GRE Subject Test: English Literature

John Skelton, Thomas More

1500-1558 Early Tudor period Reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary

Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare

1558-1603 Elizabethan period Reign of Elizabeth I

Ben Jonson

1603-1625 Jacobean period Reign of James I

John Donne, John Webster

1625-1649 Caroline period Reign of Charles I

John Milton, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell

1649-1660 Charles I executed (1649) Cromwell and the Interregnum

William Congreve, George Etherege, John Bunyan, John Dryden

1660-1714 Restoration Reign of Charles II (1660-1702)

Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope

1714-1727 Reign of Anne (1702-1714), the last Stuart monarch

Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Thomas Gray

1727-1760 Reign of George I of the House of Hanover

Samuel Johnson, Lawrence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Thomas Chatterton, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Cowper

1760-1790 Reign of George II The Enlightenment First 30 years of reign of George III American Revolution (1775-1783) The Gothic Novel

Anne Radcliffe, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Jane Austen

1790-1820 Early romantic period Second 30 years of reign of George III Sturm und Drang in Germany

Jesus

Son of God Allusions: his death. Dante's "The Divine Comedy," "Vita Nuova" John Milton's Paradise Lost Jon Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson; Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe

1820-1837 Middle Romantic period Reign of George IV (1820-1830) Reign of William IV (1830-1837)

Flat and Round Characters

Terms coined by EM Forster to describe characters built around a single dominant trait (F) and those with psychological complexity (R). Example: Dickens' Mr. Micawber from David Copperfield (F) v. Anna Karenina from Tolstoy (R)

Participle

The "-ed" form of a verb. Example: "John has played with the ball many times."

Artemis (twin of Apollo)

goddess of the hunt Roman name: Diana

Persephone

goddess of the underworld Roman name: Proserpine

Auxilary

helping verb (often a form of "be," "have," or "do") Example: "I am working on it."

Ophelia

Object of Hamlet's attention. Daughter of Polonius (Hamlet kills him accidentally) and sister of Laertes (Hamlet kills him in duel). Goes crazy and dies, debatable whether it was a suicide or not. Allusion: T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" "Goodnight" lines

Oedipus at Colonus

Oedipus goes to Colonus with daughters Antigone and Ismene. His sons fight each other to the death for his vacated throne.

Second Person

Rarely utilized voice, the author speaks using the pronoun "you," making the reader an active participant in the work.

Shakespeare's Histories

Richard III

Athena

Goddess of wisdom Roman name: Minerva

Euterpe

Lyric Poetry

Macbeth

Macbeth murders his way to the top of the Scottish monarchy due to his ambition and the prophesy from the three witches. Macbeth and his wife plot to kill King Duncan, which leads to a chain of death. Later the King Macbeth and his wife become guilty and die. Characters: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, three witches, King Duncan, Macduff, the Dane of Fife. Quotes: "Yet I do fear thy nature. / It is too full o'th' milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way." Allusions: Macbeth's famous speech-- "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time, /And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death. Out, out, / brief candle. / Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing."

Dionysus

god of wine Roman name: Bacchus

Eris

goddess of strife

Demeter

goddess of the harvest Roman name: Ceres

Daniel

"court tales" of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Daniel's interpretation of dreams. From: Daniel

Moses

(Old Testament) the Hebrew prophet who led the Israelites from Egypt across the Red sea on a journey known as the Exodus Concepts: Aaron, the golden calf, the ark of the covenant, manna, "eye for eye, tooth for tooth," Mount Sinai, ram's blood, the casting down of the first two tablets of laws. From: Exodus

The Gothic Novel (1764-1860)

- gothic conventions include dark, dreary settings like abandoned castles and presumably supernatural happenings - Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764): first gothic novel - Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho: developed the gothic novel formula so that supernatural events are revealed to have real-world explanations by the end ("gothic explique") - Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey: a spoof of gothic conventions Other popular novels: - M. G. "Monk"

How many final couplets does a Petrarchan sonnet have?

0

How many final couplets does a Shakespearean sonnet have?

1

How many final couplets does a Spenserian sonnet have?

1 final + 2 couplets in the body.

William Langland (1380), Geoffrey Chaucer (1380), Thomas Malory (1450)

1300-1500 Middle English Battle of Agincourt (1415) Gutenberg Bible (1456)

Thomas Macaulay, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville

1837-1869 Late Romantic and Victorian periods First 32 years of reign of Victoria Transcendentalism in the United States

John Ruskin, George Meredith, Charles Swinburne, George Eliot Gerard, M. Hopkins, Thomas Hardy; Mark Twain, Henry James

1869-1901 Second 30 years of reign of Victoria Realism

William Butler Yeats, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf; Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. E. B. Du Bois

1901-1939 Modernism

Sestina

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

Caedmon c. 670, Author of Beowulf c. 750

400-1300 Old English (c. 1000, the English language became strongly influenced by Medieval French) Battle of Hastings (1066)

Spenserian Sonnet

A 14-line poem rhyming abab bcbc cdcd ee. Example: "One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand" by Edmund Spenser.

English or Shakespearean

A 14-line poem rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. Example: Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73"

Italian or Petrarchan

A 14-line poem rhyming abbaabba cdecde. The first eight lines are called the octave. The final six lines (composed of two groups of three, or tercets) are called the sestet. Example: "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent" by John Milton.

Villanelle

A 19-line form rhyming aba aba aba aba aba abaa. Its most noticeable characteristic is the repetition of the first and third lines throughout the poem: aba ab1 ab3 ab1 ab3 ab13. Example: Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"

Substantive

A group of words acting as a noun. Example: "Playing the banjo is extremely annoying."

Abraham and Isaac

A conceives a child from his maid, Hagar, named him Ishmael. From: Genesis Allusion: Moby-Dick A's wife, Sarah, gives birth to second son. God asks him to sacrifice Isaac; he almost does until God stops him. From: Genesis Allusion: Soren Kierkegaard's meditations in Fear and Trembling

The Miller (Canterbury Tales, 1837)

A cuckold is tricked into sleeping on his roof in a washtub while his wife consorts with various suitors. Characteristics: huge, strong, hard-drinking, rough-talking, fight-picking, unpleasantly coarse fellow Nicholas (young scholar) & Amelia (wife to carpenter), Absalom, apocalyptic flood

Doggerel

A derogatory term used to describe poorly written poetry of little or no literary value. Example: Shakespeare used this term in the dialogue between the Dromio twins in The Comedy of Errors for comedic effect.

