protagonist and a sociological satire of the French social order under the Bourbon Restoration. Published in 1830, a bildungsroman.

John Donne

Holy Sonnets! conflation of religion with romantic/sexual love because he was a poet and a cleric, he is the best representative of the metaphysical poets, he has strong sensual style. Also noted for his inventiveness of metaphor compared to his contemporaries. Caroline period. Notable works include Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going To Bed and The Flea. Also worth noting that he was once the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral and many of his sermons were really famous. Laudably direct, unpretentious style, abstained from classical references.

The Miller (Canterbury Tales)

Huge, strong, hard-drinking, rough talking, fight-picking, unpleasant fellow with a shovel-sized red beard and a big, hairy wart on his nose. Tells a vulgar tale whilst drunk in which a well-off carpenter with a pretty young wife has a boarder, "Handy" Nicholas, a good-looking and clever scholar who is learned in astrology. Nicholas and the wife, Alison, convince the carpenter that an apocalyptic flood is coming and he should spend the night on the roof sleeping in the washtub, so they can get together. Another one of Alison's suitors, Absalom, comes singing at the window. Alison promises hi m a kiss and has him kiss her ass, hanging out the window. He's angry, gets a hot poker, and returns; this time, Nicholas's butt goes out the window. He starts shrieking "water, water!," at which point the carpenter wakes up, thinking that the flood has come, and cuts the rope on his washtub, falling down.

Skeltonics

Humorous poetry used for comedy and satire, made popular by John Skelton in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Characterized by short lines, choppy pronounced rhythm, and stomping end rhymes. Ex: "How the Doughty Duke of Albany" by John Skelton.

Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1842)

I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

Preface to Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth (1803)

I have shewn that the language of Prose may yet be well adapted to Poetry; and I have previously asserted that a large portion of the language of every good poem can in no respect differ from that of good Prose. I will go further. I do not doubt that it may be safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and Painting, and, accordingly, we call them Sisters: but where shall we find bonds of connection sufficiently strict to typify the affinity betwixt metrical and prose composition?

in medias res

In an epic poem, such as the Iliad or the Odyssey, when the action is begun in the midst of things.

Interlace Rhyme

In long couplets, especially hexameter lines, sufficient room in the line allows a poet to use rhymes in the middle of the line as well as at the end of each line. Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine" illustrates its use: Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from Thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1838)

In the world's broad field of battle, In the bivouac of Life, Be not like dumb, driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife!

Ubi sunt

Latin phrase meaning "Where are they?", literary device where poems meditate on the transitory nature of life and the inevitability of death by posing a series of questions about the fate of the strong, beautiful, or virtuous. Often used in medieval European poems.

The Faerie Queene

Incomplete epic poem by Edmund Spenser, published in 1590/96. Notable for its form as one of the longest poems in the English language and the origin of the verse form known as the "Spenserian stanza". Follows several knights in an examination of several virtues, but is primarily an allegorical work with several levels of allegory. Book 1 is centered on the virtue of Holiness as embodied in the Redcrosse Knight. Book 2 is centered on the virtue of Temperance as embodied in Sir Guyon, who is tempted by the fleeing Archimago into nearly attacking the Redcrosse Knight. Book 3 is centered on the virtue of Chastity as embodied in Britomart, a lady knight. Book 4 is titled "The Legend of Cambell and Telamond or Of Friendship", but Cambell's companion in Book IV is actually named Triamond, and the plot does not center on their friendship; the two men appear only briefly in the story. The book is largely a continuation of events begun in Book III. Book 5 is centered on the virtue of Justice as embodied in Sir Artegal. Book 6 is centered on the virtue of Courtesy as embodied in Sir Calidore..

The Study of Poetry by Matthew Arnold (1880)

Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. Of course we are not to require this other poetry to resemble them; it may be very dissimilar.

Laurence Sterne

Irish novelist and Anglican clergyman, involved in local politics but died in London in 1768, wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767 in 9 volumes). Style is marked by digression, double entendre, and graphic devices.

W. B. Yeats

Irish poet, major figure of 20th century literature. Driving force behind the Irish literary revival.

