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alexandrine

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Line of iambic hexameter. Final line of a Spenserian stanza

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alliteration

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Use of a repeated consonant or sound, usually at beginning of series of words

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allusion

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Reference to someone or something, usually literary

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antagonist

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Main character opposing the protagonist. Usually the villain

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anthropomorphism

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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 intrinsic premise and an ongoing pattern applied to a nonhuman character throughout a literary work

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apostrophe

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Speech addressed to someone not present, or to an abstraction. "America, you great unfinished symphony!/You sent for me!" is an example. Innate grandiosity of apostrophe lends itself to parody

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Bildungsroman

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German term meaning "novel of education." Typically follows a young person over a period of years, from naivete and inexperience through the first struggles with the harsher realities and hypocrisies of the adult world

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caesura

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

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decorum

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One of the neoclassical principles of drama. Relation of style to content in speech of dramatic characters. A character's speech should be appropriate to his or her social station. Shakespeare was not the best at this.

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doggerel

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Derogatory term used to describe poorly written poetry of little or no literary value

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epithalamium

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Work, especially poem, written to celebrate a wedding

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euphuism

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Self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech. Opposite of skeltonics.

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feminine rhyme

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Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. The tunnel song from Willy Wonka. Properly, and not simply a double rhyme, penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables unstressed

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flat and round characters

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

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georgic

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Not to be confused with pastoral poetry, which idealizes life in the countryside. Deals with people laboring in the countryside, FARMING

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hamartia

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

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Homeric epithet

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Repeated descriptive phrase, as found in Homer's epics; "the wine-dark sea"

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hudibrastic

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Derived from Samuel Butler's Hudibras. Refers specifically to the couplets of rhymed tetrameter lines (8 syllables), which Butler employed in Hudibras, or more generally to any deliberate, humorous, ill-rhythmed ill-rhymed couplets.

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hyperbole

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Deliberate exaggeration

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litotes

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Understatement created through a double negative, or more precisely, negating the negative. "Paul answered, 'I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of NO ORDINARY CITY. Please let me speak to the people'" (Acts 21:39)

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masculine rhyme

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Rhyme ending on the final expressed syllable

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metonymy

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Phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature of the person; "pen is mightier than the sword"

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neoclassical unities

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Principles of dramatic structure derived from Aristotle's Poetics. Popular in neoclassical movement of 17th and 18th centuries. Time--a work should take place within the span of one day. Place--a work should take place within the confines of a single location. Action--a single dramatic plot, with no subplots.

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pastoral elegy

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Type of poem that takes form of an elegy sung by a shepherd. The shepherd who sings the elegy is a standin for the author, and the elegy is for another poet.

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pastoral literature

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

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pathetic fallacy

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Term coined by John Ruskin; refers to ascribing emotion and agency to inanimate objects: "the cruel crawling foam"

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personification

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Giving inanimate object human qualities or form

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picaresque

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Novel, typically constructed along an incident-to-incident basis, that follows the adventures of a scurrilous rogue whose primary concerns are filling his belly and staying out of jail

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protagonist

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Main character, usually the hero

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skeltonics

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late 15th - early 16th century. Short lines, choppy pronounced rhythm, stomping end rhymes hammering away at the same sound for 5-6+ beats. Only suitable for comedy and satire. More intelligent than doggerel. Opposite of euphuism.

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sprung rhythm

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Rhythm created and used in 19th century by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like Old English verse, fits a varying number of unstressed syllables in a line--only stresses count in scansion

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synaesthesia

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Referring to phrases that suggest an interplay of the senses

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synecdoche

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Phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature of that object or person: "pair of ragged claws"

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voice

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Perspective from which story is written

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first person

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Work is narrated using the pronoun "I"

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third person

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Work is narrated using a name or a third-person pronoun

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second person

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Author speaks using the pronoun "you," making the reader an active participant in the work

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first-person plural

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Work is narrated using the pronoun "we." Forces the reader to concentrate more on what the story is about than who is telling it

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ballad

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Typical stanza of the folk ballad. Length of lines determined by number of stressed syllables only. Rhyme scene abcb

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in memoriam

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Stanza composed of 4 lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming abba

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ottava rima

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8-line stanza, usually iambic pentameter, rhyming abababcc

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rhyme royal

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7-line iamic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc

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Spenserian stanza

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9-line stanza. First 8 lines are iambic pentameter. Final line, in iambic hexameter, is an alexandrine. Stanza's rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc

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terza rima

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3-line stanzas with interlocking rhyme scheme proceeding aba bcb cdc ded, etc.

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blank verse

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Unrhymed iambic pentameter verse

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free verse

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Unrhymed verse without a strict meter

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Old English verse

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Verse characterized by internal alliteration of lines and strong midline pause called caesura. If you can read it, it isn't this.

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Italian/Petrarchan

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14-line sonnet rhyming abbaabba cdecde. First 8 lines called octave. Final 6 lines (composed of 2 groups of 3, or tercets) are called the sestet. 0 final couplets

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English/Shakespearean

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14-line sonnet rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. 1 final couplet

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Spenserian sonnet

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14-line sonnet rhyming abab bcbc cdcd ee. 1 final couplet, plus 2 couplets in body

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villanelle

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19-line form rhyming aba aba aba aba aba abaa. Repetition of first and third lines throughout the poem: aba ab1 ab3 ab1 ab3 ab13. "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."

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sestina

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39-line poem of 6 stanzas of 6 lines each and final stanza (envoi) of 3 lines. Rhyme plays no part. One of 6 words is used as the end word of each poem's lines according to a fixed pattern. Poem of 6-line stanzas based on pattern of repeated end words

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auxiliary

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"helping verb," often form of "to be," "to have," or "to do"

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gerund

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verb acting as a noun clause, usually the "-ing" form of the verb

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imperative

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verb used for issuing commands

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indicative

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plain old verb in present tense

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infinitive

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unconjugated verb with "to" in front of it

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participle

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"-ed" form of a verb

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predicate

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further information about the subject, a verb and its cohorts

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subjunctive

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

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subordinate

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

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substantive

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

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vocative

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expression of direct address: "Sit, Ubu, sit!"

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Lacanian criticism

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"The Mirror Stage in the Formation of the I"; endless chain of signifiers has its analogue in Freud's theory of the interpretation of dreams; major difference from Freud is chicken-egg thing; language comes first and shapes or structures the unconscious; discontinuity between signifiers and signified, and signifiers "float" in endless chain of substitution Keywords: mirror, phallus, signifier/signified, substitution, desire, jouissance, objet petit a, imaginary order, symbolic order, real order

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Marxist criticism

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

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Marxist influence on criticism

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Texts are not timeless fixed creations subject to universal standards of evaluation and interpretation, nor does Man possess essential unchanging qualities that works of "great literature" address across the ages. A given individual, his consciousness, and the products of that consciousness are themselves the products of specific cultural and historical context, and thus that context must be addressed.

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New Historicism

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Specifics of culture matter profoundly. Institutions of a given society produce discernible effects in the consciousness of a society's members, and therefore in the products of consciousness, such as literature. Presence and effects of ideology in literature are not artificial layers of fluff to be stripped away in order to get at the essential and "the real," but the cultural-ideological layer is the proper object of analysis itself. Finds the encoded ideology supporting the dominant class and the struggling voice of the oppressed ideological subject. Keyword: ideology, encoded ideology supporting the dominant class

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Feminist criticism

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New Historicist-influenced critical mode/Identity criticism based on historic status of women as disenfranchised in the European phallocratic hegemony.

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Black criticism

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New Historicist-influenced critical mode/Identity criticism based on historic status of African-Americans or black people as disenfranchised in the European phallocratic hegemony.

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Postcolonial criticism

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New Historicist-influenced critical mode/Identity criticism based on historic status of occupied people as disenfranchised in the European phallocratic hegemony.

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psychological criticism

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Examines universals of human consciousness and ways in which essential aspects of the human psyche manifest themselves in literature, as well as personality and biographical particulars of individual author as legitimate fields of inquiry

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Freudian criticism

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or Psychoanalytic criticism Keywords: Oedipal complex, libido, id, ego, superego, subconscious, repression, resistance, et. al

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Harold Bloom

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theory of authorial production states that authors subconsciously position their work against that of another earlier author who functions as kind of literary father figure Keywords: strong poet

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Archetype or Myth criticism

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Drawn from theories of Jung and anthropologist James Frazer; Joseph Campbell and Northrop Frye important figures. Looks for recurring symbols, motifs, character types, and plots, finding them in disparate sources. Existence of persistent, powerful, ever-repeated stories and characters point to needs and urges deep within the human psyche, and study of such stories can reveal the collective unconscious of humankind. Keywords: collective unconscious

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Linguistic criticism

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Broad area of thought concerned primarily with language. Roots in early 20th century, when critics felt need to professionalize their discipline, to make its methodology more rigorous and less speculative

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Formalist criticism

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Predominantly Russian school of the 1920s. Attempts to discern underlying laws that shape literary text, objectively discernable features that make it literature. Employs devices of plot, story, and voice that makes language unfamiliar and thus signaled to the reader that the writing was an aesthetic object Keywords: defamiliarization, devices

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New Criticism

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Critical approach with roots in beginning of 20th century; dominant at American and English universities for several decades at mid-century. Thought earlier critical approaches were polluted by unsustainable speculations about authorial intent and subjective effusions about the beauty and emotion of work. Loathed criticism that attempted to extract germ of content from what "Writer was trying to say." Studies ambiguity in order to discern how the several readings affect the totality of piece. Keywords: intentional fallacy, affective fallacy, heresy of paraphrase, close reading

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Structuralism

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Stay within the text. Keywords: sign, signifier, signified, center and periphery, vertical axis and horizontal axis. Story architectures. Center. Perimeter.

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Post-Structuralism

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Text cannot be held to just one interpretation. Keywords: mimesis, alterity, marginality, desire, lack. Sign, signifier, multiplicity, slippage, differance. Heteroglossia.

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Deconstruction

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School of post-structuralism focusing on displacements, excesses, and gaps. Holds that "exceptions" are integral to creation of meaning. Keywords: erasure, trace, bracketing, difference, slippage, dissemination, logocentrism, indeterminacy, decentering.

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Reader-Response criticism

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Reader's experience of text is the literary event; literature is what happens inside a reader's head, not what occurs on the page. Literary works involve an implied or ideal reader. Some examine aesthetic impact of work, judging whether work broke with aesthetic horizon of expectations of its time. Signal concern with effect literature has on readers. Keywords: implied/ideal reader, horizon of expectations

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Genesis

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keywords: Nimrod, Ham, Lot, Lot's wife, Sodom, Gomorrah, Jacob/Israel, Esau/Edom, Joseph & coat of many colors, Judah

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the creation

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"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," setting in motion a quick cycle of creation, assessment, and clarification Day 1: Light and Darkness aka day and night, Day 2: Heaven (firmament), Day 3: Earth (dry land) complete with grass herbs trees, Day 4: Lights in the firmament of heaven (sun moon stars), Day 5: Animals of sea and sky, Day 6: Beasts of the earth and man in God's own image, Day 7: Rest

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the fall

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God creates, then tells Adam that Eden is his for the taking and he can do pretty much whatever he likes except eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam consents, and all is well and good until Eve, created from Adam's rib, comes along and gets duped by a serpent (Satan in disguise) into eating from the tree. Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden for good. You may have heard this referred to as the "Fall of Man" and it is generally read as the Abrahamic interpretation of the fall of all humankind. To further cement the idea, Adam itself is a Hebrew word meaning "the man." Milton's Paradise Lost is entirely concerned with these that come only from the first two chapters or so of Genesis

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Cain and Abel

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Eve eventually bears two sons, Cain ("a tiller of the ground") and Abel ("a keeper of sheep"). After the Lord appreciates one of Abel's offerings more than Cain's, Cain gets very angry and slays Abel. As a punishment, Cain is driven out of God's sight to take up residence in the east of Eden, but Cain is marked for protection ("the mark of Cain"), and God warns, "whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold." Eve has another kid named Seth, but his life is not nearly so eventful. John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1952) is a retelling of this story

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The flood

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After some generations had passed, God decides he doesn't like the way things are going, seeing that "the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of [man's] heart was only evil continually." The solution? A huge flood to kill everyone and start over. He picks Noah to assemble his family, build an ark, and to collect "two and two of all flesh" to restart all life once everything dries out. After all is said and done, God seems to regret his decision in the wake of all the destruction and vows, "neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done." The rest of the book details the events of Noah and his family, but the flood is what's most important

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The Tower of Babel

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Some generations later, the people of Shem decide to build a tower that will reach up to heaven. The Lord is very angry at the arrogance of the idea, and decided that as a punishment, he would scatter the generations all over the earth. In doing so, he "confound[ed] the languages of the earth." This, according to the Bible, is why people in different parts of the world speak different languages and cannot communicate with each other.

