British Literature Cult Lit
Jane Austen
A British author of the late eighteenth and early ninetieth centuries; her best known works are the Novels Pride and Prejudice and Emma. She is particularly famous for her witty irony and perceptive comments about people and their social relationships.
Joseph Conrad
A British author of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. He based many of his works, including Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, on his adventures as a sailor.
"Et tu, Brute?"
A Latin sentence meaning "Even you, Brutus?" from the play Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare. Caesar utters these words as he is being stabbed to death, having recognized his friend Brutus among the assassins. Is also used to express surprise and dismay at the treachery of a supposed friend.
Animal Farm
A NOVEL OF SATIRE by George Orwell . Animals take over a farm to escape human tyranny, but the pigs treat the other animals worse than the people did . A famous quotation from the book is "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS."
James Boswell
A Scottish author of the eighteenth century, best known for his Life Of Samuel Johnson. His last name has become a general term for a biographer: "James Joyce found his __________ in Richard Ellmann."
Robert Burns
A Scottish poet of the eighteenth century, known for his poems in Scottish dialect, such as "To a Mouse," "A Red, Red Rose," and "Auld Lang Syne." Many lines from his poetry have become proverbial: "The best-laid schemes of mice and men/ Gang aft agley" (often go astray), "Oh, wad some power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us!" (Oh, if the good spirit would only give us the power/ to see ourselves as others see us), "A man's a man for a a' (all) that
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
A book by Lewis Carroll. Alice, a young girl, enters Wonderland by following the White Rabbit down his hole, and has many strange adventures there. She meets the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, the grinning Cheshire Cat, and the Queen of Hearts, who shouts, "Off with her head!" when Alice makes a mistake at croquet. THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS is a sequel to this book
Cheshire Cat
A cat with an enormous grin encountered by Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. The cat tends to disappear, leaving only its smile hanging in the air.
Brutus
A character in the play Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare; on the of assassins of Julius Caesar
As You Like It
A comedy by William Shakespeare. Most of the action takes place in the Forest of Arden, to which several members of a duke's court have been banished. The speech " All The World's A Stage" is from this play.
Sherlock Holmes
A fictional English detective, created by Sir Arthur Doyle. His extraordinary powers of memory, observation, and deduction enable him to solve mysteries and identify criminals in cases that leave all other detectives baffled. His companion is Dr. Watson, who records his exploits. This character is often mistakenly quoted as saying, "Elementary, my dear Watson." Figuratively, any shrewd detective can be called ____________ __________, or simply _____________.
"The female of the species is more deadly than the male"
A frequently repeated line from the poem "The Female of the Species," by Rudyard Kipling.
Lord George Gordon Byron
A handsome and daring English poet of the early nineteenth century, known for his sexual exploits, his rebelliousness, and his air of brooding. He was a leader of Romanticism; his best-known work is Don Juan, a long poem of satire.
Marc Antony
A historical politician and general of ancient Rome, who appears as a character in the plays Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare. In a famous speech in Julius Caesar, given after Caesar has been killed, he turns public opinion against those who did the killing. His speech begins, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend me your ears"; in it, he repeats several times the words "Brutus Is An Honorable Man."
Byronic hero
A kind of hero found in several of the works of Lord Byron. Like Byron himself, a _________ hero is a melancholy and rebellious young man, distressed by a terrible wrong he committed in the past.
King Arthur
A legendary early king of Britain much celebrated in literature. The best-known works on Arthur are the fifteenth-century book Le Morte d'Arthur, by Thomas Malory, and the nineteenth century series of poems Idylls of the King, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
"Drink to me only with thine eyes"
A line from a love poem by the seventeenth- century English poet Ben Jonson. He suggests that lovers find each other's glances so intoxicating that they have no need to drink wine.
"East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet"
A line from a poem by Rudyard Kipling. It continues, a few lines later: "But there is neither East nor West... When two strong men stand face to face.
"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?"
A line from the sixteenth century play Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe; Faustus says this when the Devil Mephistopheles shows him Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in history. The "thousand ships" are warships, a reference to the Trojan War.
"There's a divinity that shapes our ends"
A line spoken by the title character in the play Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. In referring to a divine power that influences human affairs, Hamlet is defending a decision he made suddenly, and is questioning the need for careful planning in all circumstances.