Samuel Beckett

Irish-born playwright/novelist/poet. Plays are Spartan in both decor and characters (usually four or less). Characters are always either physically, mentally, economically, or spiritually disabled. Bleakly absurd worlds full of futility, alienation, and discomfort. Have moments of humor, violence, and even lyricism. Associated with the term "Theater of the Absurd"

Lacanian Criticism

Jaques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage in the Formation of the I" makes a claim that the word "I" when a child first (mis)recognizes themselves in a mirror is the point at which the child because alienated from themselves and enters the symbolic order. Child becomes part of an endless chain of signifiers in a symbolic order. Language comes first and shapes the unconscious; can be read as a bridge between psychoanalytical and linguistic criticism. Keywords: mirror, phallus, signifier/signified, substitution, desire, jouissance, objet petit a, and the three orders: imaginary, symbolic, and real. Developed in the 1930s

Dylan Thomas

Known for extravagantly music verse and gorgeous prose. "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is probably his most famous work.

Marxist criticism

Left-wing view of literature. Buzzwords include base and superstructure (material economic reality and the cultural superstructure built on top), class, proletariat, means of production, bourgeoisie, imperialism, dialectical materialism, etc. If it grossly emphasizes the econimic situation from which literature emerges and in which it was and is consumed.

Dockery and Son by Phillip Larkin

Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, And leaves what something hidden from us chose, And age, and then the only end of age. Published in the late 20th century, this poem talks about living in post-war England.

Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Shelley (1821)

Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.

Feminine rhyme

Lines rhymed by their final two syllables, like running/gunning. The penultimate syllables are stressed and final syllables unstressed.

amour courtois

Literary convention meaning courtly love

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Longest major poem by Coleridge, written 1797-98 and published in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads. Albatross.

The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Look for names like Miles Coverdale, Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla. Also important is that the ---- Farm, where most of teh action occurs, is based on the actual utopian community of Brook Farm, founded by prominent Bostonian social and literary figures such as Emerson and Thoreau.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Look for names like Roger Chillingworth, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne, and Pearl

Ozymandias by Percy Shelley (1818)

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Italian/Petrarchan sonnet

Made up of the octave and sestet, abbaabba/cdecde. Ex: John Milton's, "When I Consider How My Light is Spent"

John Keats

Major English Romantic poet, died at the age of 25 but posthumously became one of the most beloved English poets. His poetry was characterized by sensual imagery, most notably with a series of odes. Major works include "I Stood Tip-toe Upon a Little Hill," "Sleep and Poetry", and "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Major English Romantic poet/lyric poet. Best known for classic poems such as Ozymandias and Ode to the West Wind, but also wrote major works such as Prometheus Unbound (1820), and Queen Mab.

William Wordsworth

Major Romantic poet who helped launch the Romantic Era in with the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798). Wrote "Imitations of Immortality". Magnum opus is The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem. Buzzwords: Lake Poet/Lake district, Lucy

Post-structuralism

Makes use of structuralist theory and critiques it. One smaller school within this movement is deconstruction, which focuses on displacements and gaps in the structure in which meaning are lost, arguing that these gaps are integral to creation of meaning. Oppositions, in an attempt to hold themselves into place, are sometimes betrayed into collapsing themselves. Buzzwords: trace, bracketing, slippage, dissemination, logocentrism, indeterminacy, decentering,

Caesura

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

Samuel Pepys

Most famous diarist in English letters, notable for his easy style and frank portrayal of the private life of a London man during the restoration. If there's a seventeenth century diarist question, it's him.

Mnemosyne

Mother to the nine muses. (Their dad was Zeus)

Realism

Movement that placed strong emphasis on the truthful representation of the actual, emerged 1869-1901. Major writers include Charles Swinburne, George Eliot, Mark Twain, and Henry James.

Urania

Muse of Astronomy

Polyhymnia

Muse of Songs to the Gods

Thalia

Muse of comedy

Terpsichore

Muse of dance

Calliope

Muse of epic poetry

Clio

Muse of history

Erato

Muse of love poetry

Euterpe

Muse of lyric poetry.

Melpomene

Muse of tragedy

Miss Julie (1888)

Naturalistic play by August Strindberg. It is set on Midsummer's Eve on the estate of a count in Sweden. The young woman of the title is drawn to a senior servant, a valet named Jean, who is particularly well-traveled, well-mannered and well-read. The action takes place in the kitchen of Miss Julie's father's manor, where Jean's fiancée, a servant named Christine, cooks and sometimes sleeps while Jean and the titular character talk. On this night the relationship between T.C. and Jean escalates rapidly to feelings of love and is subsequently consummated. Over the course of the play T.C. and Jean battle until Jean convinces her that the only way to escape her predicament is to commit suicide.