Apostrophe

A figure of speech that directly addresses an absent or imaginary person or a personified abstraction, such as liberty or love. Example: "History! You will remember me..."

Skeltonics

A form of humorous poetry, using very short rhymed lines and a pronounced rhythm; made popular by Renaissance poet John Skelton. Similar to doggerel, the only difference being the quality of the thought expressed. eg: O ye wretched Scots / Ye puant pisspots" (Skelton's "How the Doughty Duke of Albany")

Bildungsroman

A german term meaning a "novel of education." A coming of age story.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1380)

A green knight shows up at a New Year's party and issues a challenge: Anyone who desires can behead him, but he who fails must in turn be beheaded. Gawain succeeds, but the knight re-heads himself. Gawain shows up for his own beheading, but the Green Knight (really a lord) spares him. bob and wheel bob-- a very short line (one foot) wheel--short quatrain of trimeter lines rhyming

Alexandrine

A line of iambic hexameter. The final line of a Spenserian stanza. Example: "A needless alexandrine ends the song/that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along." -- Alexander Pope's "Essay on Criticism"

Epic

A long narrative poem telling of a hero's deeds

Alexander Pope's The Dunciad (1688-1744)

A mock epic written in heroic couplets. A savage assault on bad poetry and writing by anyone who'd crossed Pope's path or otherwise offended him, particularly that of Colley Cibber, poet laureate of England. Poem concerns the coronation ceremony of Bayes as the poet laureate of Dulness, during which everyone in attendance falls asleep. Poem suggests that Dulness will ultimately prevail over all the arts and sciences.

New Criticism

A movement in literary criticism, dating from the late 1920s, that stressed close textual analysis in the interpretation of works of literature. Does not ask what the author "actually" meant but rather studies the ambiguity in order to discern how the several readings affect the totality of the piece. is the school that dominated in England and the U.S.

Caesura

A natural pause or break in a line of poetry, usually near the middle of the line.

Picaresque

A novel, typically loosely constructed along an incident-to-incident basis, that follows the adventures of a more or less scurrilous rouge whose primary concerns are filling his belly and staying out of jail. Example: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.

The Sermon on the Mount

A part of the Gospel according to Matthew in which Jesus preaches important moral teachings, including the Beatitudes Read: Matthew Ch. 5-7

Synecdoche

A phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature of that object or person. Example: "I should have been a PAIR OF RAGGED CLAWS / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." (T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock") "pair of ragged claws" only references the claws, but is used to mean the whole animal.

Epithalamium

A poem written to celebrate a wedding. Example: Edmund Spenser's poem Song! made in lieu of many ornaments, With which my love should duly have dect, ...

Allusion

A reference to a well-known person, place, event, literary work, or work of art Example: "Call me Ishmael." Opening line from Moby Dick by Herman Melville alludes to the biblical figure of Ishmael.

Homeric Epithet

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

Masculine Rhyme

A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (regular old rhyme) Example: Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening"

Pathetic Fallacy

A term coined by John Ruskin. It refers to ascribing emotion and agency to inanimate objects. Example: Ruskin's famous line: "The cruel crawling foam."

Hudibrastic

A term derived from Samuel Butler's Hudibras. It refers specifically to the couplets of rhymed tetrameter lines (eight syllables long), which Butler employed in Hudibras, or more generally to any deliberate, humorous, ill-rhythmed, ill-rhymed couplets.

Metonymy

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

Synaesthesia

A term referring to phrases that suggest an interplay of the senses. "hot pink" and "golden tones" are examples. Another example: "Tasting of Flora and the country green, / Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth! / O for a beaker of warm South..." (John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale")

Pastoral Elegy

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

Gerund

A verb acting as a noun clause (usually the "-ing" form of the verb). Example: "Eating worms is bad for your health."

Euphuism

A word derived from Lyly's Euphues (1580) to characterize writing that is self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech. This was a popular and influential mode of speech and writing in the late sixteenth century. Example: The character of Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet demonstrates this literary device, exemplified by his most famous lines: "To thine own self be true." "Neither a borrower or a lender be." "Bervity is the soul of wit."

Subordinate Conjunction

A word that introduces a subordinate clause. "SINCE you're awake, I'll just turn on the TV."

Feminist, Black, and Post-Colonial Criticism

All work within Marxist/New Historicist frameworks. Essentially critique Euro-American society's dominance and marginalization of the other from diff. perspectives Jargon: patriarchy, imperialism, phallocratic/phallocentric, hegemony, Euro-American dominance

Psychological Criticism

An approach to literature that draws upon psychoanalytic theories, especially those of Sigmund Freud or Jacques Lacan to understand more fully the text, the writer, and the reader.

New Historicism

An approach to literature that emphasizes the interaction between the historic context of the work and a modern reader's understanding and interpretation of the work.

The Odyssey by Homer

An epic poem attributed to a blind poet, Homer. This is one of the greatest works of literature. The story tells of the adventures and journeys of a Greek hero, Odysseus.

The Aeneid

An epic poem by Virgil chronicling the adventures of the Trojan prince Aeneas that portrayed the Roman ideals of duty, piety and faithfulness; Aeneas was the ancestor of Romulus Allusions to Dido: - Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech in Romeo and Juliet - Dante's Inferno, in which she appears in the second circle of hell, punished for all eternity for her lust. - Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage - T.S. Eliot's Lil in the "A Game of Chess" section of The Waste Land; composite of abandoned lovers, including Dido.

Infinitive

An unconjugated verb with "to" in front of it. Example: "To be, or not to be."

Litotes

An understatement created through a double negative (negating the negative) Example: Book of Acts from the Bible; "Paul answered, 'I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of NO ORDINARY CITY. Please let me speak to the people.'"

Formalist Criticism

Analysis centered on defamiliarization. Literature employed devices of plot, story and voice, that made language unfamiliar and signaled to the reader that the writing was an aesthetic--literary--object. predominantly Russian school of the 1920s

The Knight (Canterbury Tales) (1387)

Arcite and Mars fight Palamon and Venus for Emily. Arcite wins but dies. Characteristics: valorous, chivalrous and polite.

Hamartia

Aristotle's term for what is popularly called "the tragic flaw." Implies fate. Example: Oedipus, in his hasty temper, is tragically flawed. Macbeth, in his lust for power, is also tragically flawed.