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Abraham and Isaac

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Abraham and Sarah, two very devout people, are having a tough time conceiving. They try and try but to no avail. Finally, Sarah recommends that Abraham try to conceive with her Egyptian maid Hagar. That works, and they have a son named Ishmael, but no one really thinks much of him (cf., Melville's narrator is of the same name in Moby-Dick). After this, God comes to Abraham and tells him that he's going to be the "father of many nations" and that his generations will inherit the land then known as Canaan. When Abraham and Sarah are both old, Sarah finally gets pregnant and gives birth to Isaac. Then one day, God comes and asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering. Abraham unflinchingly sets out to do so, but God stops him at the last minute. This event often comes up in discussions of religious faith; in fact, this single event was the single subject of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's meditations in Fear and Trembling.

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Exodus

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Documents the major events in the life of Moses, the central prophet in Judaism. The first five books of the Bible can be referred to either as the Torah or as the "five books of Moses." Keywords: 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

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Samuel and Kings

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Detail the doings of the first kings of Israel, anointed by the prophet Samuel, himself the last of the Hebrew judges. Saul is the first of these kings, followed by David when Saul is killed in a battle with the Philistines. Even before he is crowned king, David makes an early name for himself, defeating the giant Goliath by felling him with a stone shot from a sling. David is also important as the credited composer of many of the Psalms. The later king and wise man Solomon was David's son by Bathsheba. David's son Absalom rebels against David and tries to usurp his throne (a similar power struggle takes place between Saul and David). This rebellion has been a particularly attractive topic for authors, and is told allegorically in John Dryden's satirical long poem Absalom and Achitophel (1681-1682) and William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936).

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Job

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Satan proposes to God that God's loyal subject Job is only loyal because of God's protection. To test the hypothesis, God begins to strip away Job's health, wealth, and family to tempt Job to curse God. He doesn't, and God, in admiration of his perseverance ("the patience of Job") restores all his riches. Artists and philosophers are particularly drawn to this chapter because it is so heavily invested in dialogue. Job looks to understand his situation through dialogue with his friends, and while many hold Job up as an Abraham-like figure for his unshakable faith, many others see the book of Job as an important moment of uncertainty in the Old Testament

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Daniel

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The book is set during the Babylonian captivity of Jerusalem, and can be split into two main parts: the "court tales" of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and Daniel's interpretation of dreams (psychoanalysts, enter at your peril). Daniel rises from the position of a servant to aid and confidant of the king because of his famed skill at interpreting dreams. He is called to interpret several recurring dreams that king his having and ends up predicting an upcoming famine, allowing his kingdom to store enough grain in advance to ensure their survival. Daniel is then appointed by King Darius of Babylon to be one of three presidents for the kingdom, and the others, jealous of the king's preference for a Hebrew, cast Daniel into a den of lions. Daniel survives, ascribing his safety to the Lord's protection; this is where the phrase "Daniel in the lion's den" comes from. The book of Daniel is also the source of the "writing on the wall," referring to a prophecy that Daniel must interpret for the drunk and terrified Belshazzar the King.

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Jonah

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God orders Jonah to "go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness come up before me." Jonah apparently doesn't want to, so he tries to escape the "presence of the Lord" by boarding a ship headed for Tarshish. God, of course, is not fooled, and sends out a mighty tempest. The other sailors get suspicious, and when Jonah admits that he's the reason for all the boat-rocking (literal and figurative), the other sailors cast him overboard where he is promptly swallowed by a fish (probably a whale) in whose belly he spends three days and three nights. Because there's not a whole lot to do in the belly of a whale, Jonah repents, and God orders the whale to spit Jonah out safely on the shore. The book of Jonah is of particular interest to authors writing about the sea. Although the narrator of Melville's Moby-Dick is named Ishmael, the novel as a whole is deeply engaged with the book of Jonah

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The New Testament

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the most important and commonly referenced books are the Gospels: the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (Mamalujo) Authors like Dante, John Milton, and John Bunyan were such profound scholars of the Bible in general and the New Testament in particular that often single words or turns of phrases will be pulled from some part of the testament. Many authors, such as Jonathan Swift and John Donne, were themselves clergymen, and thus were arguably more engrossed in the study of the Bible than in their own writing. Keywords: Salome, who asked for the head of John the Baptist on a plate (and got it); Lazarus, whom Jesus resurrected; and Mary Magdalene, a prostitute whom Jesus reformed

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The Sermon on the Mount

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Matthew Ch. 5-7

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Parable of the Prodigal Son

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Luke 15:11-32

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Parable of the Sower

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Mark 4:1-20, Matthew 13:1-23, Luke 8:1-15

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Biblical allusions in literature

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often allusions will be contained in the title: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, and Marcel Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah. Less obvious examples are Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder, and Jean Toomer's Cane

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Romeo and Juliet

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Two households, both alike in dignity In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life, Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Doth with their death bury their parents' strife. ... For never was a story of more woe/Than this of Juliet and her Romeo. Major characters: Romeo, Juliet, Friar Laurence, Juliet's nurse, Benvolio, Mecutio, Tybalt Famous moments: the prologue; Mercutio's Queen Mab speech; the balcony scene

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Hamlet

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Major characters: Hamlet, Ghost, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, Laertes, Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Fortinbras Famous moments: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"; "To be or not to be, that is the question"; "The Murder of Gonzago"/"The Mousetrap" Eliot's The Waste Land's "Goonight" lines refer to Ophelia's final lines before her drowning Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1969)

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Macbeth

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Major characters: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, the three witches, King Duncan, Macduff Famous quotes: "Yet I do fear thy nature./It is too full o'th' milk of human kindness/To catch the nearest way"; 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. ("I trust you recognize my reference to another Scottish tragedy without my having to name the play.")

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Othello

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Has drawn lots of critical attention for two main reasons: first, it is the play in which Shakespeare engages most directly with issues of race. Second, Iago is a quintessential literary antagonist; the search for Iago's motivations in his ultimate betrayal have been of interest to artists and writers. For Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence, Iago becomes the prototype for a kind of evil or rebellion so profound as to be the object of endless conjecture; Iago, Bloom says, is the forebear of Milton's Satan. Major characters: Othello, Desdemona, the Duke of Venice, Cassio, Iago, Roderigo Famous quotes: "For when my outward action doth demonstrate/The narrative act and figure of my heart/In compliment extern, 'tis not long after/But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve/For daws to peck at. I am not what I am." "She swore in faith 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange/'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful" "I hate the Moor..." "Men should be what they seem;/Or those that be not, would they might seem none!" "O! beware, my lord of jealousy;/It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on..." "Put out the light, and then put out the light..." "I kissed thee ere I killed thee, no way but this,/Killing myself, to die upon a kiss." "beast with two backs"

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The Taming of the Shrew

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Has drawn attentions for its portrayal of a proto-feminist character, Kate, and in this portrayal, seems to one of a number of extended Shakespeare meditations on women in society. Modern eyes often see Kate's "taming" as a downfall and clear instance of patriarchy pummeling independent women. Major characters: Baptista, Bianca, Katherina (Kate), Lucentio, Petruccio, Grumio, Gremio, Hortensio, Tranio, Vincentio Famous moments: 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'... Kate: Then veil your stomachs, for it is no boot, And place your hands below your husband's foot, In token of which duty, if he please, My hand is ready, may it to him ease Petruccio: Why, there's a wench! Come on, and kiss me, Kate.

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The Tempest

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Typically regarded as the last play Shakespeare wrote alone; most direct engagement with the burgeoning colonial expansion of his day (1611); commonly referred to as a romance because of distinction between "romances" and earlier Shakespeare comedies, and because of the common characteristics many of these plays share with the Medieval romance tradition Most discussed character in recent criticism is Caliban, particularly because of his position as "colonized" to Prospero's "colonizer." Margaret Paul Joseph's 1992 critical work Caliban in Exile: The Outsider in Caribbean Fiction gives a good sense of this. Interestingly, Caliban was a much-studied figure even before the emergence of postcolonialism as a discourse. In Robert Browning's dramatic monologue "Caliban in Setebos" (1864) champions Caliban as a "natural man" in Rousseau's sense of the term. Major characters: Alonso, Prospero, Miranda, Antonio, Caliban, Ariel, Sycorax, Ferdinand Famous moments: "All lost! to prayers, to prayers! All lost!" "I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated/To closeness and the bettering of my mind..." "...All the charms/Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you;/For I am all the subjects that you have,/Which first was mine own king..." "You taught my language, and my profit on't/Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you/For learning me your language!" "O wonder!/How many goodly creatures are there here!/How beauteous mankind is!/O brave new world/That such people in't!"

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The Merchant of Venice

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Interesting to critics in recent years because of its own portrayal of race, this time in the form of the Jewish moneylender, Shylock. As with Caliban in The Tempest, Shylock is not the play's "main character," but he has drawn more interest in criticism and in allusions to the play than any other character. Major characters: Bassanio, Portia, Antonio, Shylock, Jessica, Lorenzo Famous moments: "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." "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose./An evil soul producing holy witness/Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,/A goodly apple rotten at the heart./O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!" "But love is blind, and lovers cannot see/The pretty follies that themselves commit...What, must I hold a candle to my shames?" "I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, sense, affections passions... If you prick us, do we not bleed?"

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Richard III

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Long meditation on evil, especially the way this meditation is complicated by putting an evil character at the center of the history and making the reader/audience sympathize with him Major characters: Richard, Duke of Gloucester/Richard III; King Edward IV; George, Duke of Clarence; Prince Edward/King Edward V; Prince Richard of York; Queen Elizabeth Woodville; Elizabeth's Grey sons; Lady Anne Neville; Princess Elizabeth of York; Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond; Buckingham Famous moments: 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 amorous looking-glass, I that am rudely stamped and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph, I that am curtailed of 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.

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Sonnet 18

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"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

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Sonnet 116

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"Let me not to the marriage of true minds"

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Sonnet 130

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"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"

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400-1300

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Old English (c. 1000, the English language became strongly influenced by the medieval French) Battle of Hastings (1066) Caedmon c. 670 Author of Beowulf c. 750

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1300-1500

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Middle English Battle of Agincourt (1415) Gutenberg Bible (1456) William Langland (1380) Geoffrey Chaucer (1380) Thomas Malory (1450)

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1500-1558

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Early Tudor Period Reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary John Skelton Thomas More

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1558-1603

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Elizabethan period Reign of Elizabeth I Philip Sidney Edmund Spenser John Lyly Christopher Marlowe William Shakespeare

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1603-1625

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Jacobean period Reign of James I Ben Jonson

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1625-1649

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Caroline period Reign of Charles I John Donne John Webster

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1649-1660

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Charles I executed (1649) Cromwell and the Interregnum John Milton Robert Herrick Andrew Marvell

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1660-1714

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Restoration Reign of Charles II (1660-1702) William Congreve George Etheredge John Bunyan John Dryden

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1714-1727

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Reign of Anne (1702-1714), the last Stuart monarch Daniel Defoe Alexander Pope

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1727-1760

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Reign of George I of the House of Hanover Jonathan Swift Henry Fielding Thomas Gray

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1760-1790

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Reign of George II The Enlightenment First 30 years of the Reign of George III American Revolution The Gothic Novel Samuel Johnson Lawrence Sterne Horace Walpole Thomas Chatterton Mary Wollstonecraft William Cowper

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1790-1820

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Early Romantic period Second 30 years of reign of George III Sturm und Drang in Germany Anne Radcliffe William Blake William Wordsworth Samuel Coleridge Percy Bysshe Shelley Lord Byron John Keats

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1820-1837

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Middle Romantic Period Reign of George IV (1820-1830) Reign of William IV (1830-1837) Charles Lamb Jane Austen Thomas Carlyle Alfred Tennyson Washington Irving Edgar Allan Poe

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1837-1869

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Late Romantic and Victorian periods First 32 years of reign of Victoria Transcendentalism in United States Thomas Macaulay Emily Bronte Charlotte Bronte Charles Dickens Robert Browning Nathaniel Hawthorne Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David Thoreau Walt Whitman Herman Melville