An Essay on Criticism Part 1 by Alexander Pope

Nature to all things fix'd the limits fit, And wisely curb'd proud man's pretending wit:

In Memoriam A.H.H. by Tennyson

Nature, red in tooth and claw

May Sarton

New England poet, novelist, and diarist.

Chinua Achebe

Nigerian novelist and poet, 1930-2013, most famous for "Things Fall Apart" (1958)

Sarah Orne

Nineteenth century New England writer. Her best known work is "The Country of Pointed Firs". Characterized by quiet lyricism.

William Dean Howells

Nineteenth century novelist best known for his avowal of realist technique in fiction, socialist politics, and his criticism's crusty moralizing. Best known novel is The Rise of Silas Lapham, which a nouveau riche Bostonite loses his wealth but Learns What Matters.

Ode on Melancholy by John Keats

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

Infinitive

Non-conjugated verb with a "to" in front of it

Don Juan

Satiric poem written by Lord Byron, first published in 1816, with 16 cantos completed by his death in 1824. The trad. legend is reversed by making the titular character easily susceptible to women. Includes adventures re: the aristocracy.

The Wings of the Dove (1902)

Novel by Henry James, tells the story of Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, and her effect on the people around her. Some of these people befriend Milly with honourable motives, while others are more self-interested. Look for names Kate Croy, Merton Densher, Milly Theale. Maud Lowder, Susan Stringham, Lord Mark, Sir Luke Strett

The Magic Mountain

Novel by Thomas Mann, published in 1924 and considered to be one of the most influential works of 20th century German literature. Hans Castorp is one of the main characters, it is a bildungsroman, and offers the promise of hope through experience. Ambiguous, blends scrupulous realism with deeper symbolic undertones, and is ironic in parts.

Molloy (1955)

Novel written by Samuel Beckett (originally in French), the book concerns two different characters, both of whom have interior monologues in the book. As the story moves along the two characters are distinguished by name only as their experiences and thoughts are similar. The novel is set in an indeterminate place. Part of "The Triology"

John Henry Newman

Often referred to as Cardinal ----, as he became a Catholic Cardinal in 1879, although he was raised Anglican and had been a clergyman. Important Victorian thinker, wrote influential books Apologia Pro Vita Sua (reasoned account of his life and social/spiritual reflections that led to his conversion to Catholicism) and The Idea of a University (champions the values of a liberal art education). Stylistically clear, dispassionate, logical reasoning.

Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1842)

Old age hath yet his honour 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.

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Anne Radcliffe

One of the first (and most popular) Gothic novels. Most events in this novel seem supernatural, but it turns out that they all have real-life causes by the end. Austen parodies this with Northanger Abbey.

John Stuart Mill

One of the leading thinkers of the Victorian age. Major works include "What Is Poetry?", which defines poetry as the expression of the self to the self, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, and Autobiography. First member of Parliament to call for women's suffrage. Much of his writing was political or theoretical in nature. Look for his account of melancholia in his Autobiography.

Jean Racine

One of the three great playwrights of 17th century France, particularly known for tragedies which draw upon classical sources.

Naiads

One of three classes of water nymphs, along with the Nereides and the Oceanides.

Now is the winter of our discontent

Opening monologue of Richard III, one of Shakespeare's histories that showcases a truly evil character (Richard, Duke of Gloucester) killing his brother's young children while being king of the realm to ensure his kingship.

Heroic couplets

Pairs of iambic pentameter lines rhyming aa/bb/cc, etc. The Rape of the Lock has iambic pentameter.

Mark Twain

Pen name of Samuel Clemens, American writer, humorist, publisher, and lecturer. Most famous for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Credited with the first Great American Novel.

Prosperine

Persephone, goddess of the underworld's, Roman name

Prosopopeia

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

Synaesthesia

Phrases that suggest an interplay of the senses, such as "hot pink" and "golden tones"

Tom Jones

Picaresque novel by Henry Fielding. Features a young boy of unknown parentage being raised by the kind Squire Allworthy, having sex with Molly George, falling in love with Sophia Western, and ultimately finding out that Squire Allworthy's sister Bridget is his mother. Other significant characters include Partridge.

