GRE Literature in English Subject Test (II) – Flashcards
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Daisy Miller
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Henry James; young, flirtatious American girl in Europe; candid yet ambiguously unwitting sexuality shakes the Old World sensibilities that surround her and ultimately prove to be her undoing
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Hestia/ Vesta
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goddess of the hearth and home
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Abraham
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Genesis; had a son named Ishmael with his wife's servant Hagar and then a son named Isaac with his wife Sarah; asked by God to sacrifice Isaac but stopped last minute
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Regan
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Shakespeare's Kong Lear; one of Lear's daughters
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Goneril
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Shakespeare's King Lear; one of Lear's daughters
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Cordelia
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Shakespeare's King Lear; Lear's "good" daughter
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Gloucester
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Shakespeare's King Lear
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Edmund
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Shakespeare's King Lear
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Edgar
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Shakespeare's King Lear
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Albany
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Shakespeare's King Lear
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Pip
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Dickens' Great Expectations
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Cain
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Genesis; son of Eve (along w/ Abel and Seth); "a tiller of the ground" who slays Abel after Lord appreciates Abel's offerings more; as punishment driven out of God's sight to take up residence in East of Eden, but is marked by God's protection
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Ishmael
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narrator and soul survivor in Melville's Moby-Dick, named after the insignificant first son of Abraham before miraculous birth and near-sacrifice of second son Isaac (fr/ Genesis)
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Moses
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fr/ Exodus; adopted by Pharoah's daughter in real mother's attempt to save fr/ Pharoah's Hebrew hate; commanded by burning bush to lead Hebrews fr/ bondage; miracles of a rod that turns into snake and leprous hand; when Pharoah won't let ppl go, 10 plagues (hence, Passover); parting of the red sea in final escape; 10 commandments
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Samuel
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fr/ books of Samuel and Kings in the Bible; prophet, last of Hebrew judges; anointed first kings of Israel
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Saul
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fr/ books of Samuel and Kings in the Bible; first king of Israel; killed in a battle w/ the Philistines
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David
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fr/ books of Samuel and Kings in the Bible; second king of Israel in struggle to usurp throne fr/ Saul; before being crowned, makes early name for himself by defeating Goliath; composed many Psalms; had sons Solomon w/ wife Bathsheba; had son Absalom (tried to usurp David's throne)
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Daniel
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fr/ book of Daniel in the Bible; associated w/ "court tales" of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; during Babylonian captivity of Jerusalem, rose fr/ servant to King's confidant; interpreted king's dreams, predicting famine and saving the kingdom; cast into den of lions b/c he was a Hebrew but survives b/c fof Lord's protection; "writing on the wall" phrase comes fr/ interpretation of king Belshazzar's dreams
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John the Baptist
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recognized Jesus as the Son of God w/o being introduced; baptizes Jesus
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Lazarus
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raised fr/ the dead by Jesus
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Judas Iscariot
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identifies Jesus by kissing him in plain sight of the soldiers who arrest Jesus; paid 30 pieces of silver for his betrayal; eventually kills himself for the guilt
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Salome
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daughter of king Herod, who requested the head of John the Baptist on a plate (and later got it)
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Mary Magdalene
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prostitute whom Jesus reformed
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Benvolio
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Romeo's cousin
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Friar Laurence
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marries Romeo and Juliet
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Mercutio
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Romeo's fabulous, hot-headed friend; responsible for the Queen Mab speech; death in a fight with Tybalt avenged by Romeo
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Tybalt
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Juliet's cousin
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Claudius
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Hamlet's uncle; after the death of Hamlet's father, marries Hamlet's mother Gertrude; killed by Hamlet
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Gertrude
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Hamlet's mother; after husband's death, marries brother in law Claudius; drinks a poisoned cup intended for Hamlet
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Ophelia
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object of Hamlet's affection and recipient of famous "Get the to a nunnery!" command; father Polonius accidentally killed by accident and brother Laertes kills Hamlet in a duel; goes crazy, singing songs to herself and in the end drowns in a lake
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Horatio
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Hamlet's best friend and confidante; suggested at the end of the play that he will tell Hamlet's story
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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