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1869-1901

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Second 30 years of reign of Victoria Realism John Ruskin George Meredith Charles Swinburne George Eliot Gerard M. Hopkins Thomas Hardy Mark Twain Henry James

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1901-1939

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Modernism 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

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epic

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Long narrative about sustained heroism. Has several distinct features

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epic invocation/epic question

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Begins with the invocation of the muse, as the address to the muse is often in the form of a request for the muse to help the poet to remember the past

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in media res

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Action is begun in the midst of things; for example, the Iliad begins with the siege of Troy already 10 years old. Background information is supplied as the narrative unfolds

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epic cataogs

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Background information and the descriptions of equipment or participants are often in the form of long lists, called epic catalogs

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epic simile

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Some descriptions are highly stylized; a comparison almost always beginning with like or as, but carries the comparison to extraordinary length

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supernatural beings

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Characteristic of the epic in which these parties interfere and/or are interested, and in some sense toy with human participants

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great battle

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Usually resolves an epic; or great contest, or deed

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the Iliad

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Traditionally held to be composed by a blind man named Homer sometime around the 8th century BCE. Events took place in 12th century BCE. Historically, the city of Troy stood on the eastern side of the Hellespont in what is now Turkey. The city of Troy, ruled by Priam, is under siege from a massive army led by the Spartan Agamemnon. Priam's son, Paris, has stolen Helen, the wife of Agamemnon's brother Menelaus, which led to the hostilities. As the Iliad opens, Troy has been under siege for 10 years and the conflict remains deadlocked. The Trojans, under guidance of their champion Hector, turn the tide of the battle and drive the fight all the way back to the Greek ships at the shore. For the Greeks, the situation is dire. Leading Greek captains, Odysseus among them, implore Agamemnon to apologize to Achilles. Agamemnon relents and offers to compensate Achilles for the wrongs the hero has suffered, but Achilles will not be appeased. Eventually, however, Achilles allows Patroclos to participate in the defense of the ships. Patroclos dons Achilles' magnificent armor and enters the battle. The ships are saved, but Patroclos is killed by Hector, and the armor is lost.

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Achilles

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"This is the story of an angry man." By far the ablest warrior on the Greeks' side, and his men, the Myrmidons, are some of the fiercest fighters. Refuses to take part in siege of Troy any longer and goes to his ships, taking the Myrmidons and his best friend Patroclos with him. Enraged at Patroclos's death, decides to fight, but cannot fight without armor. Calls on his mother, the demigod Thetis, and through her obtains a fantastical suit of armor crafted by the god Hephaestus. Finally takes the field and quickly avenges the death of Patroclos by killing Hector and dragging the Trojan hero's corpse through the dirt behind a chariot. Priam, mourning the loss of his valiant son, enters the Greek camp and begs for the body. Moved by Priam's grief, returns Hector's body to the old man.

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Agamemnon

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has angered Achilles by abusing his privileges as commander-in-chief and taking Achilles' favorite woman Bryseis.

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Zeus

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Jupiter chief god, god of the sky

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Poseidon

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Neptune lord of the sea

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Hades

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Pluto lord of the dead, the underworld (not death itself)

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Hestia

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Vesta goddess of the hearth

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Hera

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Juno protector of marriage

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Ares

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Mars god of war

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Athena

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Minerva goddess of wisdom

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Aphrodite

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Venus goddess of love and beauty

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Hermes

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Mercury messenger god (leads dead to underworld; inventor of music)

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Artemis

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Diana goddess of the hunt

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Apollo

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Phoebus god of healing, intellectual pursuits, fine arts, prophesy, sun and light

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Hephaestus

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Vulcan god of smiths and weavers

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Demeter

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Ceres goddess of the harvest

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Persephone

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Proserpine/Kore goddess of the underworld

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Dionysus

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Bacchus god of wine

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Eros

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Cupid god of love

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Eris

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goddess of strife

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Pan

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god of goatherds and shepherds

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The Graces

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daughters of Zeus and Eurynome

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Aglaia

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Splendor; also wife of Hephaestus, daughter of Asclepius, granddaughter of Apollo

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Euphrosyne

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Mirth; also daughter of Hephaestus and Aglaia

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Thalia (Grace)

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Good Cheer; also Muse of Comedy

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the Muses

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

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Clio

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History

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Urania

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Astronomy

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Melpomene

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Tragedy

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Thalia (Muse)

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Comedy; also Grace of Good Cheer

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Terpsichore

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Dance

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Calliope

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Epic Poetry

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Erato

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Love Poetry

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Polyhymnia

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Songs to the Gods

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Euterpe

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Lyric Poetry

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the Furies

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punish crime; Megaera, Alecto, and Tisiphone

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the Fates

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choose a man's destiny and lifespan; Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos

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Titans

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ruled the earth before the Olympians overthrew them; Kronos, Iapetus, Hyperion, Oceanus, Coeus, Creus, Theia, Rhea, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, and Themis

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Chronos

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Saturn ruler of the Titans, father of the gods

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the Naiads

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

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the Odyssey

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James Joyce's use of Homer in Ulysses (1922) was something of an anomaly and uses the Latin name of the hero Odysseus, thanks to Virgil Major characters: Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, Polyphemus, Poseidon, Circe, Scylla, Charybdis, Sirens, Helios, Zeus, Calypso, Penelope's suitors, Athena

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the Aeneid

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Virgil was a great admirer of Homer's Iliad and wanted to write a Roman analogue of what the Odyssey and Iliad were for the Greeks. Because of Catholic Church's influence and predominant spread of Latin, Virgil is often honored as the greatest epic poet, and has arguably had more direct influence on pre-20th century artworks than Homer. Milton's structure of Paradise Lost is based on the Aeneid's structure. George Bernard Shaw's play Arms and the Man is lifted from the first line "I sing of arms and the man..." Invokes the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome, for Virgil's contemporary audience, in love affair with Dido & Dido's pyre. Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech refers to Dido; Dante's Inferno features her in the second circle of hell 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 is a composite of abandoned lovers, including Dido. Often made a composite with other famously tragic women such as Eve, Philomele (Ovid's Metamorphoses), Cleopatra, and Ophelia. Major characters: Juno, Aeneas, Dido, Ulysses, Laocoon (Friedrich Schiller's famous essay "Laocoon" is about a statue inspired by Virgil's description of Laocoon's fate, which is two be eaten by two giant sea snakes pretty much out of nowhere), Venus, Anchises, Jupiter, Mercury, Evander, the Latins, Turnus, the Rutili, Lavinia.

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the Cursed House of Atreus

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Greek tragedian Aeschylus drew upon set of stories concerning an ancient familial curse, the curse upon the House of Atreus, to write the Oresteia--Agamemnon, Choephoroe, and Eumenides--in 5th century BCE Intersects with the Trojan War in Agamemnon and Menelaus (Atreus's sons) Tantalus; Pelops; Thyestes; Atreus; Aegisthus; Menelaus (+Helen); Agememnon (+Clytemnestra); Iphigenia; Electra; Orestes Cause of Trojan War could be abduction of Helen by Paris; or rape of Leda by Zeus (in Yeats poem "Leda and the Swan"); or curse of House of Atreus--Helen's abduction, Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia & offense of Achilles Major characters: Cassandra, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Orestes, Pylades, the Furies, Apollo, Athena

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Oedipus

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Sophocles's dramatization in Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone in 5th century BCE. Following Oedipus's death, Eteocles and Polyneices agree to share rulership of Thebes, alternating active command yearly. Eteocles reigns first, and when his year is up he refuses to yield the throne. Polyneices organizes an army against Eteocles and attacks Thebes (Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus). Polyneices and Eteocles die by one another's hands. Creon decrees that because Polyneices has waged war against Thebes he will not be buried. Antigone defies the decree. Major characters: Laius, king of Thebes; Jocasta; Oedipus; Antigone; Ismene; Eteocles; Polyneices; Creon; Haemon

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

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"Come live with me and be my love/And we will all the pleasures prove" Quoted and alluded to by Walter Raleigh ("The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd), John Donne, Robert Herrick, C. Day Lewis, others

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

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"He was not of an age, but for all time!"

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Robert Herrick's Julia Poems: "Upon Julia's Breasts," "Upon Julia's Clothes," "The Night Piece, to Julia" (1648)

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If a poem mentions Julia, chances are it is at least a nod in Herrick's direction. Other poets invented mistresses for themselves about which to write poems. "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time," also by Herrick, has same theme as "To His Coy Mistress" (Marvell)

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

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Theme: Come and have sex with me immediately because before you know it, we'll all be rotting in our graves. The rallying cry of the perpetually randy cavalier poets. Rephrased to something like "make the best use of your time while you can." "But at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrying near;/And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity."

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

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Meditation upon death, especially death without worldly fame/death without recognition or full expression of one's gifts. "Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest."

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

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Subject is Lucy; one of the Lucy Poems. Very much like "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard" about the death of a person unknown to larger society.

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Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses" (1842)

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

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

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"Nature, red in tooth and claw." Verse tribute to friend and fellow poet who died young. Form employed in this poem is referred to by name.

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

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Most quoted poem of the 20th century. "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold." "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

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Beowulf (ca. 750)

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Sung by scops for several centuries before being put to paper. Swedish hero, who, at the request of the Danish king Hrothgar, slays the monster Grendel (and Grendel's mother). Beowulf returns home famous, rich, and respected, and ultimately becomes king of his people, the Geats. Years pass. Older and weaker but still fearless, he is called to duty again, this time to slay a dragon. Beowulf kills the dragon but is mortally wounded in the combat. During the fight a young warrior, Wiglaf, proves his worth. Beowulf appoints Wiglaf his successor and dies. Beowulf was breme --blaed wide sprang-- (Beowulf was famous, his fame wide sprung) Written in strong stress verse, characteristic of Old English vesre. Keywords: Beowulf, Grendel, Grendel's mother, Hrothgar, Beaw, Scyld Scefing, Heorot (Beowulf's favorite bar), and Wiglaf.

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William Langland's Piers Plowman (ca. 1380)

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Long poem composed of 8 allegorical visions, wherein Will, in dreams, seeks out truth. Written at the same time as The Canterbury Tales, but written in alliterative verse. Masterpiece of the revival of the alliterative verse form in the 14th century. "In a somer seshoun whanne softe was the sonne I shop me into a shroud as I a shep were; In abite as an Ermyte, vnholy of werkis, wente wyde in Pis world wondris to here. But on a may morwenygn on maluerne hilles Me befel a ferly, of faerie me Poushte: I was wery for wandrit & wente me to reste Vndir a brood bank be a bourn side, And as I lay & lenide & lokide on Pe watris I slomeride into a slepyng, it swishede so merye. Panne gan I mete a meueillous sweuene, Pat I was in a wildernesse, wiste I neuere where."

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The Canterbury Tales (1387)

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Composed by Geoffrey Chaucer sometime around 1387. Written in Middle English. A group of 24 pilgrims (including the author) journeys to the religious shrine at Canterbury. On the way, they tell stories to pass the time. Written in several different meters depending on whose tale is being told, but the rhyming couplet form used in the general prologue predominates.

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The Knight

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Valorous, chivalrous, and polite, he's a portrait of what you'd expect a knight to be. Arcite and Mars fight Palamon and Venus for Emily. Arcite wins but dies. 1st tale told following the general prologue. Arcite and Palamon, a pair of friends, while held in a tower as prisoners of war, fall in love with a woman, Emily, they see from the window. After a number of vicissitudes, the story reaches its climax when the two former friends organize an enormous battle to see who is deserving of Emily's hand. Arcite prays to Mars for help, Palamon to Venus, and each god answers its supplicants with what seems an assurance of victory. As it turns out, Arcite wins the battle, but dies he dies in the process, and thus Palamon gets Emily.

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The Prioress

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She is dainty, materialistic, and sentimental about her little dogs. She wears a well-pleated wimple, a rosary made out of coral, and a golden brooch with "Love conquers all" inscribed upon it. Her tale, told in a staid rhyme royal, concerns the murder of a little by by Jews for singing the Christian hymn Alma Redemptoris while walking in a Jewish neighborhood. The murder is discovered because the boy miraculously continues singing despite having his throat slit. Apologists suggest Chaucer intended to critique the prioress by having her recite this offensive tale, but such a view is almost surely revisionist. Stories of Jewish atrocities were standard fare of the time, and no doubt served as convenient pretexts for the Christian's periodic slaughter of their Jewish neighbors.