Anne Radcliffe

Pioneer of the gothic novel which is evident in her use of the supernatural even with her Romantic/vivid descriptions of landscapes, she wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) which Jane Austen later parodied in Northanger Abbey, highest professional writer of the 1790s

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Play by Tennessee Williams, takes place in the New Orleans French Quarter, in the southern gothic genre. Major characters are Blanche DuBois, Stella Kowalski, Stanley Kowalski, Harold "Mitch" Mitchell

Mother Courage and Her Children (1939)

Play written by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, written in resistance to Fascism and Nazism in response to the invasion of Poland. It is set in the 30 Years War, follows the fortures of a canteen woman in the Swedish Army named Anna Fierling who is trying to profit from the war, but ultimately loses all three of her children to the war.

Thomas Gray

Poet and scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Known for poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" in 1751, he only published 13 poems in his lifetime because he was extremely self critical (relatable content). Declined the offer of poet laureate in 1757. Elegy had a calm and stoic tone. It was so cool it was translated INTO Latin.

Ted Hughes

Poet laureate of Great Britain before his death in 1998. Best known for his collection "Crow". His poetry is characterized by its unflinching investigation of the darker side of human nature, frequently portrayed as beasts, and unmistakably contemporary. Married to Sylvia Plath.

William Blake

Poet, painter, and printmaker. Considered a seminal figure in early Romanticism, he wrote the "Oh rose, thou art sick!" poem, "did those feet in ancient time"", and "The Tyger". His work as a poet and an artist had a huge impact on the movement as a whole. Look for childlike simplicity in The Tyger, and mysticism in his other work, such as Songs of Experience. Reconciliation of opposites is one of the cornerstones of his philosophy.

In Defence of Poetry by Percy Shelley (1821)

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the center and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life.

Joseph Conrad

Polish-British writer, considered one of the greatest novelists in the English language. Master prose stylist who brought non-English sensibility into English literature. Many of his stories had nautical settings and depicted trials of the human spirit in an impassive, inscrutable universe. Considered an early modernist. Famous works include Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Typhoon (1902), Nostromo (1904)

Formalist Criticism

Predominantly Russian school of the 1920s which attempts to discern the underlying laws that shape a literary text. Basically the features that make it literature. Much of this is centered around defamiliarization and employment of devices such as plot, story, and voice which make language unfamiliar and thus signaled to the reader that the writing was an aesthetic object.

The Night Piece, to Julia by Robert Herrick (1648)

Then Julia let me woo thee, Thus, thus to come unto me; And when I shall meet Thy silv'ry feet, My soul I'll pour into thee.

Neoclassical unities

Principles of dramatic structure derived from Aristotle's "Poetics," most popular in the neoclassical movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These claim that a work should take place within the span of one day (unity of time), within the confines of a single locale (unity of place), and should contain a single dramatic plot with no subplots (unity of action).

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, short story writer, and utopian feminist. (1860-1935). Author of the Yellow Wallpaper, which is semi-autobiographical, she also has a feminist Utopian novel called Herland, which is about three male social scientists stranded in an all-female society.

Gulliver's Travels

Prose satire by Jonathan Swift (1726). Satire both on human nature and the travel guide subgenre. Major sequences include Lilliput, where everyone is six inches tall, Brobdingnag, where everyone is enormous, Laputa, a flying island, The Struldburgs, unhappy immortans who wish they could die, Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent, clean living, right thinking horses, and Yahoos, dirty, idiotic, violent creatures who turn out to be (or look like) people.

John Milton

Published Paradise Lost in 1667,. also notable are The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Samson Agonistes, his earlier poetry that discusses Shakespeare in a deragatory light, and Paradise Regained. Note that Paradise lost has been faulted for its tangled syntax and dull stretches.

Moby Dick

Published in 1851 by Herman Melville, sailor Ishmael tells the story of Ahab, captain of the whaler "the Pequod", and his obsessive quest for revenge on the white wale who bit off his leg at the knee.

Mary Rowlandson

Puritan colonial woman who recorded her abduction by Native Americans in a book called "A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. ------ or "the Sovereignty and Goodness of God". Written in 1682, this is supposed to be one of America's first bestsellers.

Spacing

Sometimes called difference, this is a poststructuralist idea coined by Derrida which states that space is out of place, a kind of blindness concerning the force that differentiates elements from one another and, in so doing, engenders binary oppositions and hierarchies that underpin meaning itself.

The Yellow Wallpaper

Rediscovered feminist classic written in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, draws on gothic conventions to narrate the mental decline of a woman taken by her physician husband to an isolated estate to undergo a "rest cure" for her neurasthenia.

Pathetic fallacy

Refers to ascribing emotion and agency to inanimate objects. Coined by John Ruskin. Ex: Ruskin's line, "The cruel crawling foam."