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Hamlets "friends" who went to England w/ Hamlet with instructions that the recipient of the letter should kill him; not bright, and Hamlet alters the letter so they are killed
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Fortinbras
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fr/ Hamlet; "strong armed" Prince of Norway who is constantly pressing on the Danes fr/ without; appears at the end looking to meet w/ Claudius but finds only the dead; Hamlet crowns Fortinbras king of Denmark just before his death and Fortinbras orders an honorable burial for Hamlet
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Baptista
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Bianca and Katharina's father in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew; Padua merchant
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Bianca
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Katherina's younger and more desirable sister in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew
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Petruccio
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proto-macho-man to Kate's proto-feminist in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew; breaks Kate down until she assumes subservient position (NOTE: Italian-sounding names common in this play: Lucentio, Grumio, Gremio, Hortensio, Tranio, Vincentio)
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Alonso
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fr/ Shakespeare's The Tempest; king of Naples, shipwrecked on a mysterious island on their way home fr/ daughter's wedding
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Prospero
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fr/ Shakespeare's The Tempest; former Duke of Milan whose power was usurped by brother Antonio; flees to island w/ daughter Miranda
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Sycorax
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fr/ Shakespeare's The Tempest; Caliban's mother, former head of the island; imprisoned Ariel in a tree
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Ferdinand
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fr/ Shakespeare's The Tempest; falls in love w/ Miranda; married after long servitude to Prospero
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Bassanio
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fr/ Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice; young Venetian who decides to marry Portia for fortune
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Portia
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fr/ Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice; beautiful Venetian heiress; father says in will that daughter's suitors must choose her picture fr/ one of thee casks in order to marry her; disguises as a male lawyer in order to save Antonio
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Antonio
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the "merchant" of Venice fr/ Shakespeare's play; lends friend Bassanio three thousand ducats to woo Portia, but only after making deal w/ Shylock involving a pound of his flesh as punishment; anti-simetic
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Jessica
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Shylock's daughter in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice; runs off w/ Lorenzo, causing Shylock to want to seek revenge on anyone and everyone, especially anti-semites; receives some money fr/ Antonio after he took it fr/ Shylock in complicated deal
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Priam
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fr/ Homer's Iliad; ruler of Troy; father of Paris, Hector, Cassandra; grief moves Achilles to return Hector's body
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Agamemnon
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FR/ HOMER'S ILIAD: Spartan; attempts to seize Troy b/c Paris stole his brother's wife Helen of Sparta; abuses power as commander in chief and takes Achilles's lover, Bryseis; eventually apologizes to Achilles; FR/ AESCHYLUS'S ORESTEIA: after the "successful" Trojan war, returns to Sparta w/ Cassandra, Priam's daughter, as his mistress; wife Clytemnestra jealous and murders Agamemnon (justified by fact that Agamemnon had earlier sacrificed daugther Iphigenia in order to sail to Troy); all of this is a product of the curse on the House of Atrius
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Paris
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fr/ Homer's Iliad; prince of Troy; son of Priam and brother of Hector; stole Helen, sparking the Trojan war
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Helen
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fr/ Homer's Iliad; conceived when Leda was raped by the "swan" Zeus; wife of Menelaus; stolen by Priam, sparking the Trojan war
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Menelaus
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fr/ Homer's Iliad; Atrius's son Agamemnon's brother--therefore subject to curse on house of Atrius; Helen's husband, whose upset over stolen wife starts the Trojan War
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Achilles
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fr/ Homer's Iliad ;Greek's ablest warrior and leader of the fierce Myrmidon fighters; refuses to continue siege of Troy b/c angry at Agamemnon for abusing power as commander in chief and taking Bryseis (with whom Achilles is in love); after Agamemnon apologizes, eventually helps defend the ships fr/ oncoming Trojans with the help of his friend Patroclos; upon Patroclos's death, seeks revenge in killing Hector and dragging body through dirt on a chariot until Priam asks for it back
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Bryseis
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fr/ Homer's Iliad; Achilles's love, taken by Agamemnon, sparking a feud between the two warriors, where Achilles takes his army elsewhere
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Patroclos
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fr/ Homer's Iliad; Achilles's best friend; leaves siege w/ Achilles and the rest of the Myrmidons; allowed to wear Achilles's magnificent armor, but killed by Hector anyway and armor is lost
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Hector
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fr/ Homer's Iliad; Priam's son, Paris's brother; Trojan champion who drives the Greeks away fr/ the walls of Troy
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Odysseus/ Ulysses
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fr/ Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; Greek captain in Trojan war; convinces Agamemnon to apologize to Achilles; after sacking Troy, attempts to return home to Ithaca with men and 12 ships but met w/ variety of obstacles which he alone survives; in Virgil's Aenid, Ulysses was responsible for creating the Trojan Horse that ultimately allowed Troy's defeat