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The Nun's Priest(s)

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Chaunticleer the rooster is kidnapped by Sir Russell, a sweet-tongued fox. Chaunticleer gets away when the fox opens his mouth to brag. In the general prologue, a nun and three priests are mentioned as pilgrims accompanying the prioress. The priests are not described individually, and later chaucer refers to only a single "Nun's Priest." This three-into-one prestidigitation is not considered deliberately symbolic of the unity of Father-Son-Holy Ghost; it seems that at some point Chaucer decided two of the priests were superfluous. One of the most frequently stuied of The Canterbury Tales. Chaunticleer, a handsome vain rooster noted for his singing, dreams he'll be eaten by a strange creature (he describes a fox). Perteltote upbraids Chaunticleer for being a coward who believes in dreams. Sir Russel, a fox, comes along flatters Chaunticleer into singing with his eyes closed, adn snatches him away. Just as the fox is about to finish Chaunticleer off, however, he gloats over his victim. In opening his mouth to say a few choice words, the fox allows Chaunticleer to escape. The fox tries to dupe Chaunticleer again, but the rooster has learned his lesson and rebukes himself for having listened to Sir Russell in the first place. The fox learns in turn that he, the fox, was foolish to blab when he should have been eating. Mock-heroic: it ariodies some of the conventions of classical epic poetry such as the Iliad

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The Merchant

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Knight January is old and blind. His young wife, May, cheats on him, but when his sight is restored, May says she did it to cure him. Wears motley and a beaver hat, and talks about little else but business concerns, which he unfailingly points out are profitable. He's actually in debt, but he bears himself with such calculated dignity that no one suspects it. January, an old knight, marries May, a beautiful young girl. At first, January enjoys his young wife greedily (in fact, relentlessly) by night in the bedroom and by day in the garden, which is not bad for a scrawny old fellow with a flappy neck. One day he suddenly goes blind and finds himself overwrought with jealousy. He keeps May within arm's reach at all times. May contrives to meet her young lover, Damian, in January's garden. She and Damian manage to consummate their passion up in a tree while the blind January remains on the ground holding onto the trunk. In the midst of May and Damian's fun, the god Pluto decides to restore January's sight. Caught in the act, quick-thinking May manages to convince January that she committed adultery only as a cure to restore his vision.

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The Wife of Bath

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King Arthur's knight commits rape. To escape sentencing, he must discover what women desire most. He marries an old witch for the answer (sovereignty); she turns into a beautiful woman. The Wife of Bath is a bit deaf, gap-toothed, plump, ruddy, and not bad-looking in her preposterous way. She wears scarlet stockings, an enormous hat, and is comfortable both riding a horse and swapping jokes with the boys. She's had five husbands and that's "not counting other company she had in youth/but there's no need to speak of such things now." The wife of Bath is the embodiment of an outsized vision of womankind, a partly grotesque character, but one redeemed by the unselfconscious gusto with which she plays her part. Her prologue recounts the story of her give husbands, and more important, her uniquely feminist philosophies of love, sex, and (re)marriage. If you have enough, why care you how merrily the other folks fare? For certain, old dotard, you'll have the fill of my thighs come evening. The man's too great a miser who won't let another man light a candle at his lantern. For he'll have no less the light, by heaven. Takes up her pro-woman theme, but with fare more gentility. One of King Arthur's knights rapes a maiden, and Arthur sentences the knight to death. The queen and some of her ladies protest, and Arthur delivers the knight unto the queen's justice. She tells the knight that she will spare his life if he can return with an answer to the question, "What do women desire most?" After some travail, the knight encounters a repulsive and sinister-seeming witch, who promises to reveal the answer if the knight will marry her. The knight, not altogether happily, agrees. The answer, sovereignty, is revealed, and the witch turns into a beautiful maiden once the knight marries her.

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The Miller

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A cuckold is tricked into sleeping on his roof in a washtub while his wife consorts with various suitors. A huge, strong, hard-drinking, rough-talking, fight-picking, unpleasantly coarse fellow, with a shovel-sized red beard and a big hairy wart on his nose. He knows and uses the tricks of the trade when it comes to weighing out grain. He's quite drunk when he tells his tale ("I am drunk, I know it by the sound of my voice") which is perhaps the most vulgar story of all The Canterbury Tales. A well-off carpenter with a pretty young wife has a boarder named "Handy" Nicholas. Nicholas is a good-looking, clever young scholar whom the carpenter respects as one learned in astrology. Nicholas and the carpenter's wife Alison contrive to spend a night of sin together by convincing the carpenter that an apocalyptic flood is coming and that he should spend the night on the roof sleeping in the washtub. The ruse succeeds, but Nicholas and Alison's revels are somewhat interrupted by another of Alison's suitors, the ridiculously lovelorn Absalom, who comes crooning at the window. Alison promises Absalom a kiss, and in the darkness she has him kiss her ass (which she hangs out the window). Infuriated, Absalom fetches a hot poker and returns. When the lovers try to trick Absalom a second time (this time it's Nicholas's butt slung out the window), Nicholas gets the scalding poker across his buttocks. The carpenter on the roof awakens to Nicholas's shrieks of "Water! Water!" Thinking the flood has come, the carpenter cuts the rope tethering his washtub and so comes clattering down.

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The Pardoner

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Three drunkards search for death but instead find a treasure, over which they murder each other. He is a thin, vain, smooth-skinned blond with a bag full of pardons "all hot from Rome." The host calls him a pretty boy, and Chaucer sugests that the pardoner isn't "all man." Chaucer also makes no disguise of portraying the pardoner as nothing more than a successful huster, with bits of the true-cross, a scrap of St. Peter's sail, and a holy sheep bone that when dunked in a well turns the water into a cure-all potion. The host asks the pardoner to tell a story with a moral, an edifying story. The pardoner offers as prologue to his story an utterly frank confession of perfect hypocrisy itself, for he explains that his bogus wheelings and dealings make him an expert on his chosen theme: Radix malorum est Cupiditas ("The love of money is the root of all evil.) Three immoral drunkards set out to find Death, who has taken one of their drinking buddies. They're told to look for Death under a certain tree, but instead they find a large pile of treasure there. The three eventually manage to murder each other treacherously in trying to get an increased share of the booty. At the conclusion of the tale the pardoner tries to get the host to pay for the opportunity to handle some of the relics. The host responds that he'd rather have the pardoner's severed testicles so that he might bury them in pig shit. The pardoner begins to pitch a hissy fit at this, but the knight steps in, and the two are reconciled.

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The franklin

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

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The reeve

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A kind of administrative overseer tells a tale of how a greedy miller named Simkin has his wife and daughter enjoyed by a pair of clerks, John and Adam, whom he'd swindled earlier. Response to the Miller's Tale of the foolish flood-fearing carpenter.

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The clerk

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

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The doctor

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Virginia has her father kill her in order to avoid falling into the clutches of evil judge Apius.

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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1380)

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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. Draws on the legend of Arthur and the court of Camelot. An enormous, mysterious, entirely green knight intrudes on a New Year's banquet and sets out a bizarre challenge. He will allow any of the knights present to strike off his head, but if he survives the blow, the knight who failed to behead him must, exactly one year later, submit to being beheaded in turn. Gawain accepts the challenge, lops off the Green Knight's head, and watches in dismay as the Green Knight picks up his head and puts it back on. After a year, Gawain sets out to keep his side of the bargain. On his journey, he is taken in by a lord and given hospitality at the lord's castle. After three days at the castle, Gawain is told the way to the Green Chapel where he is to meet his fate. At the Green Chapel, Gawain finds the Green Knight, who ultimately spares Gawain's life. He tells Gawain that he is the lord of the castle in another form and that he has spared Gawain because of Gawain's honorable conduct both at the castle and for keeping his bargain. (Because Gawain's conduct was not perfect--during his stay at the castle, he tried to keep a magic girdle that would supposedly protect him when, according to the rules of the castle, he should have returned it to the lord--the Green Knight does cut Gawain's neck slightly.) The poem is written in distinctive verse stanzas, which can be used to identify the poem and distinguish it from Malory's Morte D'Arthur. The body of each stanza is composed of long alliterative lines, but the stanzas end with a peculiar form called "bob and wheel." The "bob" is a single very short line (one foot) and the "wheel" that follows a short quatrain of trimeter lines rhyming (with the bob) ababa. The boar makes for the man with a mighty bound So that he and his hunter came headlong together Where the water ran wildest--the worse for the beast, For the man, when they first met, marked him with care, Sights well the slot, slips in the blade, Shove it home to the hilt, and the heart shattered, And he falls in his fury and floats down the water, ill-sped. Hounds hasten by the score To maul him, hide and head; Men drag him in to shore And dogs pronounce him dead. Poet also believed to be the author of the poems Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness. Sometimes referred to as "the Pearl poet."

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

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Written in Late Middle English. Recounts legends surrounding King Arthur. Morte D'Arthur is prose. Malory wrote the work while in prison.

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

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Written in Spenserian stanzas, 9-line stanza rhyming ababbcbcc. Look for weird stylings: "Warre," "whilome," "renowmd," "hardinesse." Actually a close contemporary of Shakespeare.

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Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

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"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"; also Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus. Tamburlaine is the story of a Scythian shepherd, Tamburlaine, who becomes an extraordinarily ferocious and successful conqueror in Asia Minor. Zenocrate is the main female character. Dr. Faustus is the story of a sorcerer who sells his soul 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 which the protagonist's soul is bartered in exchange for knowledge and Faust deals with a single satanic agent, Mephistopheles.

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John Donne (1572-1631)

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Marked by wit and razor-sharp intellect. Young Donne's poetry is the verse of a courtier playboy: "The Sun Rising" and "The Flea." Donne turns to a religious career, eventually becoming Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, the most influential pulpit in London. The poems and sermons of this period are marked by passionate, original, and searching thought regarding the Divinity and Christian faith. Originated phrase "for whom the bell tolls" in a sermon, as well as "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main"

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John Milton

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Writes in blank verse. Merciless torture of English sentence structure. Suggestions author wrote in Latin using an English vocabular. Yes, the sentence is really 20 lines long, and yes, the subject is the 3rd word from the end. Wrote the one masque considered to have substantial literary merit.

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Paradise Lost (1667)

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Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers, If these magnificent Titles yet remain Not merely titular, since by Decree Another now hath to himself ingross't All Power, and us eclipst under the name Of King anointed, for whom all this haste Of midnight march, and hurried meeting here, This only to consult how we may best With what may be devis'd of honors new Receive him coming to receive from us Knee-tribute yet unpaid, prostration vile, Too much to one, but double how endur'd, To one and to his image now proclaim'd?

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Areopagitica (1644)

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Milton's best known prose piece, lauded and studied for its defense of free expression and its condemnation of censorship. Interested in separating the spheres of spiritual and temporal authority. 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."

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Comus (1634)

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"Masque," a dramatic form in which all entertainment systems are go in music, singing, dancing, acting, and stage design. Often offered in performance as tribute to the patron. Flourished in Milton's time, and given name A Mask, Presented at Ludlow Castle. The one masque considered to have substantial literary merit. 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.

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Lycidas (1637)

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Written as a pastoral elegy for Milton's recently-passed friend Edward King. Comes from Theocritus's Idylls; "Lycidas" also shows up in Herodotus. "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 (with the "Pilot of Galilean Lake" as St. Peter). Has irregular rhythms and rhymes and heavily wrought allusiveness that makes Milton's poetry so difficult. "Without the need of some melodious tear." "But, oh! the heavy change, now thou art gone,/Now thou art gone and never must return!" "Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise/(That last infirmity of noble mind)/To scorn delights and live laborious days" "Look homeward, Angel, now and melt with ruth:/And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth."

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John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678-1684)

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Allegory of the believer's journey toward redemption. The protagonist, Christian, slogs through life, passing places like the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair on his way to the Celestial City 17th century. Contemporary of Dryden, Pepys, Milton, etc.

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John Dryden (1631-1700)

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Know Absalom and Achitophel and Mac Flecknoe. A&A uses biblical characters to analogize a political crisis during the reign of Charles II. Absalom is the Duke of Monmouth, Achitophel is the Earl of Shaftesbury, and Kind David is Charles II. Essentially, 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. Use of heroic couplets. Remarkable for politic handling of extremely sensitive situation. Mac Flecknoe is a withering satirical attack upon dramatist Thomas Shadwell, contemporary of Dryden. Told in mock epic, strewn with allusions to literary figures past and present. Prolific writer, and much of his work is dramatic literature.