Decorum

Relation of style to content in the speech of dramatic characters, should be appropriate to a character's social station.

Philip Sidney

Remembered for written Astrophel and Stella, probably composed in 1580s. Also credited with nativizing the key features of the Petrarchian sonnet, including an "ongoing but partly obscure narrative, the philosophical trappings of the poet in relation to love and desire, and musings on the art of poetic creation"

William Congreve

Restoration playwright and minor British Whig. Wrote the lines "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast" and "You must not kiss and tell" and "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" in The Mourning Bride (1697), and all of these lines are often attributed to Shakespeare. Wrote a play called "The Way of the World"

Interlace Pattern

Rhetorical term which refers to the formulaic repetitions of some lines in Beowulf with the repetition of linear patterns found in both Anglo-Saxon artwork and in Celtic knotwork such as The Book of Kells. The idea is that, just as the visual motifs in the artwork repeat and interweave with one another, certain lines in the Anglo-Saxon poem repeat and interweave with the narrative material.

Henry Fielding

Rich, earthy humor and satirical prowess, wrote a picaresque novel called Tom Jones (1749), which is one of the earliest works in English described as a novel. Known for his tone of comic irony and damning innuendo.

Mikhail Bakhtin

Russian critic, active in the Soviet Union in the 1920s but didn't gain popularity until the 1970s. Coined the term "heteroglossia". One of his central theses is that the novel as a form is characterized by the play of the micro-languages that exist within a language; where the farmer can battle the scholar, or where irony can discourse with sincerity. Works include The Dialogic Imagination, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, and Rabelais and His World

Anton Chekhov

Russian playwright and short story writers, known as one of the best writers of short fiction. His plays are typically set in upper-middle-class Russian homes. Wrote intricately plotted and dramaturgically innovative plays, with an unparalleled ability through dialogue that is both natural and poetic to convey the inner life of his characters. Also a doctor. Second half of the 19th century.

Christopher Marlowe

Said to have greatly influenced Shakespeare, had a mysterious death, known for use of blank verse and overreacting protagonists (same), wrote Tamburlaine the Great in 1587, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus in 1589, where Faustus is served and persecuted by Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Mephistopheles, and The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.

Thomas Carlyle

Scottish philosopher, satirist, essayist, and historian. He was considered one of the most important social commentators of his time. He claimed that "history is nothing but the biography of the Great Man." His 1837 book "The French Revolution: A History" was the inspiration for Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities". Contemporary of Charles Lamb. Work is famously idiosyncratic, rancorous, philosophical, funny, and linguistically playful. Major works include Sartor Resartus, a philosophical work in the guise of fiction. He was a student of German philosophy such as Kant.

She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways by William Wordsworth (1800)

She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me!

The Sun Rising by John Donne

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

Because I could not stop for Death - (479) by Emily Dickinson

Since then - 'tis Centuries - and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads Were toward Eternity -

Persuasion Characters

Sir Walter, Elizabeth, Anne Elliot, Frederick Wentworth, and Kellynch Hall

Before I got my eye put out - (336) by Emily Dickinson

So safer - guess - with just my soul Upon the window pane Where other creatures put their eyes - Incautious - of the Sun

The Defence of Poesy by Sir Philip Sidney (1579)

So that the ending end of all earthly learning being virtuous action, those skills that most serve to bring forth that have a most just title to be princes over all the rest; wherein, if we can show, the poet is worthy to have it before any other competitors.

Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round; And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard by Thomas Gray (1751)

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

I Must Have Wanton Poets by Christopher Marlowe

Sometime a lovely boy in Dian's shape, With hair that gilds the water as it glides, Crownets of pearl about his naked arms, And in his sportful hands an olive-tree, To hide those parts which men delight to see

Nadine Gordimer

South African author, 1923-2014, Nobel prize winner, works include The Conservationist and July's People

Euphrosyne

The Grace of Mirth, daughter of Zeus and Eurynome, sister to Aglaia and Thalia.

Aglaia

The Grace of Splendor, daughter of Zeus and Eurynome, sister to Euphrosyne and Thalia.