Urania

Astronomy

Stanza Types

Ballad, In Memoriam, Ottava Rima, Rhyme Royal, Spenserian, Terza Rima.

The Taming of the Shrew

Baptista, won't marry off his daughter Bianca, until Katherina is married as well. Petruchio marries Kate and ends up "taming the shrew". In the end, Kate is the best "wife" of all the women in the play. Main characters: Baptista, Bianca, Katherina, Petruchio. Other characters: Lucentio, Grumio, Gremio, Hortensio, Tranio, Vicentio Quotes: "You lie, in faith, for you are called plain Kate, / And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst, / But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom, / Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate--/ For dainties are all cates, and therefore 'Kate'..." (Petruchio ii.1) Kate: "Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot, / And place your hands below your husband's foot, / In token of which duty, if he plase, / My hand is ready, may it do him ease." Petruchio: Why, there's a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate.

John the Baptist

Baptized Jesus

The Merchant of Venice1

Bassanio wants to marry Portia upon hearing that her fortune would be his. He asks Antonio for money to woo Portia. Antonio borrowed it from Shylock. Three months roll around and Antonio can't pay. Shylock is found guilty of conspiring to murder a Venetian and gives up his wealth. Allusions: Shylock Quotes: "I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you." (Shylock, i.3)

Beowulf (ca. 750)

Beowulf slays monster Grendel and becomes king. Years later, he is killed by a dragon and Wiglaf becomes king. *Sound out Old English to translate. Old English qualities: written in strong stress verse (lines are internally organized by alliteration). Old English line is based on the number of stressed syllables only. The gap is a caesura (represents deep pause). Characters: Beowulf, Beaw, Scyld Scefing, Heorot (B's mead-hall), and Wiglaf.

Verse Types

Blank, Free and Old English.

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

Catherine Morland, the Allens, Henry Tilney, and John Thorpe. Parody of Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1819-1891)

Chapter "The Candles"; Ishmael (narrator and sole survivor), Queequeg, Dashoo, and Tashtego (the savage harpooners), Starbuck (the first-mate), and the Pequod (the ship).

Old English Verse

Characterized by internal alliteration of lines and a strong midline pause called a caesura. Example: "Protected in war; so warriors earn / Their fame, and wealth is shaped with a sword." (Beowulf).

The Nun's Priest(s) (Canterbury Tales, 1387)*

Chaunticleer the rooster is kidnapped by Sir Russel, a sweet-tongued fox. Chaunticleer gets away when the fox opens his mouth to brag. A mock-heroic: it parodies some of the conventions of classical epic poetry such as The Iliad.

Restoration Comedy (1660-1730)

Comedies of language and manners, written with their own peculiar take on farce. Always centered on the tension between the accepted social codes of behavior toward sex and marriage, and the direct behavioral prerogatives of human lust and social ambition. War between the sexes is a common motif.

Thalia (Muse)

Comedy

Epic similie

Comparison carried to an extraordinary length.

Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1688-1744)

Concerns the real life brouhaha surrounding an impertinent haircut given by one Lord Petre to Arabella Fermor (Arabella, called Belinda in the poem, is the work's central character.) Most famous and most perfectly executed mock epic in English letters. All conventions of an epic are here, including: invocation, feast, battle, interference with the gods, and simile. Written in heroic couplets.

Ben Jonson's "To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare" (1623)

Date: 17th century. Names: Shakespeare + other references Famous Quote: "He was not of an age, but for all time!" References: Chaucer, Spenser and Francis Beaumont (buried in Westminster Abbey; Shakespeare in Stratford.) John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlow (Elizabethan dramatists almost contemporary with Shakespeare). Greek gods such as: Apollo, Mercury.

John Henry, Cardinal Newman (1801-1890)

Convert from Anglican to Roman Catholic faiths; wrote Apologia Pro Via Sua on the matter. Also authored "The Idea of a University" in support of liberal arts study. Style: look for passages of rigorous clarity and simplicity

Terpischore

Dance

Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" (1599)

Date: 16th century. Names: Shepherd, His Love Style: pastoral lyric of invitation, famous Elizabethan song; love, sheep, spring, hopeful tone, "romantic" "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." Quoted or alluded to by many English poets like: Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, Robert Herrick, and C. Day Lewis. Few lines from this poem were sung in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor. Many poets have replied to it, best known is Sir Walter Raleigh. "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"

Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" (1681)

Date: 17th century. Style: Carpe diem poem; make the best use of your time while you can. Love versus Time. "But at my back I always hear / Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity."

Robert Herrick's Julia Poems: "Upon Julia's Breasts," "Upon Julia's Clothes," "The Night Piece, to Julia," and "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" (1648)

Date: 17th century. These poems inspired other poets to invent mistresses to write poems about. "Upon Julia's Breasts": Describing Julia's breasts through poetry. Illusions such as red rose, cherry, lilies, strawberry and rubies, smooth pearl. "Upon Julia's Clothes": Describes Julia's clothes through poetry. Silks, flows, brave vibration. "The Night Piece, to Julia": Night themed poem about mistress. "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." "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time": Same theme as "To His Coy Mistress" by Marvell (sexual; asap because life is short and soon they will die). "Then be not coy, but use your time, / And while ye may, go marry; / For having lost but once your prime, / You may forever tarry."

Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard" (1751)

Date: 18th century. This poem is a meditation upon death, especially death or full expression of one's gifts. The Epitaph: "Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth/ A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown./ Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,/ And Melancholy marked him for her own.//Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,/ Heaven did recompense as largely send:/ He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,/ He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wished) 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." "Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest,/ Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood."

William Wordsworth's "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways" (1800)

Date: 18th century. Names: Lucy (The Lucy Poems: "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known," "Three Years She Grew," "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," "I Traveled Among Unknown Men") Theme: the death of one lovely person unknown to larger society. (like Gray's Elegy...)

Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses" (1842)

Date: 19th century. Names: Ulysses, Ulysses' wife, Telemachus (son), Achilles. Poem includes classical references. Odysseus is in Ithaca, old and bored. He contemplates sailing with his companions off beyond the sunset because... "Old age hath yet his honor and his toil./ Death closes all; but something ere the end,/ Some work of noble note, may yet be done,/ Not unbecoming men that strove with gods."