"God's in heaven- - All's right with the world"
A line sung by a little Italian girl, Pippa, in the poem "Pippa Passes," by Robert Browning
Friday
A native character in Robinson Crusoe, so named by Crusoe because Crusoe found him on this day of the week. ____________ places himself in service to Crusoe, and helps him survive. Figuratively, a "man __________" or "girl ___________" is a valued helper.
Brave New World
A novel by Aldous Huxley that depicts the potential horrors of life in the twenty-fifth century.
Great Expectations
A novel by Charles Dickens, Worldly ambitions lead a young boy, Pip, to abandon his true friends.
David Copperfield
A novel by Charles Dickens, largely the story of Dickens's own life. The title character is sent away to work at a very young age, and grows to manhood over the course of the book. The account of the title character's grim boyhood was designed to expose the cruel conditions of child labor in Britain at the time.
Jane Eyre
A novel by Charlotte Bronte. The title character serves as governess to the ward of the mysterious and moody Edward Rochester. He proposes to her, but she discovers that he is already married to an insane woman. Eventually the title character and Edward are able to marry.
Frankenstein
A novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The title character, Dr. Victor __________________, makes a manlike monster from parts of cadavers and brings it to life by the power of an electrical charge. His monster is larger than most men and fantastically strong. Frequently the subject of horror films, the monster is usually pictured with an oversized square brow, metal bolts in his neck and forehead, and greenish skin. People often refer to the monster, rather than his creator, as "______________________."
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
A novel by Robert Louis Stevenson about the good Dr. ________, whose well- intentioned experiments on himself periodically turn him into a cruel and sadistic Mr. _________. Dr. ________ and Mr. __________ provide a classic example of split personality. In addition, the two characters often serve as symbols of the good and evil sides of a single personality.
"Far from the madding crowd"
A phrase adapted from the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," by Thomas Gray; madding means "frenzied." The lines containing the phrase speak of the people buried in the churchyard: "____ ________ ___ ___________ __________ __________ ________/ Their sober wishes never learned to stray." In the late nineteenth century, the English author Thomas Hardy named one of his novels this phrase.
"Elementary, my dear Watson"
A phrase often attributed to Sherlock Holmes, the English detective in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes supposedly says this to his reasoning in solving a crime. Though these precise words are never used in the Holmes stories, something like them appears in the story "The Crooked Man": "Excellent!" I [Watson] cried. "Elementary," said he.
"Every inch a king"
A phrase used by the title character in the play King Lear, by William Shakespeare, to describe himself to his friend, the earl of Gloucester. The situation is ironic; Lear is raving over his deprivation and is wearing weeds.
"In Flanders Fields"
A poem about World War I by the Canadian author John McCrae, describing the scene of some of the worst fighting of the war; the "speakers" of the poem are the dead. It begins: "___ ____________ _________ the poppies below Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place..."
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
A poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson that celebrates the heroism of a British cavalry brigade in its doomed assault on much large forces. The poem contains the well-known lines "Theirs not a reason to why/ Theirs but to do and die."
"Gunga Din"
A poem by Rudyard Kipling about the native water carrier for a British regiment in India. It ends: "Though I've belted you an' flayed you, by the livin' Gawd that made you, You're a better man than I am, _________ _____!"
"Invictus"
A popular poem from the late nineteenth century by the English author William Ernest Henley. _____________ is Latin for "unconquered." The speaker in the poem proclaims he strength in the face of adversity: "My head is bloody, but unbowed... I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul."
"All animals are equal , but some animals are more equal than others"
A proclamation by the pigs who control the government in the novel Animal Farm, by George Orwell. The sentence is a comment on the hypocrisy of governments that proclaim that absolute equality of their citizens, but give power and privileges to a small ELITE.
"Fear not till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane"
A prophecy made by witches to Macbeth in the play Macbeth, by William Shakespeare. Later in the play, Macbeth's enemies advance on the hill of Dunsinane, his stronghold, camouflaged by tree branches they have cut from the Forest of Birnam. Macbeth sees Birnam Wood moving as prophesied, and realizes that he will soon die.
Gulliver's travels
A satire by Jonathan Swift. Lemuel ___________, an Englishman, travels to exotic lands, including Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and the land of the Houyhnhnms. Probably the most famous image from this book is of the tiny Lilliputians having tied down the sleeping giant, the title character.
Uriah Heep
A scheming blackmailer in David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens. He continually insists that he is a "very 'umble person."