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Restoration Comedy (1660-1730)

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Ribald riffs on sex and society. Comedies of language and manners, written with their own peculiar take on farce. Almost always centered on tension between accepted social codes of behavior toward sex and marriage, and the rather more direct behavioral prerogatives of human lust and social ambition. "War between the sexes" is another frequently occurring motif. Typically open with a verse prologue to the audience. Generally provide an excellent introduction to kind of cynical, punning, innuendo-laden language that you can expect from the plays.

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William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675)

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

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George Etherege's The Man of Mode (1626)

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Featuring Mr. Dorimant, Sir Fopling Flutter, and Mrs. Loveit Incredibly vulgar, insulting itself and the audience, but wittily.

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

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Featuring Millamant (a woman), Mirabell (a man), Mr. Fainall, Lady Wishfort, Foible (a woman), and Mincing (a woman) Apparently all about inflicting adultery on your husband.

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Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal

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Featuring Sir Peter Teazle, Maria, Lady Sneerwell, Sir Benjamin Backbite, and Charles Surface

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Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726)

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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) Yahoors (idiot, dirty, violent creatures who turn out to be people, or at least look like them)

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Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

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Master of witty mockery. Wrote almost exclusively in heroic couplets; consistently ends his lines on natural pauses. An Essay on Criticism, the Dunciad, The Rape of the Lock

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The Rape of the Lock

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Mock-epic, probably purest example in English. Uses traditional epic decides for ironic treatment of non-heroic material. Keywords: Belinda, Caryll

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The Dunciad

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Mock epic written in heroic couplets. 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. Concerns coronation ceremony of Bayes as the poet laureate of Dulness, during which everyone in attendance falls asleep. Suggests that Dulness will eventually prevail over arts and sciences.

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Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

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Success came late; struggled with poverty into his forties but is considered the very best English literary mind of the 18th century. Important works include "The Vanity of Human Wishes," The Lives of English Poets, essays for the journal The Rambler, the first modern English Dictionary, and Rasselas (a melancholy novel about the Prince of Abyssinia's unsuccessful quest for a happy and fulfilling "choice of life"--wrote in a week to settle debts arising from his mother's funeral).

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James Boswell (1740-1795)

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Wrote gushing biography of friend/mentor Samuel Johnson in The Life of Johnson. (Grantaire to Johnson's Enjolras.) Characterized Johnson in genial, sympathetic 18th-century style. Describes as supremely witty and erudite conversationalist with deep melancholy streak. Shown to have both generosity of spirit and outbursts of irritability. Most notable and innovative characteristic is that it doesn't merely describe Johnson or discuss his thought but shows us Johnson "in life"; treats us to snatches of Johnson in conversation with the leading intellectual figures of the day captured in fly-on-the-wall fashion.

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William Blake (1757-1827)

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Childlike simplicity of Blake's meter and syntax in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. No-holds-barred visionary mystic in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Fully consistent at spiritual base. Reconciliation of opposites one of cornerstones of philosophy.

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William Blake's "The Tyger" (1794)

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

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The Gothic Novel (1764-1860)

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Novels produced by the sensibility typified by the gloomy half-deserted castles and crumbling ancestral manors with an evil twin locked in the attic jabbering to himself. Heroines of such novels have penchant for inopportune fainting, and there's always a room one ought not...shouldn't...mustn't ever enter! Does it not seem as though that portrait's eyes follow one about the room? Recognize M. G. "Monk" Lewis's The Monk

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Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764)

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First true gothic novel; instant success; events are truly supernatural

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Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho

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Second true gothic novel; events appear supernatural but at book's end are revealed to have perfectly real-world explanations--"gothic explique" "Fate sits on these dark battlements and frowns, And as the portal opens to receive me, A voice in hollow murmur through the courts Tells of a nameless deed." Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is a spoof on Radcliffe.

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Jane Austen (1775-1817)

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Understated ironic treatment of character

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Sense and Sensibility

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

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Pride and Prejudice

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

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Mansfield Park

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Features the Bertrams of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, and Mrs. Norris; also Mary Crawford

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Emma

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Delicate satire of the manners of the English gentry, set around the matchmaking attempts and missteps of "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition"

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Northanger Abbey

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Features Catherine Morland, the Allens, Henry Tilney, and John Thorpe. In large part a parody of Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho

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Persuasion

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Features Sir Walter, Elizabeth, and Anne Elliott, Frederick Wentworth, and Kellynch Hall (a manor)

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The Lake Poets (ca. 1810)

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William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey; also essayist Charles Lamb. Called Lake Poets because of their long residency in the Lake District of England

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William Wordsworth

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the Lucy Poems, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," and Lyrical Ballads itself. Values of rustic people and rural settings, as well as nonacademic language. Seminal romantic work. Loved wandering in the groves and valleys

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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"Imagination." A romantic: imagination linked to the divine in humans and an inexhaustible source of goodness. Subdivided imagination into "primary imagination" and "secondary imagination."

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Charles Lamb

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Celebrated London wit and essayist. Friend to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Used pen name Elia in the charming, witty, sophisticated Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia. Had urbane sensibilities, unlike his friends, who liked mud and daffodils.

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The Victorian Essayists (ca. 1800-1900)

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

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Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

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Prolific and often exasperating, whose opinions exerted considerable influence on the thought of his day. Sartor Restarus--philosophical work in the guise of fiction, similar to Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. Student of German philosophy, particular that of Immanuel Kant, and an early English advocate of Goethe. Inventive, passionate, humorous, sometimes downright weird writer, with a strong sense of the ridiculous. Berserk prose style. Funny.

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Sartor Resartus

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"The tailor reclothed." Concerns the relationship of outward appearances and inward essences; relates Carlyle's spiritual growth (Teufelsdroeckh is the author's proxy). Keywords: Professor Teufelsdroechk (demondung), Weissnichtwo (professor's hometown, "who knows where"), the Everlasting Yea, the Everlasting No, and the Wanderer

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John Henry, Cardinal Newman (1801-1890)

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Became a Roman Catholic Cardinal in 1879. Important Victorian thinker. Wrote influential book called Apologia Pro Vita Sua and also The Idea of a University. Style is one of clear, dispassionately logical reasoning. For much of his life, had been highly regarded Anglican clergyman.

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John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

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Keywords: utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, individualism. Importance of an individual's rights in relation to the demands of the state. Suffered from depression as a young man. Revised many philosophical views.

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Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

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"Sweetness and light" refers to the quality and beneficial values of classical literature, partic. Hellenism. Devout classicist. Leading 19th century exponent of classical humanism.

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Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869)

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Culture (the arts) ideally nourishes, promotes, and calls forth the best in humankind.

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John Ruskin (1819-1900)

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Predominantly an art critic, Ruskin originated critical term "the pathetic fallacy" (happy sunshine, gloomy fog, cruel shoes). The Stones of Venice is a brilliant architectural study of Venice in which Ruskin "reads" the economic, social, and moral history of Venice through its permanent structures

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Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

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grandson of Judge Hathorne, influencing writing of The House of the Seven Gables

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The Scarlet Letter

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Features 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). Some hideous secret

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The Blithedale Romance

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Features Miles Coverdale, Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla. Blithedale Farm, where much of the action takes place, is based on an actual utopian community called Brook Farm.

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Brook Farm

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Located near Boston, founded by prominent Boston social and literary figures. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau were all stockholders. Philosophy here was transcendentalism. Turned toward Fourierism before dissolving in 1847.

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The House of Seven Gables

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Features Pyncheons, especially Hepzibah Pyncheon. Other names are old Maule, Phoebe, Holgrave, and Clifford. The story's theme is that of the sins of the fathers visited upon later generations

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Herman Melville (1819-1891)

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Moby-Dick; Biblical-Shakespearean style of Ahab's monologues. Keywords: Ishmael, Queequeg, Dashoo, Tashtego, Starbuck, and the Pequod. Billy Budd is the story of a handsome sailor undone by his own goodness and the plottings of the repulsive Claggart. "Bartleby the Scrivener" is a short story about the bizarrely alienated Bartleby, whose mantra, whenever asked to do ANYTHING, is the reply, "I'd prefer not to."

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Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

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"Song of Myself." Long, exuberant lines and use of repetition instead of rhyme to lend structure to his somewhat shaggy verse. Grew up in Brooklyn. Early career involved newspaper work. After wandering along Atlantic seaboard, the South, and the Midwest, writing took dramatic turn. Became radically original and uniquely American celebration of self, spirit, and democracy that is Leaves of Grass. Influenced by everything from German metaphysical philosophers (particularly Hegel) to Hindu religious texts such as the Upanishads. Most deeply indebted to the transcendental philosophy of Emerson. Ardor for innate brotherhood of man and spiritual virtues of democracy; Civil War affected him profoundly. Spent much of Civil War in D.C. as volunteer nurse to wounded. "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "O Captain, My Captain" memorialize Abraham Lincoln

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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

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Typically short, clipped lines, radiant mystic intensity. Dashes that end several lines are idiosyncrasy of style. Famously blank biography. Lived in Amherst, MA, her entire life and did nothing. Extraordinarily intense inner life. "Death is a dialogue between the spirit and the dust."

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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

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Incredibly prolific; had impact as both novelist and literary critic. Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse

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Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

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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." Eschews traditional beginning-middle-end form and foregrounds the minor details of the lives of the characters. Written in an intimate stream-of-consciousness less reliant on allusion than Joyce and other Modernists, more interested in highlighting characters' interiority, especially by means of the free indirect style employed by Jane Austen and Henry James. Major characters: Clarissa Dalloway, Septimus Smith (shellshocked veteran and partial parallel to Clarissa's story), Richard Dalloway, Sally Seton, and Peter Walsh

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Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927)

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Describes Ramsay family's two separate visits to this lighthouse. More concerned with passage of time than Dalloway. Book split into three sections, middle of which "Time Passes" is kind of elliptical prose experiment meant to create the sense of the passage of time (a long corridor between two rooms). Profoundly invested in epistemological questions, particularly as they are inflected by temporality and each character's own psychological experience of events. Interest of book in 3rd section "The Lighthouse": "nothing is merely one thing." Major characters: Ramsay family, Lily Briscoe, Charles Tansley, Augustus Carmichael, Paul Rayley, and Minta Doyle.

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

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One of the most important statements in 20th-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 (financial and otherwise) that men enjoy if they are to write. Woolf uses an extended story of Shakespeare's (invented) sister Judith to demonstrate the various impediments that would block Judith from ever having the freedom to write as her brother William had.

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James Joyce (1882-1941)

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Stream-of-consciousness masterpiece Ulysses (1922) is the great work of the 20th century. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Vocabulary.

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James Joyce's Dubliners (1914)

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Short story collection in Dublin 1900. Most famous is "The Dead," in which Gabriel Conroy attends a party with his wife Gretta. A series of events, including Gretta's solemn reaction to one of the songs sung at the party, reveal a side of Gretta's past of which Gabriel had not previously been aware--a girlhood lover, Michael Furey, who died from illness. This "epiphany" ruptures the almost pastoral construction of the rest of the story, as it ends with Gabriel's mediation on the snow: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

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

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Semi-autobiographical novel featuring Stephen Dedalus. Takes free indirect discourse to the next level, opening with a kind of babyspeak and ending with passages from young Stephen's journal. A late dialogue in the novel contains the following famous line, taken by many to be Joyce's artistic credo: "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."

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James Joyce's Ulysses (1922)

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Follows Stephen Dedalus as Telemachus to Leopold Bloom's Odysseus. Follows "travels" of Bloom throughout Dublin on an unremarkable day in 1904. Novel is structurally analogous to Homer's epic, and each of the "episodes" is based on an episode in the epic. Famous for its difficulty. "Yes I said yes I will Yes": conclusion of the Penelope episode, a long stream-of-consciousness from the perspective of Leopold's wife, Molly Bloom.

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939)

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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."

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William Faulkner (1897-1962)

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Noted practitioner of stream-of-consciousness approach. Father of High Modernism in the United States. Bluntly idiosyncratic. Keywords: Yoknapatawpha County; "Count No 'count"; Snopes, Compson, Sartoris

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William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929)

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Split into four sections, each with a different narrator. First section uses mentally disabled character named Benjy. Second section narrated from perspective of Quentin Compson (appearing in Absalom, Absalom!) written in more recognizably Modernist style, conflating separate times and events; obsessed by questions of Southernness and the downfall of the American South after the Civil War; infatuated with his sister Caddy's purity (with some clearly incestuous leanings), repulsed by her sexual promiscuity and extramarital pregnancy and ultimately commits suicide to escape his own thoughts; force and inappropriateness of his incestuous feelings alone may influence this; Caddy names her daughter Quentin in honor of her deceased brother.