Alfred Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H." (1833-50)

Date: 19th century. Stanza form: In Memoriam (composed of four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming abba). Started when friend and sister's fiancé, Arthur Hallam, died. Sort of a mix of a diary with lyrics; very personal. Love poem. Writing to himself. Put together different lyrics throughout many years. "Nature, red in tooth and claw"

William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming" (1921)

Date: 20th century. Most alluded-to poem. Personal mythology in a visionary poem.

Salome

Daughter of Herodias and Herod (son of Herod the Great) and niece of Herod Antipas, before whom she danced to secure the head of John the Baptist.

Absalom

David's son who rebelled and drove David from Jerusalem; hair hung in a tree. (Similar power struggle happened with Saul and David). Allusions: John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681-2), William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936) From: Samuel and Kings

Jane Austen's Emma

Emma Woodhouse ("handsome, clever and rich"), Mr. Knightley, Miss Bates, Frank Churchill, Harriet Smith, and Jane Fairfax.

Antigone

Despite the penalty of death, Antigone attempts to bury her brother Polyneices. King Creon, her uncle, banishes her to a cave where she hangs herself. Creon's son Haemon, her lover, stabs himself in grief.

The Iliad by Homer

During the Trojan War, a great Trojan warrior dies at the hands of a great Greek warrior. Achilles, Greek warrior, refuses to take part of the siege after Agamemnon angers him. The Trojans, under the guidance of Hector, advance in the siege, leaving the Greeks in a dire situation. Agamemnon apologizes, but Achilles is not appeased. He [Achilles] allows his friend take part in the defense, but is later killed by Hector. Achilles avenges the death of his friend. Throughout the story, the gods are divided and take sides, helping their favorite mortals when the opportunity arises. (Read book if possible!)

Ottava Rima

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

Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility

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

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Elizabeth Bennet, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Charles Bingley, and George Wickham.

Calliope

Epic Poetry

Vocative

Expression of direct address, "Sit, Ubu, Sit!"

Saul

First king of Israel, anointed by the prophet Samuel. Later killed in a battle against with the Philistines. From: Samuel and Kings

Predicate

Further information about the subject (a verb and its cohorts). Example: "This test is really bogus."

Personification

Giving an inanimate object human qualities or form.

Apollo

God of healing, intellectual pursuits, fine arts, prophesy, and, in later years, sun and light. Roman name: Phoebus

Hephaestus

God of smiths and weavers Roman name: Vulcan

Ares

God of war Roman name: Mars

Noah

God plans to start over by the flood. N. builds an ark and collects "two and two of each flesh" to restart life. God later on regrets his decision. From: Genesis

Adam and Eve

God prohibits them to eat from the tree of knowledge. Eve is tempted by the serpent (Satan) and eats from the tree. Both A & E are cast out from Eden. From: Genesis Allusions: John Milton's Paradise Lost

Job

God tests his loyalty by stripping his health, wealth, and family. He passes the test and God returns his riches. Known as Abraham-like figure. Also a moment of uncertainty in the Old Testament. From: Job

Hestia

Goddess of hearth and home Roman name: Vesta

Aphrodite

Goddess of love and beauty Roman name: Venus

Thalia

Good Cheer

Common referenced books from the New Testament:

Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Horatio

Hamlet's best friend. Will tell Hamlet's story. "And let me speak to th' yet unknowing world / How these things came about."

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Hamlet's friends from school They work as spies for the king Hamlet is quick to question their loyalty. Sent away to England with Hamlet with a letter that Hamlet alters, which ends up killing R & G. Allusion: Tom Stoppard's 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Clio

History

Jonah

In order to avoid God's order, he ends up living inside a whale for three days and three nights. Allusion: Moby-Dick From: Jonah

Reader Response Criticism

Insists that the reader's experience of a text is the literary event. Jargon: implied or ideal reader, horizon of expectations.

John Dryden's Mac Flecknoe (1631-1700)

Is a withering satirical attack upon dramatist Thomas Shadwell, a contemporary of Dryden. Poem relates to the succession of Shadwell (Mac Flecknoe) to the throne of dullness. Mock epic-- allusions to literary figures past and present.

Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen (1590-1596)

Is written in Spenserian stanzas: ababbcbcc. The first eight lines are in iambic pentameter, but the final line is in iambic hexameter (alexandrine).

Lacanian Criticism

Jaques Lacan's literary theory where language comes first and shapes, or "structures," the unconscious. The perfect bridge between psychoanalytic and linguistic criticism. Famous essay: "The Mirror Stage in the Formation of the I" - a child's first (mis)recognition (méconnaisance) of him or herself in the mirror is the point at which the child becomes alienated from him or herself, because it is the point at which the child enters the symbolic order. Keywords: mirror, phallus, signifier/signified, substitution, desire. Three orders: imaginary, symbolic, real.

Psychoanalytic Critic

Jargon: oedipal complex, libido, id, ego, superego, subconscious, repression, resistance. Harold Bloom is a Freudian critic made term Strong-poet, where authors subconsciously position their work against that of another, earlier author who functions as a kind of literary father figure.

Joseph and Mary

Jesus' earthly parents

The Prioress (Canterbury Tales, 1387)

Jews kill a Christian boy; he continues to sing after his throat is slit. Characteristics: dainty, materialistic, and sentimental about her little dogs.

John Donne's "Holy Sonnet 14" (1572-1631)

John Donne eventually became Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. His later poems are marked by passionate, original and searching thought regarding the Divinity and Christian faith.

Which two known writers were clergymen and studied the Bible intensively?

Jonathan Swift and John Donne

The Wife of Bath (Canterbury Tales, 1387)*

King Arthur's knight commits rape. To escape sentencing, he must discover what women desire most. He marries an old witch for the answer (sovereignty); she turns into a beautiful woman. Characteristics: deaf, gap-toothed, plump, ruddy. Embodiment of an outsized vision of womenkind. Prologue recounts the story of her 5 husbands.

king Herod

King when Jesus was born; wanted to kill Jesus so he could remain king. Orders children under two to be killed "Massacre of the Innocents" From: New Testament

The Merchant (Canterbury Tales, 1387)

Knight January is old and blind. His young wife, May, cheats on him, but when his sight is restored by Pluto, May says she did it to cure him. Characteristics: talks about business, he's actually in debt.

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Known for understated ironic treatment of character.