"It is a far, far better thing to do, than I have ever done"
A sentence from the end of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. The character who says this is about to die in place of another man. Sydney Carton replaces Charles Darnay.
"The horror! The horror!"
A sentence spoken by the dying adventurer Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad.
Jeeves
A servant who appears in comic novels and short stories about the English upper classes by P. G. Wodehouse, a twentieth- century American author born in England.
Heart of Darkness
A short novel by Joseph Conrad. It concerns a seafarer, Marlow, who is sent to the interior of Africa in search of a "mad adventure" named Kurtz. The book's title refers both to the location of the story and to the evil and darkness in people's hearts.
"Brutus is an honorable man"
A statement made several times in a speech by Mark Antony in the play Julius Caesar. The speech is Antony's funeral oration over Caesar, whom Brutus has helped kill. "________ __ __ _____________ ____" is ironic, since Antony is attempting to succeeds in turning the Roman people against Brutus and the other assassins.
A Christmas Carol
A story by Charles Dickens about the spiritual conversion of the miser Ebenezer Scrooge. At first, Scrooge scoffs at the idea of Christmas with a "Bah, humbug!" After the appearance of the ghost of his stingy partner, Jacob Marley, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, Scrooge reforms and offers help to the crippled boy Tiny Tim, son of Scrooge's clerk, Bob Cratchit.
Bard of Avon
A title given to William Shakespeare, who was born and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon , England. A bard is a poet.
Julius Caesar
A tragedy by William Shakespeare, dealing with the assassination of the title character and its aftermath. Some famous lines from the play are "Et Tu, Brute?" "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Ears," "Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look," and "the Noblest Roman of Them All."
Hamlet
A tragedy by William Shakespeare. Before the play begins, the king of Denmark has been murdered by his brother, Claudius, who then becomes king and marries the dead king's widow. The ghost of the dead king visits his son, Prince ___________, and urges him to avenge the murder. In the course of the play, the title character, a scholar, slowly convinces himself that he ought to murder Claudius. The play ends with a duel between the title character and the courtier Laertes, and the death by poison of all the principal characters. The title character has come to symbolize the person whose thoughtful nature is an obstacle to quick and decisive actions. ______________, Shakespeare's longest play, contains several soliloquies- speeches in which the title character, alone speaks his thoughts. Many lines from the play are very familiar, such as "Alas, poor Yorick"; "There's a divinity that shapes our ends"; "Frailty, thy name is woman'; "Get thee to a nunnery"; "The lady doth protest too much"; "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio"; "Neither a borrower nor a lender be"; " There's a special providence in the fall of the sparrow"; "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"; and "To be or not to be: That is the question."
Antony and Cleopatra
A tragedy by William Shakespeare. It dramatizes the grand but ill- fated love of the Roman general Mark Antony and Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt.
Fagin
A villain in the novel Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens. This unscrupulous, miserly character teaches Oliver Twist and other orphaned boys to pick pockets and steal for him.
"Beware the ides of March"
A warning Julius Caesar receives from a fortune teller in the play Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare. Later in the play he is assassinated on the Ides of Marchi
"Big Brother is watching you"
A warning that appears on posters throughout Oceania, the fictional dictatorship described by George Orwell in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four. The term Big Brother is used to refer to any ruler or government that invaded the privacy of its citizens.
The Canterbury Tales
A work written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the late fourteenth century about a group of pilgrims, of many different occupations and personalities, who meet at an inn near London as they are setting out for Canterbury, England. Their host proposes a storytelling contest to make the journey more interesting. Some of the more famous stories are "The Knight's Tale," "The Miller's Tale," and "The Wife of the Bath's Tale." The tales have many different styles, reflecting the great diversity of the pilgrims; some are notoriously bawdy. The language of ____ _____________ ______ is Middle English.
William Blake
An English author and artist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This author, a visionary, was an early leader of Romanticism. He is best known for his collections of poems Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience contains "Tiger! Tiger! Burning Bright." This author illustrated, printed, and distributed all of his books himself.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
An English author of the early nineteenth century. He was a leader of Romanticism; his poems included "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
Samuel Johnson
An English author of the eighteenth century, known fro his wit and for his balanced and careful criticism of literature. _______________, who is sometimes called "Dr. _______________" (he held a doctorate from Oxford), complied an important dictionary of the English language. The story of his life is told in The Life of _____________ ______________, by James Boswell.