The Lesser Arts of Life by William Morris (1877)

The arrangement of our houses ought surely to express the kind of life we lead, or desire to lead; and to my mind, if there is anything to be said in favour of that to-day somewhat well-abused English middle class, it is that, amidst all the narrowness that is more or less justly charged against it, it has a kind of orderly intelligence which is not without some value. Such as it is, such its houses ought to be if it takes any pains about them, as I think it should: they should look like part of the life of decent citizens prepared to give good commonplace reasons for what they do. For us to set to work to imitate the minor vices of the Borgias, or the degraded and nightmare whims of the blasé and bankrupt French aristocracy of Louis the Fifteenth's time, seems to me merely ridiculous. So I say our furniture should be good citizen's furniture, solid and well made in workmanship, and in design should have nothing about it that is not easily defensible, no monstrosities or extravagances, not even of beauty, lest we weary of it.

Mirror stage

The key aspect of Lacanian Criticism, this suggests that the point at which a child first (mis)recognizes themselves in the mirror as the point at which they become alienated from themselves and enter the symbolic order and an endless change of signifiers and substitutions with no clear referent.

Jacobean masque

Theatrical form derived from the religious spectacles and plays of medieval times. Lavish production involving spectacular sets, costumes, and even machinery with many of the players drawn from the court. Called for dancing and music. Major writers included Ben Jonson and John Milton, somehow.

gothic explique

The process of summing up and revealing the true causes of many seeming impossibilities at the end of a gothic work; then became adapted in the detective story

Reader-response criticism

The reader's experience of a text is the literary event (sounds like touchy-feely bullshit to me tbh even though I kind of did my research on this). Jargon includes implied or ideal reader.

The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Theme is that of sins of fathers visited upon later generation. Look for the Pyncheon family, with names such as Hepzibah, Maule, Phoebe, Holgrave, and Clifford.

In Memoriam

The stanza composed of four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming abba.

Phenomonology

The study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. It is an approach to psychological subject matter that has its roots in the philosophical work of Edmund Husserl.

Hamartia

The tragic flaw, a term coined by Aristotle. This term, however, implies that fate plays a role in the flaw, rather than a merely an inherent psychological flaw.

The Prelude by William Wordsworth

There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence--depressed By false opinion and contentious thought, Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, In trivial occupations, and the round Of ordinary intercourse--our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired; A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced, That penetrates, enables us to mount, When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen

The Pardoner (Canterbury Tales)

Thin, vain, smooth-skinned blond, Chaucer suggests that he isn't "all man", and is only a glorified salesman. The host asks him to tell a moral tale, which he prologues with a circular confession of hypocrisy which is hypocritical in itself, claiming that the love of money is the root of all evil. His tale focuses on immoral drunkards who are trying to find Death, because he took one of their friends. They're told to look for Death under a certain tree, but instead they find a large pile of treasure. They eventually murder each other trying to get more and more of the treasure. At the end, he tries to get the host to pay to touch some relics, at which point the host says he would prefer the man's severed testicles.

William Langland

Wrote Piers Plowman, an alliterative verse work that is also an allegory with a complex variety of religious themes. Written in Middle English between 1350 and 1380, same time that Chaucer was writing.

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

This tale is a fable about Chaunticleer, a handsom, vain, rooster noted for his singing, the beautiful Perteltote, his favorite hen, and Sir Russell, a fox. Chaunticleer dreams he'll be eaten by a strange creature (a fox) and Perteltote makes fun of him for being a coward who believes in dreams. The fox comes, flatters C into singing, and snatches him away. The fox opens his mouth to gloat before eating him, however, and C escapes. The fox tries to get him again, but C has learned his lesson. Note that it is mock-heroic, parodying some of the conventions of classical epic poetry such as the Iliad.

Preface to Shakespeare by Samuel Johnson (1765)

To works, however, of which the excellence is not absolute and definite, but gradual and comparative; to works not raised upon principles demonstrative and scientifick, but appealing wholly to observation and experience, no other test can be applied than length of duration and continuance of esteem. What mankind have long possessed they have often examined and compared, and if they persist to value the possession, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour. As among the works of nature no man can properly call a river deep or a mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains and many rivers; so in the productions of genius, nothing can be stiled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind. Demonstration immediately displays its power, and has nothing to hope or fear from the flux of years; but works tentative and experimental must be estimated by their proportion to the general and collective ability of man, as it is discovered in a long succession of endeavours. Of the first building that was raised, it might be with certainty determined that it was round or square, but whether it was spacious or lofty must have been referred to time. The Pythagorean scale of numbers was at once discovered to be perfect; but the poems of Homer we yet know not to transcend the common limits of human intelligence, but by remarking, that nation after nation, and century after century, has been able to do little more than transpose his incidents, new name his characters, and paraphrase his sentiments.