Solomon

Later king of Israel. Wise man and son of David by Bathsheba. From: Samuel and Kings

Erato

Love Poetry

Marxist Criticism

Left-wing view of literature; emphasizes the economic situation from which literature emerges and in which it was and is consumed. Key words: socialism, base and superstructure, class, proletariat, means of production, bourgeoisie, imperialism, dialectical materialism.

Feminine Rhyme

Lines rhymed by their final two syllables; the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables unstressed. Example: pairs of lines ending "running" and "gunning"

William Langland's "Piers Plowman" (ca. 1380)

Long poem composed of a series of eight allegorical visions, wherein Will, in dreams, seeks out Truth. Written at the same time as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, except Piers Plowman is written in alliterative verse. Is the masterpiece of the revival of the alliterative verse form in the fourteenth century.

Archetype or Myth Criticism

Looks for recurring symbols, motifs, character types and plots. Believe that the existence of these stories and characters points to needs and urges deep within the human psyche, and that the study of such stories can reveal the collective unconscious of humankind. drawn from theories from Carl Jung and James G. Frazer (The Golden Bough) Important critics to note: Joseph Campbell and Northrop Frye

Post-Structuralism

Make use of structuralist theory and critique it. Deconstruction focuses on the displacements, the gaps, that structuralists dismiss as exceptional. Jargon for deconstruction: Erasure, trace, bracketing, differance, slippage, dissemination, logocentrism, indeterminancy, decentering. Jargon for post-structuralism: mimesis, alterity, marginality, desire and lack.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Massachusetts-born poet who, despite spending her life as a recluse, created a vivid inner world through her poetry, exploring themes of nature, love, death and immortality. Refusing to publish during her lifetime, she left behind nearly two thousand poems, which were published after her death. Style: short, clipped lines, mystic intensity. Dashes at the end of several lines.

Hermes

Messenger god (leads dead to underworld; inventor of music) Roman name: Mercury

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1804-1864)

Miles Coverdale, Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla. Blithedale Farm = Brook Farm (located near Boston, prominent literary figures were stockholders) Transcendentalism: movement to contrast traditional European ideas).

Euphrosyne

Mirth

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Mississippi novelist who explored the South's collective memory of racism and conservatism in his fictional chronicle of "Yoknapatawpha" County. His many modernist novels inspired a twentieth-century southern literary renaissance. High Modernist tradition, stream-of-consciousness. perspective, race, effects of history past and present. perspective shifts. italics (internal reflection). Major Works: The Sound and the Fury (1929)-- Benjy, Quentin, Caddy, Jason, Dilsy. As I Lay Dying (1930)--experiment in perspective. Addie Buundren died, to honor her dying wish, the family set to bury her in Jefferson. -- Tulls and Reverend Whitefield. Allusion to Book XI of Homer's Odyssey. Absalom! Absalom! (1936)--life and death of Thomas Sutpen, becomes rich & powerful, however, after the Civil War loses everything; unable to gain it back.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Modernist novelist and feminist Mrs. Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1927) A Room of One's Own (1929)

John Ruskin (1819-1900)

Most important ideas: originated term of "the pathetic fallacy" (projection of author's sentiment onto an inanimate object; i.e. happy sunshine, gloomy fog) and his style of "reading" the literary, philosophical, and social history of a culture in its architecture (as in The Stones of Venice)

The Tempest

Multiple plots. Alonso, King of Naples are returning from Tunis. The tempest destroys his boat and they are shipwrecked to a mysterious island. Prospero, former duke of Milan, is telling his daughter Miranda of how his brother Antonio had forced him to flee. Caliban is the most studied character. Colonization. Quotes: "All lost! to prayers, to prayers! All lost!" (Mariners i.1)

Nineteenth Century Americans

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson.

Other big names from Genesis include:

Nimrom, Ham, Lot, Lot's wife, Sodom, Gomorrah, Jacob (later Israel), Esau (later Edom), Joseph, Judah.

Spenserian

Nine-line stanza. First eight lines are iambic pentameter. The final line, in iambic hexameter, is an alexandrine. The stanza's rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc. Example: Stanza created for The Faerie Queene.

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929)

Nonfiction. Seen as one of the most important statements in twentieth-century feminist aesthetics. "All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point--a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." (Women must be afforded the autonomy that men enjoy if they are to write).

Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds)

Notes pending.

Sonnet 130: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun

Notes pending.

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Notes pending.

Decorum

One of the neoclassical principles of drama. Relation of style to content in the speech of dramatic characters. A character's speech should be appropriate to his or her social station. Example: In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, the characters regularly exhibit decorum in the way they speak.

First-person plural

Rarely used point of view where the work is narrated using the pronoun "we." This voice forces the reader to concentrate more on what the story is about than who is telling it.

Othello

Othello and Desdemona have recently been married. Othello promotes Cassio to lieutenant. Iago wanted the job, so he works with deceit to remove Cassio from the job. After that, he works on deceiving Othello, making him think that Cassio and his wife are cheating on him. Othello falls for it and strangles his wife. Once he realizes the truth, Othello kills himself. Allusions: Iago character in Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence or in Milton's Satan. Quotes: "I hate the Moor..." (Iago I.3) "Men should be what they seem; / Or those that be not, would they might seem none!" (Iago, III.3). "O! beware, my lord of jealousy; / It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on..." (Iago, III.3). "I kissed thee ere I killed thee, no way but this, / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss." (Othello, V.2)

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

Part of the "lost generation" of American modernists, her Paris apartment was a pilgrimage site for authors, painters, etc. (incl. Picasso, Hemingway, and others). "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose". Influenced by Cezanne's painting Three Lives (1909)--"The Good Anna" "Melanctha" "The Gentle Lena" fictional town: Bridgepoint. "Scared Emily" (1913) poem (rose quote) The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)--bio told by the perspective of her lover. Style: use of repetition, writes in present tense.

Indicative

Plain old verb in present tense. Example: "John plays with the ball."

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Poet and essayist. Dover Beach. Works tend to call on prior ages, especially the ancient Greeks, as models of virtue and culture. Attacks "philistinism" (tacky middle class tastes) Praises classical "sweetness and light"

Hamlet

Prince of Denmark stages a reenaction of Claudius crime, to see if he's guilty or Hamlet's father's death as said from The Ghost. Everyone dies of poison in the end. Gertrude from a poisoned cup, Hamlet from a poisoned sword, Claudius is killed by Hamlet. Characters: Hamlet, Gertrude, The Ghost, Claudius, Ophelia, Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Fortinbras. Quotes: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." "To be, or not to be: that is the question..." Key concepts: a play within a play "The Murder of Gonzago" and "The Mousetrap"

Neoclassical Unities

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

Hera

Protector of marriage Roman name: Juno

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables (1804-1864)

Pyncheons (Hepzibah Pyncheon), Maule, Phoebe, Holgrave, and Clifford. Theme: sins of the fathers visited upon later generations.