Henry Fielding
An English author of the eighteenth century. He is known for his novels, including Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
An English author of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, best known for creating the character Sherlock Homes. His works include "A Study in Scarlet," "The Sign of the Four," and "The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Francis Bacon
An English author of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He is known in Philosophy for his defense of the Scientific Method. In literature, he is known for his essays; they contain such memorable thoughts as "Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man." He has sometimes been mentioned as a possible author of the plays commonly attributed to William Shakespeare.
Charles Dickens
An English author of the nineteenth century. His works include A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and numerous other novels. He created many memorable characters, including, Bob Cratchit, Fagin, Uriah Heep, Jacob Marley, Samuel Pickwick, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Tiny Tim. This author, a man of keen social conscience, used his books to portray the suffering of the working class at the time of the Industrial Revolution.
Aldous Huxley
An English author of the twentieth century best known for Brave New World, a Novel about the future.
T. S. Eliot
An English author of the twentieth century, born and raised in the United States. He wrote poems, plays, and essays, and urged the use of ordinary language in poetry. He was much concerned with the general emptiness of modern life and with the revitalization of religion. Among his best- known works are the poems "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land," and the play Murder in the Cathedral.
Agatha Christie
An English author of the twentieth century, known for her play The Mousetrap and many detective Thrillers and murder mysteries. She helped raise the "whodunit" to a prominent place in literature. Her two most famous literary detectives are the Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot(famous for deducting with his "little grey cells") and the English old lady Miss Jane Marple. Some of her famous novels are Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and most famously perhaps And Then There Were None.
John Donne
An English poet and clergyman of the seventeenth century. He is famous for his intricate metaphors, as in a poem in which he compares two lovers to the two legs of a drawing compass. He also wrote learned and eloquent sermons and meditations. The expressions "Death, be not proud," "No man is an island," and "For whom the bells tolls" come from his works.
Geoffrey Chaucer
An English poet of the fourteenth century, called the father of English poetry: he was the first great poet to write in the English language. His best- known work is The Canterbury Tales.
Robert Browning
An English poet of the nineteenth century whose many poems include, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" and "My Last Duchess".
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
An English poet of the nineteenth century, and the wife of Robert Browning. She is best known for Sonnets from the Portuguese. The most famous of these sonnets begins, "How I love thee? Let me count the ways."
Lewis Carroll
An English writer and logician, best known as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.
James Joyce
An Irish author of the twentieth century, known for his novels, especially Finnegan's Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, and for his short stories, especially the collection Dubliners. Ulysses, a novel revolutionary in its form, is almost entirely concerned with the actions and thoughts of three characters on a single day.
Falstaff
An endearing, fat, aging rogue who appears in several of the plays of Shakespeare. He is prominent in the two parts of King Henry the Fourth, where he is the jolly companion of Prince Hal, the future King Henry V. This character is a lover of wine, women, and song; although a coward in practice, he loves to tell tales of his supposed bravery.
"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
An enduringly popular poem from the middle eighteenth century by the English poet Thomas Gray. It contains the lines "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air," "The paths of glory lead but to the grave," and "Far from the Madding Crowd's ignoble strife/ Their sober wishes never learned to stray."
Beowulf
An epic in Old English, estimated as dating from as early as as the eight century; the earliest long work of literature in English. The critical events are the slaying of the monster Grendel and Grendel's mother by the the title character, and his final battle with a dragon, in which he is mortally wounded.
"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/ Her infinite variety"
Line from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra where friend of Marc Antony says that Cleopatra is overwhelmingly attractive to men not so much for her beauty but rather her fascinating unpredictability and change of moods.
"Double, double toil and trouble;/ Fire burn, and cauldron bubble"
Lines chanted by three witches in the play Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, as they mix a potion.
"Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest- /Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
Lines from a pirates' song in Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
"Home is the sailor, home from sea/ And the hunter home from the hill"
Lines from a poem, "Requiem," by Robert Louis Stevenson, composed for engraving on a tombstone.
"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is/ To have a thankless child"
Lines from the play King Lear, by William Shakespeare, spoken by King Lear after he has been betrayed by his two daughters.
"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;/ They kill us for their sport"
Lines from the play King Lear, by William Shakespeare, spoken by the end of Gloucester, a friend of King Lear. They express a bitter sense of the meaningless and brutality of life.