To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare by Ben Jonson (1623)

Tri'umph, my Britain, thou hast one to show To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age but for all time! And all the Muses still were in their prime, When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!

Identity criticisms

Types of criticisms which investigate constructions and definitions of self, such as feminist criticism, Black criticism, and Post-Colonial criticism. Key words include patriarchal, phallocratic hegemony, and marginalization.

Litotes

Understatement created through negating the negative. Ex: In the Book of Acts, Paul says he is "a citizen of no ordinary city".

Blank verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter

Free verse

Unrhymed verse w/out a strict meter

The Knight (Canterbury Tales)

Valorous, chivalrous, and polite. First tale told following the general prologue, concerns friends Arcite and Palamon. They're held in a tower as prisoners and fall in love with Emily, who they see from the window. Organize an enormous battle to see who is deserving. Arcite prays to Mars for help, Palamon to Venus; Arcite wins battle but dies in process, Palamon gets Emily.

Indicative

Verb in present tense

Subjunctive

Verb used to express conditional or counterfactual statements

John Bunyan

Wrote Pilgrim's Progress (1678 Christian allegory), was also a preacher

Thomas Macaulay on Democratic Government: Revolution

We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary. The violence of those outrages will always be proportioned to the ferocity and ignorance of the people; and the ferocity and ignorance of the people will be proportioned to the oppression and degradation under which they have been accustomed to live. Thus it was in our civil war. The heads of the church and state reaped only that which they had sown. The government had prohibited free discussion: it had done its best to keep the people unacquainted with their duties and their rights. The retribution was just and natural. If our rulers suffered from popular ignorance, it was because they had themselves taken away the key of knowledge. If they were assailed with blind fury, it was because they had exacted an equally blind submission.

The Franklin (Canterbury Tales)

Wealthy landowner, tells a romantic tale about a lover, Aurelis, a faithful wife, Dorigen, and Dorigen's husband, Arveragus.

Willa Cather

Writer who wrote novels associated with the West and Midwest, died in 1947.

Euphuism

Writing that is self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech, a popular and influential mode of speech and writing in the late sixteenth century. Associated with the poetry of John Lyly. Ex: Polonius's speech.

Hedda Gabler (1891)

Written by Henrik Ibsen, the title character is considered one of the great dramatic roles in theatre. A newlywed struggles with an existence she finds devoid of excitement and enchantment; it culminates in her shooting herself. Major characters are the titular character, George (Jørgen) Tesman, Juliana (Juliane) Tesman, Thea Elvsted, Judge Brack, Eilert Lövborg (Ejlert Løvborg), Bertha (Berte)

Kubla Khan

Written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797, and published in 1816, this work is considered one of the most famous examples of Romanticism. It focuses around Xanadu, the summer palace of Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan.

Piers Plowman

Written by William Langland ca. 1380, this long poem is composed of a series of eight allegorical visions wherein Will, in dreams, seeks out truth. Written at the same time as The Canterbury Tales, but in alliterative verse. Masterpiece of the revival of the alliterative verse form in this period.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Written c. 1380, this is a long poem that draws on the legend of Arthur and the court of Camelot, wherein an entirely green knight intrudes on a New Year's banquet and says he will allow any knight to behead him, but he who fails must in tern be beheaded the following New Year. Gawain accepts the challenge, beheads him, and watches as he picks up his head and puts it back on. Gawain sets out the next year to fulfill his end of the deal, stopping at a castle on the way. At the Green Chapel, Gawain frinds the Green Knight, who spares him because he was well behaved both at the castle (his castle) that he stopped at and because he kept his bargain. He cuts his neck slightly, though, because Gawain tried to keep a magic girdle. It's written in distinctive v erse stanzas, composed of long alliterative lines which end with a particular form called a "bob and wheel" (a single very short line and a short quatrain of trimeter lines rhyming ababa). Author is unknown, sometimes refered to as "the Pearl poet".

Peter Shaffer

Wrote "Equus," a play about a violent teenager who sadistically and inexplicably blind horses.