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William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930)

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Most complex experiment in perspective. Addie Bundren has died, and to honor her dying wishes, the Bundren family attempts to transport her to Jefferson, where she wishes to be buried. Simple story told by 15 different narrators, including Addie herself, in 59 chapters of varying length. Aside from the Bundrens (Anse, Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, Vardaman), of whom there are many, other important characters include the Tulls and Reverend Whitfield, with whom Addie had an affair. Title is an allusion to Book XI of Homer's Odyssey.

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William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

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Concerns itself mainly with the life and death of Thomas Sutpen, a poor white who moves to Mississippi with the intention of becoming rich and powerful. Sutpen does so, with all the attendant riches of an antebellum Southern dynasty (read: plantation, slaves). As so much is ruptured for the American South after its defeat in the Civil War, though, Sutpen is unable to restore his home to its former glory, and the story becomes tangled in the literal and figurative pairings of Sutpen with his slaves. Quentin Compson (The Sound and the Fury) is the main narrator. Tells the story to his Harvard roommate Shreve in fragments, with some help from his father and his early memories of the story from his grandfather and Rose Coldfield. The variety among the narrators' perspectives puts the actual narrative events in some doubt, and many of Faulkner's most common themes are present: history, the state of the South, race, isolation

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Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

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Mama Bear of modernism. Can be distinguished by looking for anti-literature. Can be relatively accessible or seeming gibberish. Heightens reader's awareness of language and narrative by writing "badly" but with such evident control that the writing cannot be dismissed offhand. Writing nearly always calls attention to itself

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Gertrude Stein's Three Lives (1939)

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Three disconnected stories of women--"The Good Anna," "Melanctha," "The Gentle Lena"--in the fictional town of Bridgepointe.

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Gertrude Stein's "Sacred Emily" (1913)

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

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Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

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Biography told from the perspective of her lover. Refers to Stein in the 3rd person. As much a biography of Stein as it is an autobiography of Toklas; much of the book concerns Stein's relationships with young artists (you may have heard of Picasso?) and her role in discovering and popularizing them. Many are attracted to the book not as a portrait of Stein bt as a portrait of the cultural milieu of Paris in the 1910s and 1920s, during which some pretty important stuff happened

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T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

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Towering figure in pre-WWII American letters; influence extended well into the 1960s and beyond. Best known as poet: "The Waste Land," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Ash Wednesday," and "The Hollow Men." Marked by heavy use of allusion to Biblical, classical, and literary sources; bleak sense of cultural emptiness and barrenness; mash-up of poetry and prose styles. Further developed his theory of the impersonal poet throughout his career, as in "Hamlet and his Problems," which marks Eliot's introduction to the concept of the objective correlative. Impersonality became an important paradigm for High Modernist authors.

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T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1920)

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"Let us go then, you and I" Heavily wrought with allusions and disparate, seemingly disconnected, parts. "In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo" "And indeed there will be time/To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'" "Do I dare/Disturb the universe?" "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas" "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

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T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922)

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Often considered one of the great works of the Anglophone Modernism. Has footnotes. Split up into 5 sections and supplemented by 7 pages of notes. Difficulty springs from its fragmentation, polyglot vocabulary, and dense cultural allusions. Opens with vague allusion to Canterbury Tales ("April is the cruelest month") and flips inexplicably to the memories of some speaker's girlhood.

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T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" (1925)

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Commonly seen as the last great poem of the early phase of Eliot's career and deals with many of the same Post-WWII themes as "The Waste Land." Concerned with the difficulty of the search for meaning in postwar Europe. "This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper."

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T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" (1930)

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First long poem Eliot published after his conversion to Anglicanism. Marks a stylistic turning point in Eliot's career, in which he began to rely more heavily on traditional forms of melody and prosody. "Because I do not hope to turn again/Because I do not hope/Because I do not hope to turn."

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T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919)

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Acts as kind of poetic manifesto for Eliot's pre-conversion work and offers a sustained argument in favor of "impersonal poetry." "Tradition" is not simply a collection of cultural artifacts from the past; instead "tradition" operates as a "simultaneous order" of timeless work, uniting past and present. The great artist attaches him- or herself to tradition rather than breaking with it. As such, Eliot does not believe in the inspired genius popularized by the Romantic poets, and argues for an artist that can use tradition to lift him or her above personal experience. Similarity between "Tradition" and Joyce's statement in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man regarding the artist as being "like the God of creation."

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William Butler Yeats

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Poetry is characterized by symbolism. Helped found Irish National Theater Company

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enjambment

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meaning runs on to the next line(s) and there is no natural pause. Gives speaker's voice natural quality even as the poem obeys the formal rules of traditional metered verse.

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humanism

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moral issues predominate

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James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking Tales

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Natty Bumpo. "Deerslayer," "Hawkeye," "Leather-stocking." A nature lover and a crack shot who always does the right thing. Monsters of Templeton alludes.

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Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

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Concerns the adventures of a young man who stows away aboard a ship.

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Charles Dickens' David Copperfield

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Partly autobiographical. Mr. & Mrs. Micawber, Uriah Heep.

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Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March

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Coming-of-age novel set in depression-era Chicago

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The Thousand and One Arabian Nights

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Scheherezade.

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment

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Raskolnikov kills his obnoxious landlady with an ax, and eventually repents.

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Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

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Heathcliff: darkly passionate and proud foundling boy whose disastrous romance with Catherine Earnshaw, a natural daughter of Heathcliff's adoptive father, is the book's subject. Lockwood, a somewhat dopey tenant of nearby Thrushcross grange, is the narrator who provides entry into the story, which is later taken up by other narrators through found manuscripts, diaries, recollections, etc., in a wave of superbly handled flashback

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Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote

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Sancho Panza.

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Geoffrey Chaucer

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A master ironist. He will eviscerate you in fiction.

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Robert Browning's "Caliban upon Setebos"

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Alludes to Caliban from the Tempest. Setebos is the deity Caliban and his witch mother Sycorax worship. Dramatic monologue. "Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos! Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o'the moon. Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match, But not the stars; the stars come otherwise; Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that: Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon, And snakey sea which rounds and ends the same."

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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A mariner tells a man on the way to his wedding the story of how, by senselessly killing an albatross, he brought a world of bad luck down upon himself and his companions and must now, in penance, travel the world relating his tale. "The sadder but wiser girl for me" is a reference.

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John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel

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Long allegorical poem that uses biblical figures to represent the players in a political upheaval of the author's time. Issue under dispute is Catholicism, Protestantism, King, and Parliament. King David represents Charles II, delicately supported by author. Ultimately a serious work that allegorizes the political situation in Restoration England, using biblical figures in order to argue an essentially pro-Charles position.

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Ernest Hemingway

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Characteristic style. Obsessed with fishing. Sparse and terse.

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Richard Wright's Native Son

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Character Bigger Thomas. Launched author to forefront of African-American writers.

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Richard Wright's Black Boy

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Autobiographical account of the author's youth.

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Kate Chopin's The Awakening

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Set in Louisiana. Pontellier and Lebrun. Women are the property of men.

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Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

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Rochester.

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Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth

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New York City. Lily Bart. Author as convoluted as Henry James.

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Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South

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Portrayal of and outcry against social conditions in 19th century England. Author fashionable member of upper-crust English society

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Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess"

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Italian Duke of Derrara stands before a painted portrait of his wife, whom he may have had assassinated, addressing a person involved in arranging the Duke's next marriage. Dramatic monologue. Heroic couplets. Elegant internal quality of enjambment.

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Joseph Conrad's "Youth"

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Seafaring story in which the main character undergoes a terrible ordeal at sea and loves it because he is young and craves experience and having his mettle tested.

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Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

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American southern gothic. A story of the chaos wrought on a woman's life when her cousin Lymon Willis (a dwarf, both deformed and powerfully charismatic) enters her world.

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D. H. Lawrence's "The Odor of Chrysanthemums"

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Set in an English coal mining town. Main character awaits her husband's return from work, but he has been suffocated in a cave-in. The main character, whose marriage was not happy, reflects on the gulf that separates her from her dead husband, coming to realize that he is scarcely farther away now than when alive.

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Henry James's The Aspern Papers

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Novella about the unsuccessful attempts of the biographer of a fictionalized and long-dead poet to secure some papers from the poet's aged former mistress and her homely daughter. Set in Venice. Protagonist at first encourages daughter's infatuation with him in order to get to the papers.

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Dante Alighieri's Vita Nuova

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Dante meets Beatrice when they are nine years old. The single most famous example of love at first sight in literary history.

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Charon

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

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Leda

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figure from Greek mythology who is raped by Zeus, who came to her in the form of a giant swan. Leda is the mother of Clytemnestra, the twins Castor and Pollux, and Helen of Troy.

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Aristotle

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the great Greek philosopher. His Poetics is a wellspring of English literary criticism and the source of the neoclassical unities

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prosopopoeia

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personification

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John Donne's "The Sun Rising"

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lighthearted and saucy, the poetry of the ambitious 16th century playboy and soldier/adventurer.

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Icarus

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a young man who drowned and it was worth it

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William Shakespeare's Cymbelline

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Imogen is the embodiment of goodness

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Racine

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author of Phaedra, father of French neoclassical theater. Andromache

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George Chapman

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High priest of Homer. Early English translator of the Greeks. Keats wrote about him. Charles Algernon Swinburne also did.

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Maya Angelou's "On the Pulse of Morning"

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poem read at President Clinton's inauguration

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Margery Kempe

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medieval figure who, at 40, after a long marriage and having borne several children, devoted her life to Christ, wandering through Europe and proselytizing for the Church. Later dictated her autobiography

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Mary Rowlandson

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Puritan woman who vividly recorded her abduction by Native Americans

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Anne Bradstreet

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Puritan poet

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Sarah Orne Jewett

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19th century New England writer. Best known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, is quiet and lyrical. Distinctly American flavor to their writing.

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Mary Wollstonecraft

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English literary figure. Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Mother of author of Frankenstein.

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The Gilgamesh Epic

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Ancient Assyrian work. At least 1500 years older than Beowulf and Caedmon. Concerns a questing hero who must battle supernatural monsters.

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Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine

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Martial character of speech. Scythians.

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Ben Jonson's Volpone

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The Fox. Set in Venice, the play concerns the efforts of Volpone and his confederate Mosca to bilk everyone who comes across their path, particularly Volpone's heirs. Volpone and Mosca manage to outwit everyone but each other, which ultimately proves to be their downfall. Mosca tries to blackmail Volpone, who is too proud to be victimized and so reveals his and Mosca's scheming ways to the authorities, bringing ruin upon them both. Volpone, Mosca, Corvino.

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The Niebelungenlied

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13th century epic poem. Siegfried. Concerns romances, marriages, wars, betrayals, and murders that occur over time as an enormous treasure called the Niebelung hoard changes hands and places.

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Eudora Welty

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Southern gothic writer whose works often comment on the religious preoccupation typical of the South. Focuses more on human relationships than on feminism.

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Willia Cather

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more heavily associated with the West and Midwest than the South. Distinctly American flavor to their writing.

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Nadine Gordimer

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South African novelist. July's People.

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May Sarton

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New England poet, novelist, and diarist

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Henry Fielding

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Tone of comic irony. Damning and unsubtle innuendo couched in high-sounding phrases. Parodied Samuel Richardson in a work called Shamela, with main character Shamela Andrews

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Henry Fielding's Tom Jones

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Goody Brown. Molly.

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Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles

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Not much on comedy

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George Eliot's Daniel Deronda

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not a guffaw kind of novel

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Sir Philip Sidney's An Apology for Poetry

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probably the most important statement of literary criticism of the 16th century. Humorously uses ironic hyperbolic praise and scorn to offset the author's genuine passion for his subject

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Ptolemaic model

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A geocentric model of the universe in which the stars and other heavenly bodies are fixed upon nested spheres that rotated about the earth. This motion produced a divine music. Eventually supplanted by heliocentric models of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo

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Henry James's The Golden Bowl

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Reminiscent of Edith Wharton. Baroque sentence construction, hesitations, considerations, and possibilities envisioned and discarded. Leaves the impression of a man who takes all the time he can to explore his delicate genius.