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Read: 18, 116, and 130

Alliteration

Repetition of consonant sounds Example: "I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet/When far away an interrupted cry/Came over houses from another street..." -- "Acquainted with the Night" by Robert Frost

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver Travels (1726)

Restoration comedy. Lilliput (where everyone is six inches tall), Brobdingnag (where everyone is enormous), Laputa (a flying island), The Struldburgs (unhappy immortals who wish they could die), Houyhnhnms (intelligent, clean-living, right-thinking horses), Yahoos (idiotic, dirty, violent creatures who turn out to be people, or at least look like them).

William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700)

Restoration comedy. Millamant (a woman), Mirabell (a man), Mr. Fainall, Lady Wishfort, Foible (a woman), and Mincing (a woman).

George Etherege's The Man of Mode (1679)

Restoration comedy. Mr. Dorimant, Sir Fopling Flutter, and Mrs. Loveit

William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675)

Restoration comedy. Mr. Horner, Mr. Pinchwife, Sir Jasper Fidget, Mrs. Squeamish, and Mrs. Dainty Fidget

Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal (1777)

Restoration comedy. Sir Petter Teazle, Maria, Lady Sneerwell, Sir Benjamin Backbite, and Charles Surface

Lazarus

Resurrected by Jesus

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1804-1864)

Roger Chillingworth (the husband), the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale (the lover), Hester Prynne (the bearer of the Scarlet A of adultery), and Pearl (the illegitimate offspring of Hester and Dimmesdale).

Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet fall in love and want to be together. They scheme a fake death, except Romeo didn't get the memo and kills himself. Juliet kills him self after realizing Romeo is dead. Major Characters: Romeo, Juliet, Friar Laurence, Juliet's nurse, Benvolio (Romeo's cousin), Mercutio (Romeo's best friend), Tybalt (Juliet's cousin). Moments and Quotes: prologue, Mercutio's Queen Mab speech, the balcony scene: "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?" "wherefore art thou Romeo?"

Shakespeare's Tragedies

Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth

David

Second king of Israel, defeated the giant Goliath. Credited composer of many Psalms. From: Samuel and Kings

Jane Austen's Persuasion

Sir Walter, Elizabeth, and Anne Elliot, Frederick Wentworth, and Kellynch Hall (manor).

William Blake (1757-1827)

Songs of Innocence & Songs of Experience: style is of a childlike simplicity (The Tyger*) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell & Visions of the Daughters of Albion: visionary mystic style. Blake's work is fully consistent at their spiritual base. The reconciliation of opposites is one of the cornerstones in his philosophy.

Polyhymnia

Songs to the Gods

Sonnet Types

Sonnet, as a rule, is a 14-line form composed of rhyming iambic pentameter lines. Italian (or Petrarchan), English (or Shakespearean), Spenserian

Cain and Abel

Sons of Adam and Eve. God appreciates Abel's wok more, so Cain kills Abel. Cain is driven to the east of Eden; has the "mark" as protection. From: Genesis Allusion: John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1952)

Aglaia

Splendor

Richard III

Started as the Duke of Gloucester, marks his intention of taking the kingship from his brother, king Edward IV. Richard arranges the death of his brother, George, Duke of Clarance. Edward falls ill, his two children are locked up in the Tower of London for their own "protection." Richard consolidates his power and is crowned King when Edward dies. Richard then kills the two young princes. In the end, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, declares war on Richard. Richard is killed in battle, and Henry Tudor is crowned King Henry VII. Monologue: Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York; /And all the clouds that loured upon our house / In the deep bosom of the ocean buried... /But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks / Nor made to court an armorous looking-glass, / I that am rudely stamped and want love's majesty / To strut before a wanton ambling nymph, / I that am curtailed for this fair proportion, / Cheated of feature by dissembling nature... / And therefore since I cannot prove a lover / To entertain these fair well-spoken days, / I am determined to prove a villain / And hate the idle pleasures of these days."

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

Success came late for Johnson, and he struggled with poverty into his forties but is considered the best English literary mind of the eighteenth century. Important works: "The Vanity of Human Wishes" (poem), The Lives of the English Poets (biography), essays for the journal The Rambler, the first Modern English Dictionary, Rasselas (a melancholy novel about the prince of Abyssinia's unsuccessful quest for a happy and fulfilling "choice of life")

Fortinbras

The "strong armed" Prince of Norway who is constantly pressing on the Danes from without. He appears at the end looking to meet with Claudius, but finds only the results of the deadliest fencing match ever. Hamlet crowns Fortinbras king of Denmark just before his death, and Fortinbras orders an honorable burial for Hamlet.

Oedipus the King

The Oracle prophesies that King Laius will have a son who will kill Laius and marry Queen Jocasta. But instead of killing newborn Oedipus to avoid the prophesy, they give him up for adoption. Grown up Oedipus solves a sphinx's riddle and marries the Queen. When the incest is revealed, Jocasta commits suicide and Oedipus blinds himself.

Shakespeare's Comedies

The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice

Anthropomorphism

The assigning of human attributes, such as emotions or physical characteristics, to nonhumans, most often plants and animals. Differs from personification in that it is an ongoing pattern applied to a nonhuman character throughout a literary work. Example: The character of Aslan in C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia is a lion, but is addressed and behaves as a human.

Epic catalogs

The background information and the descriptions of equipment or participants are often in the form of long lists.

Judas Iscariot

The disciple who betrayed Jesus

Other Pilgrims and Tales (Canterbury Tales 1387)

The franklin, a wealthy landowner, tells a romantic tale about a lover, Aurelius; a faithful wife, Dorigen; and Dorigen's husband, Arveragus. The reeve, a kind of administrative overseer, tells a tole of how a greedy miller named Simkin and his wide and daughter enjoyed by a pair of clerks, John and Alan, whom he'd swindled earlier. The story is the reeve's (and sometimes carpenter) response to the miller's tale of the foolish flood-fearing carpenter. The clerk tells the tale of Griselda, a patient wife, who endures the trials of her needlessly jealous husband, the Marquis Walter. The doctor's tale is of a woman, Virginia, who has her father kill her in order to avoid falling into the clutches of Apius, an evil judge.