"Alas, poor Yorick"
Lines said by Hamlet in Shakespeare's play of same name in which Hamlet meditates in graveyard holding skull of Yorick, a jester he had known and once liked.
"All the world's a stage"
The beginning of a speech in the play As You Like It, by William Shakespeare. It is also called "The Seven Ages of Man," since it treats that many periods in a man's life: his years as an infant, schoolboy, lover. soldier, judge, foolish old man, and finally "second childishness and more oblivion." The speech begins, "___ ____ __________ _ __________/ And all the men and women merely players..."
Book of Common Prayer
The book used in worship by the Anglican Communion. Its early versions, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were widely admired for the dignity and beauty of their language. This book has had a strong effect on literature in English through such expressions as "Let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace," and "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done."
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears."
The first line of a speech from the play Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare. Mark Antony addresses the crowd at Caesar's funeral: "____________, ________________, _______________ _____ _____ ________ _________; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, know the good is oft interred with their bones..."
"If music be the food of love, play on"
The first line of the play, Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare. The speaker is asking for music because he is frustrated in courtship; he wants an overabundance of love so that he may lose his appetite of it.
"I wander lonely as a cloud"
The first line of the poem "Daffodils," by William Wordsworth. It begins: "_____ _____________ _________ ___ __ _____________ That floats on high, o'er vales and hills When all at once I saw a crowd A host, of golden daffodils."
"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may"
The first line of the poem "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time," from the middle of the seventeenth century, by the English poet Robert Herrick. He is advising people to take advantage of life while they are young: "_________ __ _____________ ________ __ __________, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying."
"Had we but world enough, and time,/ This coyness, Lady were no crime"
The first lines of "To His Coy Mistress," a poem from the seventeenth century by the English poet Andrew Marvell. The poet tells a woman whom he loves that if they had endless time and space at their disposal, then he could accept her unwillingness to go to bed with him. Life is short, however, opportunities must be seized. Other lines from the poem are: "But at my back, I always hear/ TIME'S WINGED CHARIOT hurrying near," and "The grave's a fine and private place,/ But none, I think, do there embrace."
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"
The first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, referring to the time of the French Revolution.
"Death, be not proud"
The first words of the Sonnet by John Donne. The poet asserts that death is a feeble enemy, and concludes with these lines: "One short sleep past, we waste eternally/ And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die."
Dr. Jekyll
The kind side of the split- personality title character in The Strange Case of Dr. _________ and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
George Eliot
The nom de plume of Mary Ann Evans, an English author of novels in the nineteenth century. Some of her best known works are Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner.
"Come live with me and be my love"
The opening line of " The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," a poem by Christopher Marlowe.
Captain Hook
The private- villain in the play Peter Pan. One of his hands has been devoured by a crocodile and replaced with a hook. He is eaten whole by the crocodile near the end of the play
Globe Theater
The theater in London where many of the great plays of William Shakespeare were first performed. Shakespeare himself acted in this theater. It burned and was rebuilt shortly before Shakespeare's death, and was finally pulled down in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Count Dracula
The title character of _____________ (title character'a last name), a novel from the late nineteenth century by the English author Bram Stoker. __________ _____________, a vampire, is from Transylvania, a region of eastern Europe now in Romania. He takes his name from a blood- thirsty nobleman of the Middle Ages. To lay the vampire's spirit to rest, one must drive a wooden stake through his heart. ____________ ____________ was played in films by the Hungarian- born actor Bela Lugosi, whose elegant, exotic accent has become permanently associated with the character.
Iago
The treacherous villain in the play Othello, by William Shakespeare. As adviser to Othello, a general of Venice, this character lies to his master and eventually drives him to murder his wife.
Mr. Hyde
The vicious side of the personality of Dr. Jekyll in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. _________, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Cordelia
The youngest of the king's three daughters in the play King Lear, by William Shakespeare. King Lear at first thinks her ungrateful to him because she refuses to flatter him as her sisters do; he soon finds out that she is the only one of the three who genuinely cares for him.
Charlotte and Emily Bronte
Two English authors of the nineteenth century, known for their novels. One wrote Jane Eyre; her sister, wrote Wuthering Heights.
"Do not go gentle into the good night... Rage, rage against the dying of the light"
Two lines from a poem by the twentieth- century Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, addressed to his dying father.
"Get thee to a nunnery"
Words from the play Hamlet, by William Shakespeare; the advice Hamlet gives to Ophelia. He bids her a life of celibacy.