George Etherege

Wrote "The Comical Revenge or Love in a Tub" which was performed in 1664, introduced new styles of wit to the stage, also wrote "The Man of Mode or Sir Fopling Flutter" which was a wildly successful play in 1676, believed to have satirized contemporaries in this play

Samuel Johnson

Wrote A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) which completely changed modern English, his was the preeminent English dictionary until the OED. James Boswell wrote his biography, and this is one of the most famous English biographies of all time.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), arguing that women aren't naturally inferior to men but only appear this way because they lack education. She advocated for a social order founded on reason. Basically a protofeminist philosopher. Also the mother of the future Mary Shelley

Edmund Spenser

Wrote The Faerie Queene, epic poem and fantastical allegory about Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I, affected by Irish faerie mythology, this was published in 1590. One way to identify him is to know that he purposefully used anachronistic language and spelling, because he thought it added gravity and a certain mystique to write with an archaic style.

Thomas More

Wrote Utopia in Latin and it was written in 1516 but only translated in 1551, 16 years after his execution, opposed Protestant reformation, was a major Renaissance humanist. Coined Utopia to mean "no place".

John Lyly

Wrote the Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) which coined the term euphuism to describe his personal style.

Horace Walpole

Wrote the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), and his letters had social and political interest. He also wrote On Modern Gardening which talks about nature aesthetics and things.

Holy Sonnet 14 by John Donne

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain, But am betroth'd unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Lycidas by John Milton (1637)

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more ...Without the meed of some melodious tear ...but oh! The heavy change, now thou art gone, Now thou art gone and must never return! ...Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights and live laborious days ...Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth: And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth

In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. Auden (1939)

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.

Substantive

a group of words acting as a noun

apologue

a moral fable, especially with animals as characters

Lollard(s)

a pre-Protestant Christian religious movement that existed from the mid-14th century to the English Reformation, started by John Wycliffe, they believed that the church should aid people to live a life of evangelical poverty and imitate Jesus Christ. Their ideas influenced the thought of John Huss, who in turn influenced Martin Luther

The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)

a realist novel by William Dean Howells. The story follows the materialistic rise of Silas Lapham from rags to riches, and his ensuing moral susceptibility. Silas earns a fortune in the paint business, but he lacks social standards, which he tries to attain through his daughter's marriage into the aristocratic Corey family. Silas' morality does not fail him. He loses his money but makes the right moral decision when his partner proposes the unethical selling of the mills to English settlers. Howells is known to be the father of American realism, and a denouncer of the sentimental novel. The resolution of the love triangle of Irene Lapham, Tom Corey, and Penelope Lapham highlights Howells' rejection of the conventions of sentimental romantic novels as unrealistic and deceitful.

apposition

a relationship between two or more words or phrases in which the two units are grammatically parallel and have the same referent (e.g., my friend Sue ; the first US president, George Washington)

Débat

a type of literary composition popular especially in medieval times in which two or more usually allegorical characters discuss or debate some subject, most often a question of love, morality, or politics, and then refer the question to a judge. A tenson is a specific type of this.

Gerund

a verb acting as a noun clause (-ing)

William Morris

an English textile designer, poet, novelist, translator, and socialist activist. Associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement, he was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production. His literary contributions helped to establish the modern fantasy genre, while he played a significant role in propagating the early socialist movement in Britain (1834-1896)

Umberto Eco

an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor. He is best known internationally for his 1980 novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory. Notable ideas include The open work (opera aperta), the intention of the reader (intentio lectoris), the limits of interpretation

vocative

expression of direct address

exegetical

from Greek word to interpret, a critical look at a text, associated with New Criticism but also the Bible.

Predicate

further information about the subject

Auxiliary

helping verb (Often a form of "be," "have," or "do")

wergild

in ancient Germanic law, the amount of compensation paid by a person committing an offense to the injured party or, in case of death, to his family. Comes up in Beowulf

genitive

relating to or denoting a case of nouns and pronouns (and words in grammatical agreement with them) indicating possession or close association.

horatory

tending or aiming to exhort.

bob and wheel

the common name for a metrical device most famously used by the Pearl Poet in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The feature is found mainly in Middle English and Middle Scots poetry, where it occurs typically at the end of a stanza. The first aspect is a very short line, sometimes of only two syllables, followed by the second aspect, longer lines with internal rhyme.

Caedmon

the earliest English poet whose name is known!!! an Anglo-Saxon who cared for the animals at the monastery!!! smol sad boi. This was all happening around 670 according to the GRE book. Best known for the Hymn titled ____'s Hymn, a nine-line alliterative vernacular praise poem

semiotics

the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.

Imperative

verb used for issuing commands

Subordinate conjunction

word that introduces a subordinate clause