Antagonist

The main character opposing the protagonist. Usually the villain. Example: Iago from Shakespeare's Othello

John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667)

The most important of Milton's works. Milton writes in blank verse.

The Tower of Babel

The people of Shem build a tower to reach heaven. God was angry and scattered them throughout Earth. Explains why people speak different languages across the globe. From: Genesis

Voice

The perspective from which a story is written. Literature is most often written from the first or third person, though there are rare instances of artists using the second or the first-person plural. Changes within a particular literary work.

Sprung Rhythm

The rhythm created and used in the nineteenth century by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like Old English verse, it fits a varying number of unstressed syllables in a line - only the stresses count in scansion. eg: Hopkins' "Pied Beauty": "Glory be to God for dappled things-- / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim..."

In Memoriam

The stanza composed of four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming abba Example: Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H."

Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine (1564-1593)

The story of a Scythian shepherd, Tamburlaine, who becomes an extraordinarily ferocious and successful conqueror in Asia Minor. Zenocrate is the main female character.

Parable of the Prodigal Son

The story of a rebellious son who rejects his father's upbringing and demands his inheritance and goes off far away, not until he's confronted with failure and despair, does he come home. His father surprisingly welcomes him lovingly, without question. No amount of time, money, and rebellion could have gotten in the way of the father's unconditional love for his returning son Read: Luke 15:11-32

Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (1564-1593)

The story of a sorcerer who sells his soul in return for power. In Marlowe's telling of the tale, Faustus is served and persecuted by Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Mephistopheles. Goethe also wrote a version of the tale called Faust. In Goethe's telling, the protagonists soul is bartered in exchange for knowledge and Faust deals with a single satanic agent, Mephistopheles.

Ballad

The typical stanza of the folk ballads. The length of the lines is determined by the number of stressed syllables only. Rhyme scheme is abcb. Example: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Epic invocation

The way epics were started. aka. invocation of the muse. The address to the muse is often in the form of a request for the muse to help the poet remember the past.

Third Person

The work is narrated using a name or a third-person pronoun (he, she, etc.) Example: Most of Jane Austen's novels, including Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion.

First Person

The work is narrated using the pronoun "I." The narrator can be the protagonist, an omniscient speaker who is not even a clear character in the story. There can also be multiple "I" narrators in the same work. Example: William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

Terza Rima

This form consists of three-line stanzas with an interlocking rhyme scheme proceeding aba bcb cdc ded, etc. Example: "Midway on our life's journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell / About those woods is hard--so tangled and rough..." (Divine Comedy, Dante).

The Victorian Essayists (~1800-1900)

Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, J.S. Mill, Matthew Arnold, and Cardinal Newman.

The Pardoner (Canterbury Tales, 1837)

Three drunkards search for death but instead find a treasure, over which they murder each other. Characteristics: thin, vain, smooth-skinned blond with a bag full of pardons.

Melpomene

Tragedy

Free Verse

Unrhymed verse without a strict meter. Example: "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. / I loaf and invite my soul, / I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass." ("Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman.)

Imperative

Verb used for issuing commands. Example: "Do it now!"

Other Verse Forms

Villanelle and Sestina.

John Milton's Lycidas (1637)

Was written as a pastoral elegy for Milton's recently passed friend Edward King. The name "Lycidas" itself comes from Theocritus's Idylls; "Lycidas" also shows up in Herodotus. From the poem's opening lines: "Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more," the invocation of nature is coupled with a symbol of poetic fame (the laurel) and throughout the poem, Lycidas becomes a point of contact between some shared pastoral past, classical tradition, and Christian tradition. "Without the meed of some melodious tear." "But, oh! the heavy change, now thou art gone, / Now thou art gone and never must return!" "Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth:/ And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth."

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Works: "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass Style: long, rolling, exuberant lines and use of repetition instead of rhyme to lend structure to his shaggy verse Biography: Grew up in Brooklyn, early career = newspaper work. Mid-30's: traveled across and writing turned from, sappy, conventional to original and uniquely American celebration of self, spirit and democracy (Leaves of Grass). Influences: Hegel (German metaphysical philosophers), Hindu religious texts (Upanishads), Emerson's transcendental philosophy**

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

Works: Sartor Resartus (a philosophical work on appearances and essences) Influences: Kant, Goethe Style: passionate, often ridiculous and weird

James Boswell (1740-1795)

Wrote the biography, The Life of Johnson. Was a friend of Samuel Johnson. In it, Boswell describes Johnson in a genial, sympathetic eighteenth-century style. Portrait of a supremely witty and erudite conversationalist with a deep melancholy streak. Shown to have both generosity of spirit and outbursts of irritability.

John Donne's "The Sun Rising," and "The Flea" (1572-1631)

Young John Donne's poetry is the verse of a courtier playboy; playful and sensual.

Marxist influence on criticism

a given individual, his consciousness, and the products of that consciousness are themselves the products of a specific cultural and historical context, and thus that context must be addressed.

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

a novel basically English but incorporating as many as seventy different languages to create a kind of dreamspeak. "Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and she of it."

Pastoral Literature

a work that deals with the lives of people, especially shepherds, in the country or in nature Example: Christopher Marlowe's poem "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love"

Linguistic Criticism

broad area of critical thought concerned primarily with language. Roots in the early 20th century, made more rigorous and less speculative. Includes: Formalism, New Criticism, (particulars of literary language); Structuralism, Deconstruction (philosophy of language).

The Lake Poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, also Essayist Charles Lamb

called Lake Poets because of their long residence in the Lake District of England. Wordsworth: "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," "Lyrical Ballads"; values of rustic people and rural settings, as well as nonacademic language; nature and the sublime. "Lyrical Ballads" work of both Wordsworth and Coleride Coleridge: "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Biographia Literaria" (outlines his aesthetic principles.) His thesis is that the imagination is the supreme faculty of the human intellect, and its cultivation is both the prerequisite and aim of poetry. Both W & C were valued correspondents with Charles Lamb. Wrote back response to Lyrical Ballads.