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John Dos Passos

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Known for his U.S.A. trilogy, an experimental work, and his antiwar stories and essays. Hardheaded realist and sometime socialist not given to waxing about bookish tremulations.

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E. M. Forster

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examines the intricacies of human relationships

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Langston Hughes

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Experiments with African-American vernacular and blues and jazz rhythms

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Countee Cullen

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Poet of the Harlem Renaissance and a peer of Langston Hughes. More traditional and academic in his verse.

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W.E.B. Du Bois

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author of The Souls of Black Folk. Instrumental in the formation of the NAACP. Strongly critical of Booker T. Washington's accomodationalist politics

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Paul Laurence Dunbar

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

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Amiri Baraka

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African-American poet, playwright, novelist, and belles-lettrist. First collection of poetry is entitled Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note. Other important works are his play The Dutchman and his study of jazz in America, Blues People.

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Dylan Thomas

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20th-century poet known for extravagantly musical verse. Prose is similarly gorgeous. "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" is a villanelle.

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Ezra Pound

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20th-century poet and one of the towering figures of literary modernism. American who spent the bulk of his career in Europe. Best known for rhyming satiric poem "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and long, difficult, possibly fascist life's work "The Cantos." Influences include Asian poetry and contemporary economics. Fond of juxtapositions of images and the importation of quotes and illusions into his work. Fan of Yeats. Edited The Waste Land. Proficient translator of Old English, as well as classical Chinese, Latin, and heaven knows how many modern languages. He consumed whole literatures the way some of us eat potato chips. Despite his stunning erudition, couldn't hack all the academic rigamarole and was booted from his first college teaching position.

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William Carlos Williams

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20th-century American modernist poet. Spare but warm verse. Imagist school: "no ideas but in things." Characterized by easily accessible language and quotidian imagery. Masterpiece is book-length poem Paterson, concerns his life in hometown Paterson, NJ, where he practiced medicine for the better part of his life.

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Ted Hughes

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20th-century poet laureate of Great Britain until death in 1998. Best known for his collection Crow. Characterized by unflinching investigation of darker side of human nature (people are frequently portrayed as beasts). Unmistakably contemporary.

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Sylvia Plath

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20th century American poet known for the haunting, violent, bitter, and pitiless poems of collection Ariel, and autobiography The Bell Jar recounting events surrounding her nervous breakdown. Married to Ted Hughes for several years before committing suicide in 1963. Poems often about story relationship with father.

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William Dean Howells

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Joyless and leaden. Held literature as potentially injurious. Authored score of novels and twice as many plays, all the while editing leading magazines like Harper's and Atlantic. 19th-century novelist, best known for avowal of "realist" technique in fiction, socialist politics, criticism's crusty moralizing. Best-known novel is The Rise of Silas Lapham, in which a nouveau riche Bostonite loses his wealth but learns about the things that really matter

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Djuna Barnes

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author of Nightwood, a highly regarded modernist novel

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

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author of novels This Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Great Gatsby, and many short stories. Handles language and subtleties of character with exquisite delicacy Keywords: Tom, Daisy, Amory Blaine

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Samuel Pepys

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17th-century diary. Most famous diarist in English letters. Notable for easy style and very frank portrayal of the private life of a London man during the restoration. Diary written in private code not deciphered until the 19th century.

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground

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Memoir of a bitter, sensitive, hypochondriacal, anonymous narrator alienated from society

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Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past

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Epic masterpiece dealing with memories of rather ordinary childhood.

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Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

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Author's most important prose work, a series of almost autobiographical spiritual musings. Author best known for lyric "object poems"--attempts to describe physical objects so that there is no separation between the observer and the object being observed

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Albert Camus's The Stranger

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Begins with the death of the narrator's mother. Plot centers around the seemingly motiveless killing of a stranger on a beach and the subsequent trial. Disaffected, matter-of-fact narrator.

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Honore de Balzac

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Known for examinations of bourgeois life in 19th-century Paris, reflected in French names and straight references to Paris

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Captain Ahab

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a raging and tragic fool

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Huckleberry Finn

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antics belie a wisdom beyond his years

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J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

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Holden Caulfield is jaded teenage narrator, neither foolish nor simple

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Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

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Mysteriously injured, sexually dysfunctional WWI vet Jake Barnes narrates 1920s France and Spain

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Henry James's Daisy Miller

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novella about a young, flirtatious, nouveau riche American girl in Europe. Candid, yet ambiguously unwitting sexuality shakes the Old World sensibilities that surround her and ultimately proves to be undoing.

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Quentin Compson

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A young Mississippi man who harbors a deeply felt and guilt-provoking passion for his sister Caddy, and who ultimately kills himself while at Harvard. Or: Sister Caddy's bastard daughter. Resourceful and morally ambiguous, she steals her detestable Uncle Jason's savings and flees. She is not heard from again.

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Benjy Compson

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"idiot manchild" who narrates the first section of The Sound and the Fury. Neither rebellious nor atheist

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Arthur Dimmesdale

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Puritan Reverend who fathers Hester Prynne's daughter, Pearl, in The Scarlet Letter. Strict New England Protestant

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Hester Prynne

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not a sardonic atheist

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Samuel Butler's Hudibras

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Written in deliberate clubfoot form. Knight and his squire, Sir Ralpho.

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Alexander Pope's Dunciad

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Fantastical and withering satire in which author lambastes bad poets. Set in the kingdom of Dulness. Chief object of author's scorn is poet and comic dramatist Colley Cibber, who had the dire misfortune of being appointed Poet Laureate in an era that sported several vastly better poets.

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John Dryden's Mac Flecknoe

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Set in the land of boring poets. Takes Restoration Thomas Shadwell to task.

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Stendhal's The Red and the Black

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A young man of humble origins and formerly a seminary student executed for attempted murder of a woman he loved

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Mann's Buddenbrooks

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Tells of the decay of the titular family

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Balzac's Lost Illusions

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Story of a young, handsome, talented man, Lucien de Rubempre, who travels to Paris with a married woman to make his literary name. He loses the woman, betrays his talent, and sells out not only himself but his family, mistresses, etc. He dies in the end after making an unlikely comeback orchestrated by criminal mastermind Vautrin

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Flaubert's Sentimental Education

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Extended reworking of first part of Balzac's Lost Illusions. Frederic Moreau is struck with an obsessive love for a married bourgeois which comes to not. Pitilessly exposes everyone and everything as petty, vein, despicably commercial, and utterly unable to live up to his or their own ideals

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Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil

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Story of a rustic Norwegian's stoic, self-reliant determination to persevere in a hard land

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Wallace Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"

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About death, but ambiguously. Uses odd and vivid imagery to convey a Zen-like vision of the cosmos

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A. E. Houseman's "To an Athlete Dying Young"

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four-line stanzas of heroic couplets

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Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy

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An exceedingly violent play

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Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1612)

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A Jacobean play

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E. M. Forster's Aspects of Novel

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Famous formulation of "flat" and "round" characters. Both types have a place in the novel. Cites Dickens as excellent user of flat characters

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Iris Murdoch

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Novels often feature twisted wealthy men and bizarre plot twists

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Cerberus

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three-headed dog that guards the entrances to the underworld

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the Hydra

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Mythical seven-headed dragon. When 1 of its heads is severed, 2 more grow back in its place

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the Chimera

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Mythical beast made of parts of a goat, a lion, a serpent (or a dragon), with various ancient sources disagreeing on just what parts come from what animal. Says "onii-chan."

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Jorge Luis Borges

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Came to international attention through short stories. Characteristic stories less concerned with portraiture of individual actors than with the philosophical exploration of modernist anxieties concerning the self and meaning. Writes of labyrinths, actual and metaphysical, of infinite libraries, of dreams that dream the dreamer, of duplicate worlds and duplicate selves, of inescapable and fascinating solipsisms. Might be seen as an extended meditation on "I seem to have become lost." Most famous work is Ficciones

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George Orwell

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Wrote Animal Farm and 1984, as well as several autobiographical/journalistic accounts of his remarkable life, which included jobs as a colonial policeman in Burma and a hotel dishwasher in Paris, experiences in war, and a passionate but undogmatic commitment to social justice

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Vladimir Nabokov

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Best known for novels Lolita and Pale Fire. Emigre from Russia; wrote later novels in English. Characterized by erudite self-conscious style put to humorous effect and proclivity for experimentation with form.

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Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire

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Novel told through the annotations to a mediocre poem. Annotator is an insane academic named Charles Kinbote.

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Bernard Malamud

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American writer descended from Russian-Jewish immigrants. Best known for novel The Fixer.

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Andre Gide

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French author best known for novels and diaries

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Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"

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"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood."

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Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Tithonous"

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Poem about a man granted eternal life but not eternal youth. "And after many a summer dies the swan."

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Allen Ginsburg's Howl

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"I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked." Often uses long lines and emphatic repetition

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Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

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Author's eulogy for Abraham Lincoln (not referenced in The Dead Poet's Society)

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Richard Wilbur's "Junk"

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"An axe angles from my neighbor's ashcan; It is hell's handiwork the wood not hickory, The flow of the grain not faithfully followed." Exhibits a form characteristic of Old English verse

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Henry IV, Part I

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Famous scenes: Henry has just fought and killed his rival Hotspur. Despite their enmity, each respected the other. Famous as the one in which Falstaff survives by playing dead, and then goes to Hotspur's corpse, stabs it (to get his knife bloody), and carries the body off in order to take credit for the victory.

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Lady Macbeth

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"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day" is her eulogy. (I trust you recognize my reference to another Scottish tragedy without my having to name the play)

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Jacobean masque

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Form is derived from the religious spectacles and plays of medieval times. Evolved into a lavish production involving spectacular sets, costumes, and even machinery. Many of the players were drawn from the court.

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Ben Jonson

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Wrote numerous masques for which Inigo Jones designed elaborate sets

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Herrick's "Corinna's Going A-Maying"

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"Get up! get up for shame! The blooming morn Upon her wings presents the god unshorn. See how Aurora throws her fair Fresh-quilted colors through the air: Get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see The dew bespangling herb and tree. Each flower has wept and bowed toward the east Above an hour since, yet you not dressed; Nay, not so much as out of bed?"

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Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther

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Werther is a well-to-do young bourgeois, a morbidly sensitive dilettante fond of translating Ossian (he fancies himself a poet as well, or at least a poetic soul), who falls madly in love with the happily married Lotte. His elaborate attentions flatter her, but she is too conventional (and too content with Albert, her husband) to conduct an affair. Despairing, he writes a last diary entry (the novel is told almost entirely in diary form) and shoots himself with pistols borrowed from Albert. On publication the novel was a sensational success and struck such a nerve with its contemporary readers that it inspired several "copycat" suicides.

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Voltaire's Candide

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Short novel. "What's the name of the book that says everything that can go wrong with a human?"

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Edward Wilson's Axel's Castle

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Well-known collection of critical essays bringing to light Le Compte Villiers De L'isle Adam's relatively obscure play with main character named Axel

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Goethe

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Was associated with Sturm und Drang movement

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Sturm und Drang

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Movement with greater influence on theater than on novels, in large part due to the theatrical successes of Schiller. A youthful romantic hero confronts the arbitrary or unnatural laws of society, flouts them, and ultimately pays the price

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Mark Twain's Letters from Earth

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Satan corresponds with God about the foolish notions humans have about spiritual matters

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Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

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Dystopic story of a girl who is raised in wretched poverty by a hideous alcoholic mother. Heroine is driven to prostitution after having been manipulated, seduced, and cast aside by her lover Pete. She ultimately kills herself.

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George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia

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Concerns socialism in the context of the Spanish Civil War. Could hardly be called utopian.

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Willia Cather's My Antonia

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Story of the hardscrabble Nebraska pioneer life of Jim Burden and Antonia Shimerda.

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William Shakespeare

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April 23, 1564 - April 23, 1616 not terribly good with decorum

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veni, vidi, vici

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I came, I saw, I conquered

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honi soit qui mal y pense

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Shame on him who thinks this evil. Motto of the Order of the Garter

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ars longa, vita brevis

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Art is long, life short

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cogito ergo sum

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I think, therefore I am

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carpe diem

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Seize the day

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metaphysical poets

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17th-century school of poetry led by John Donne and George Herbert

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Sir Walter Raleigh

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An adventurer, poet, and confidante to Queen Elizabeth

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William Cowper

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Able to write only between recurring bouts of suicidal madness

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Samuel Butler's Erewhon

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Parody of a "Utopian" society. Anagram for nowhere

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Froissart's Chronicle

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Written in French; not translated into English until the 16th century.