Zeus

chief god, god of the sky Roman name: Jupiter

The Fates

choose a man's destiny and life span

James Joyce's Ulysses (1922)

continuation of Stephen's story (Artist). Stephen figures as the Telemachus to a new character's, Leopold Bloom's Odysseus. This novel follows the "travels" of Bloom throughout Dublin on an unremarkable day in 1904. Structurally analogous to Homer's epic. Each of the "episodes" of the book is based on an episode of the epic. "yes I said yes I will Yes."

Cursed House of Atreus

curse is a cause both of the war and of the problems that hound the Greeks. With the "successful" conclusion of the Trojan War, Agamemnon returns. His wife kills him to avenge the daughter he had sacrificed. Curse proceeds to Orestes, Agamemnon's son, until he begs for a trial where Athena declares a tie. The curse is finally put to rest.

The Graces: Aglaia, Euphrosyne, Thalia

daughters of Zeus and Eurynome

The Muses: Clio, Urania, Melpomene, Thalia, Terpsichore, Calliope, Erato, Polyhymnia, Euterpe

daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for their music, which brings joy to any who hear it. Each of the nine muses had her own specialty.

Hyperbole

deliberate exaggeration Example: "Here once embattled farmers stood/ And fired the shot heard round the world." Line from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Concord Hymn" denotes obvious exaggeration, employed for the purpose of highlighting the importance of battle.

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927)

describes the Ramsay family's two separate visits to this lighthouse. Style: similar to Mrs. Dalloway, except this novel is much more concerned with the effects of the passage of time. (Book is split in 3; middle section creating a passage of time; H) "Nothing is merely one thing." Lily Briscoe, Charles Tansley, Augustus Carmichael, Paul Rayley, and Minta Doyle.

Pan

god of goatherds and shepherds (plays the fife and has goat-like appearance)

Eros

god of love Roman name: Cupid

In medias res

in the middle of things Ex: the Iliad begins with the siege of Troy already ten years old.

Two other characteristics of an epic are...

involve interfering or interested supernatural beings who toy with the human participants. usually resolved by a great battle, contest, or deed.

John Milton's Aeropagitica (1644)

is Milton's best known prose piece. In this, Milton argues that free press is God's will because published books are the means by which man will hear God's Revelation. As such, the censor is blocking God's word in censoring creative artists. "...as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye."

John Milton's Comus (1634)

is a "masque," a dramatic form in which all entertainment systems are go in music, singing, dancing, acting, and stage design. The plot concerns a lady lost in the woods who, upon falling asleep, is captured by the lecherous Comus and carried back to face a series of erotic harassments. "Mortals, that would follow me, Love Virtue; she alone is free. She can teach ye how to climb Higher than the sphery chime; Or, if Virtue feeble were, Heaven itself would stoop to her. "

James Joyce's Dubliners (1914)

is a short-story collection. most famous story is "The Dead," here main character Gabriel Conroy attends party with wife, Gretta. After a series of events, Gabriel finds out Gretta had a girlhood lover, Michael Furey, who died from illness. "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon the living and the dead."

Structuralism

is the school that dominated continental Europe, derived from theories of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Closely related to semiotics. Meaning is never or rarely intrinsic--meaning is only produced by structure. Jargon: sign, signifier, and signified, binary oppositions.

Hades

lord of the dead, the underworld (but not death itself) Roman name: Pluto

Poseidon

lord of the sea Roman name: Neptune

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

narrates a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she readies her home for a party. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." written in an intimate stream of consciousness, less reliant on allusions instead focusing on highlighting characters interiority by indirect style (like Austen). Septimus Smith (veteran whose story is parallel to Clarissa's), Richard Dalloway, Sally Seton, and Peter Walsh.

The Naiads

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

Georgic

poem dealing with people laboring in the countryside, pushing plows, raising crops, etc. Not to be confused with pastoral poetry (idealizes life in the countryside) Example: Virgil's Georgics. Poem about the virtues of the farming life.

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

poet in pre-WWII, his influence extended way past the 1960's. Major Works: "The Waste Land," "The Long Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Ash Wednesday," and "The Hollow Men. Allusions to Biblical, classical, literary sources, bleak sense of cultural emptiness and barrenness. Prose and poetry styles.

The Wise Men; Magi

travel from far away bearing gifts for Jesus

James Joyce (1882-1941)

twentieth century. stream-of-consciousness.

Mary Magdalene

prostitute, forgiven of sins, witnessed almost all events around crucifixion, anointed Jesus with alabaster jar of perfume and tears

The Furies

punish crime

Titans

ruled the earth before the Olympians overthrew them

Chronos

ruler of the Titans Roman name: Saturn

James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

semi-autobiographical novel featuring Stephen Dedalus. Novel opens with babyspeak and ends with pages of young Stephen's journal. "The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."

Couplet

two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit.

Rhyme Royal

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

Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1819-1891)

short story about the alienated Bartleby, whose mantra, whenever asked to do anything, is "I'd prefer not to."

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

social theorist and reformer. Melancholia in his Autobiography ON LIBERTY: rights of individuals must be safeguarded WHAT IS POETRY?: Defines "poetry" as the expression of the self to the self THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN: excoriates on the moral, rational, and practical levels of women.

Herman Melville's Billy Budd (1819-1891)

story of a handsome sailor (a stock seafaring character elevated to Christ-like status) undone by his own goodness and the plottings of the repulsive Claggart.

Parable of the Sower

teaches that we must hear Jesus' words, take them to heart, and put them into practice. Read: Mark 4:1-20, Matthew 13:1-23, Luke 8:1-15.

Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

the Bertrams of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, and Mrs. Norris.

Protagonist

the main character, usually the hero Example: In Shakespeare's Othello, Othello is the protagonist.

Blank Verse

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

Jon Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1631-1700)

uses biblical characters too analogize a political crisis during the reign of Charles II. Characters: Absalom (Duke of Monmouth), Achitophel (Earl of Shaftesbury), King David (Charles II). The hedonistic Charles spent so much time with his mistress that he had plenty of offspring but no legitimate (Protestant) heir, which left his Catholic brother, James, successor to the throne. Note Dryden's use of heroic couplets. The poem is remarkable for Dryden's politic handling of an extremely sensitive situation.

Subjunctive

verb used to express conditional or counterfactual statements Example: "If I were a rich man..."

Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur (1470)

written in late Middle English. Recounts the legends surrounding King Arthur. Morte D'Arthur is prose while Green Knight was in alliterative verse.