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Caedmon

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author of his eponymous Hymn, written in the late 7th century. First English poet known by name to history. Contemporary of Beowulf transcription

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Balzac's Comedie Humaine

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enormous series of interrelated novels

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Balzac's Pere Goriot

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Rastignac is a naive young man here, but in later novels shows up as an increasingly cynical and successful man-about-town

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Gerard Manley Hopkins's "God's Grandeur"

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

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Percy Shelley's Ozymandias

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"Look on my Works ye Mighty and despair!"

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Hart Crane's "The Bridge"

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"O harp and altar, of the fury fused, (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)"

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

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celebrates direct, clear, forthright verse without sacrificing beauty and originality of phrase. Laudably direct, unpretentious style, and abstained from classical references "The muse's garden, with pedantic weeds/O'erspread, was purged by thee; the lazy seeds/Of servile imitation thrown away,/And fresh invention planted..."

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John Donne's Holy Sonnet 14

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Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp'd town, to another due, Labour to admit you, but O, to no end. Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captivated, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, But am betroth'd unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravage me.

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Aphra Behn

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

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George Eliot

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Pen name of female author (Marian Evans), who discarded traditional female interests to write about common people, as she does in Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and Silas Marner. Not the author of a feminist text. Keywords: Rector of Broxton.

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Clifford Odets

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playwright and left-wing political figure.

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Emily Bronte

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Used the pen name Ellis Bell

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Anne Bronte

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Used the pen name Acton Bell

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Charlotte Bronte

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Used the pen name Currer Bell

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George Sand

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Pen name used by French novelist Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin

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Thomas Rowley

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the author whom literary juvenile-delinquent/forger/genius Thomas Chatterton invented

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As You Like It

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Famous moments: The Seven Ages of Man speech "All the world's a stage/And all the men and women merely players." " At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms, Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to School. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eyebrow... Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness, and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing." Characters: Jaques

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Ezra Pound's Cantos

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Note rhythm's suggestion of Old English caesura and the heavy alliteration within many of the lines. By alluding to early Anglo-Saxon epic form, mimics the antiquity of Homer's ancient Greek. Odysseus: "And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth upon the godly sea, and we set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas."

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Satan

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"O sacred, wise, and wisdom-giving plant, Mother of science! now I feel thy power Within me clear, not only to discern Things in their causes, but to trace the ways Of highest agents, deemed however wise. Queen of this universe! do not believe Those rigid threats of death. Ye shall not die; How should ye? By the fruit? it gives you life To knowledge."

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William Cowper's The Task

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Lady Austen (not Jane) suggested author write a poem about a sofa. Goes on to address the small pleasures of his country-mouse life and, to a lesser extent, the displeasures of the city. Reflective, graceful, and subdued, despite the fact that author himself was hounded throughout his adult life by periodic fits of suicidal depression and feelings of persecution.

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Sonnet 1

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From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauty's rose might never die, But as the riper should by time decrease, His tender heir might bear his memory: But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes, Feeds't thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel, Making a famine where abundance lies, Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel. Thou that are now the world's fresh ornament, And only herald to the gaudy spring, Within thine own bud buriest the content, And, tender chorl, mak'st waste in niggarding: Pity the world, or else this glutton be, To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

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Beckett's Happy Days

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In the opening scene, the play's principal character is found up to her waist in a rubbish pile.

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Sartre's No Exit

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The theme of the play is simple: Hell is other people.

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Genet's The Balcony

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The drama takes place in the chambers of a bordello as a revolution or an uprising occurs on the streets outside. Within, the characters amuse themselves by enacting upon each other grotesque parodies of power and humiliation

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Chekhov's Three Sisters

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The drama takes place in the large comfortable living room of a well-to-do family's countryside estate. Newspapers are read. Servants come and go. An air of quiet frustration and a sense that life is passing by hangs over all that occurs. The principal characters' main concern is not so much for the life they lead, as the life they are not leading elsewhere.

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Samuel Beckett

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Irish-born playwright (and novelist and poet who wrote all but his earliest work in French). Plays are Spartan in decor and cast is rarely larger than four. Characters are always in some way disabled: physically, mentally, economically, or spiritually. They inhabit a bleakly absurd world of futility, alienation, and discomfort, in which things typically go from awful to perfectly hideous, though the gloom is enlivened (or perhaps underscored) by moments of humor, violence, and even (though very rarely) lyricism. Associated with the theater of the absurd

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Beckett's Waiting for Godot

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A pair of bums, Vladimir and Estragon (a.k.a. Didi and Gogo) await the arrival of the mysterious titular character, who fails to appear. Another pair of bums, Lucky and Pozzo, also briefly but disturbingly take the stage

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Sartre

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French author best known for formalizing the philosophy known as "existentialism" in a work called Being and Nothingness. Tried his hand more or less successfully at every type of literary production, including well-known short plays No Exit and The Flies. Both plays are considered to be theater of the absurd works.

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Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night

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Autobiographical play not produced, at the author's request, until after his death

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Eugene O'Neill

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Plays have been labeled with nearly every possible dramatic fault. Can seem at times sentimental, windy, tedious, sloppy, ill-constructed, implausible, and even incomprehensible. No other playwright since Shakespeare has worked successfully and repeatedly on so large a scale, or created characters of such epic weight. Irish-American origin, troubled family life, profound melancholy at the heart of much of his work, parallels between much of his work and Greek tragedy, and overall sense of enormous and powerful emotion that characterizes his plays

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Genet

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French author of novels and plays, also often associated with the Theater of the Absurd. One of the great antisocial authors of world literature. Spent much of his life in jail for burglary, buggery, and just bad attitude. Turns the moral universe on its head, relentlessly aestheticizing and eroticizing vice, crime, and cruelty in a gorgeously fevered, baroque prose. Not an exceptionally prolific writer. Nearly everything he wrote is considered masterful

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Anton Chekhov

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Plays are typically set in upper-middle-class Russian homes. Wrote intricately plotted and dramaturgically innovative plays, perhaps most noteworthy aspect of work is unparalleled ability, through dialogue simultaneously natural and poetic, to convey the inner life of his characters. Doctor of medicine as well as writer, and not only great playwright, but master of short story form as well.

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Upton Sinclair

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Industrial theme. 20th-century American. When did he sleep?

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Charles Dickens

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Victorian Londoner. Industrial theme. Keywords: Bounderby, Gradgrind, and Coketown.

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Dana, Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast

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Harvard man's account of shipping out on a merchant vessel as a common seaman.

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Pierre

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Takes place on dry land

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T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

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An account of author's involvement in Arab revolt against the Turks at the time of World War I. Suggestion of homosexual practice in the British army ranks.

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e. e. cummings's The Enormous Room

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poet's memoir of World War I

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Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That

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memoir of World War I

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Jack Kerouac

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Mystically inclined (some might say flaky). Mention of dharma, night, no sleep, trains, jazz, tea, Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty)

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D. H. Lawrence

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Mystically inclined (some might say flaky).

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Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano

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Set in Mexico. Concerns the last day in the life of an alcoholic and desperately unhappy British consul

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John Berryman

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Keywords: Henry. Mr. Bones. Mordant style ("life, friends, is boring"). Frequently not easily accessible

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Apologia Pro Vita Sua

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Reasoned account of author's life and the social and spiritual reflections that led his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith. Style is clear, dispassionately logical reasoning.

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The Idea of a University

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Champions virtues of liberal arts education. Style is clear, dispassionately logical reasoning.

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George Gascoigne's "For That He Looked Not Upon Her"

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You must not wonder, though you think it strange, To see me hold my louring head so low, And that mine eyes take no delight to range About the gleams which on your face do grow. The mouse which once hath broken out of trap Is seldom 'ticed with teh trustless bait, But lies aloof for fear of more mishap, And feedeth still in doubt of deep deceit. The scorched fly, which once hath 'scaped the flame, Will hardly come to play again with fire, Whereby I learn that grievous is the game Which follows fancy dazzled by desire: So that I wink or else hold down my head Because your blazing eyes my bale have bred

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Thomas Chatterton

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in 1760s, fabricated the poems of fictional poets of earlier times, the best of the poems being "by" a fictional 15th century monk, Thomas Rowley. Went so far as to forge supporting documents, such as correspondence and titles. Not until late 19th century was hoax conclusively settled, and author revealed as the author of the poems and documents. Killed himself at 18, apparently in despair at his poverty, although adolescent geniuses who fabricate the entire lives of fifteenth-century monastic poets no doubt have much to contend with already. Youngster's genius, hubris, and poverty made him a favorite of the Romantics

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Arthur Rimbaud

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not merely a prodigy but also by any standards a great poet and important literary innovator. Colorful and profoundly rebellious life included telling (while still in his teens) eminent poets that their work was merde. As a theorist, his mounting disgust with the poetry of his contemporaries led him to formulate a program for becoming more than a poet. He decided to become a visionary, a seer. To that end he practiced a "derangement of the senses," though alcohol, drugs, and debauchery. He abandoned poetry at some point in his twenties and, after a series of adventures and misadventures, became an unsuccessful and semi-legitimate trader in North Africa. Gravely ill, he returned to France, where he died at 37 in 1891

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Francois Villon

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known as the poet of the seedy, seamy side of life in medieval Paris. Though educated, he enjoyed thieving, drinking, prostitutes, and living against the grain. He popped in and out of jail, some of his best poetry being witty excoriations of jailers he detested. Real-life Sir John Falstaff without the beer gut and with a wicked pen

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John Clare

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minor Romantic poet who came from a rural lower-class background, a fact which made him an instant hit with the fashionable London literati, who typically extolled the intrinsically poetic nature of just such rustics. After a brief period of poetic success, Clare went mad, though he continued to write good poetry from the mental institution

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Raymond Radiguet

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teenage novelist of genius. Frenchman. Died in influenza epidemic that swept Europe and the United States following World War I

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John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

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Keywords: Tom Joad, Rose of Sharon

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Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories

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Character: Sally Bowles

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W. H. Auden

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

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Wallace Stevens

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modernist weirdness. Unsettling ambiguities, arresting images, and peculiar syntax

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James Baldwin

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Brilliant, versatile, prolific, and passionate, he has written novels, essay, stories, and plays, almost all controversial. The publication of his first book saw him hailed as a spokesman for blacks in America, a role he took on uneasily. Openly homosexual in the hostile climate of America in the 1950s and 1960s, he demonstrated an unwavering artistic and moral courage. He protested injustice wherever he saw it and from whatever direction it came, never afraid to break ranks and go against "party lines." He would say that his only part was truth, and however hostile he at times became, his outrage was not so much of a black man, or a homosexual, as that as of an artist, of a deeply thinking, deeply feeling human being

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Henry V

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Centers around the battle of Agincourt, which the English, led by Henry, won despite the heavy odds against them

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Peter Shaffer's Equus

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A play about a teenager who sadistically and inexplicably blinds horses

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John Guare

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plays erode the boundaries of traditional realistic drama

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Romulus Linney

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almost impenetrable southern regional dialect

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Tom Stoppard

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almost impenetrable for intellectual explorations of advanced physics, ancient poetry, and the nature of love

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Oscar Wilde

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scandalous relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, a.k.a. Bosie, led to his imprisonment

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper

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rediscovered feminist classic. First-person story drawing on gothic conventions to narrate the mental decline of a woman taken by her physician husband to an isolated estate to undergo a "rest cure" for her neurasthenia

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland

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Three male social scientists stranded in a blissful all-female society

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George Eliot's Silas Marner

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Lovely foundling girl Eppie eventually brings joy and warmth into the life of the lonely, miserly, eponymous old man who takes her in

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George Eliot's Middlemarch

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Novel centers around Dorothea Brooke and the eponymous town. Casaubon is Dorothea's first husband, a scholar of large erudition but little talent. Their marriage is a failure. Lydgate is a socially prominent doctor whose reputation is sullied by shady financial dealings

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Claude McKay

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African-American radical famous for his poetry and ardent socialism

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Charles Waddell Chestnutt

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received no formal education and died in 1932

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Jean Toomer

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Known for Cane; religious philosopher and poet

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zeugma

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a relatively obscure type of punning, in which a verb is called upon for double duty

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Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House

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Drama from the tensions between a woman longing for some freedom from her role as a parlor-wife and the repressive, selfish husband who doesn't understand. Nora ultimately leaves her husband and children.

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Mann's The Magic Mountain

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Offers the promise of hope through experience Characters: Hans Castorp

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