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Thetis
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fr/ Homer's Iliad; Greek demigod; Achilles's mother; provides Achilles w/ armor fr/ Hephaestus
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Hades/ Pluto
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Greek/ Roman lord of the dead/ underworld (but not death itself)
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Hera/ Juno
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Greek/ Roman goddess; protector of marriage
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Ares/ Mars
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Greek/ Roman god of war; in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, Mars helps Arcite win the battle for Emily's hand
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Athena/ Minerva
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Greek/ Roman goddess of wisdom
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Aphrodite/ Venus
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Greek/ Roman goddess of love and beauty; in Virgil's Aenid, Venus is Aeneas's mother and convinces Aeneas to flee Troy in search of new home in Italy; in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, Venus helps Palamon in the battle for Emily's hand
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Hermes/ Mercury
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Greek/ Roman messenger god; leads dead to underworld; inventor of music
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Artemis/ Diana
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Greek/ Roman goddess of the hunt; twin of Apollo
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Apollo/ Phoebis
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Greek/ Roman god of healing, intellectual pursuits, fine arts, prophesy; later, god of sun and light
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Hephaestus/ Vulcan
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Greek/ Roman god of smiths and weavers
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Demeter/ Ceres
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Greek/ Roman goddess of the harvest
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Persephone/ Proserpine
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Greek/ Roman goddess of the underworl
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Dionysus/ Bacchus
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Greek/ Roman god of wine
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Eros/ Cupid
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Greek/ Roman god of love
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Eris
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Greek goddess of strife
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Pan
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Greek god of goatherds and shepherds; plays a fife and has a goat-like appearance)
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Aglaia
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in Greek mythology, one of the three "graces" (daughter of Zeus and Eurynome); splendor
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Euprosyne
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in Greek mythology, one of the three "graces" (daughter of Zeus and Eurynome); mirth
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Thalia (the grace)
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in Greek mythology, one of the three "graces" (daughter of Zeus and Eurynome); good cheer
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Clio
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in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); history
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Urania
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in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); astronomy
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* Melphomene
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in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); tragedy
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* Thalia (the muse)
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in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); comedy
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Terpsichore
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in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); dance
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*Calliope
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in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); epic poetry
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* Erato
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in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); love/ lyric poetry
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Polyhymnia
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in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); songs to the gods
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Euterpe
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in Greek mythology, one of the nine muses (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; known for music, which brings joy to any who hear it); lyric poetry
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The Furies
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in Greek mythology, punish crimes
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The Fates
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in Greek mythology, choose a man's destiny and life span
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Titans
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in Greek/ Roman mythology, ruled the earth before the Olympians overthrew them; ruled by Chronos/ Saturn
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Chronos/ Saturn
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in Greek/ Roman mythology, ruler of the Titans
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The Naiads, Nereides, Oceanides
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in Greek mythology, three classes of water nymphs
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Polyphemus
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Homer's Odyssey; cyclops that Odysseus and his men encounter and blind on their way home, leading father, Poseidon, to be enraged
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Circe
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Homer's Odyssey; lives on the island of Aenea and turns Odysseus's men into pigs but after a year lets them leave the island as humans
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Scylla and Charybdis
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Homer's Odyssey; two monsters which Odysseus has to sail around
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Calypso
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Homer's Odyssey; goddess who detains Odysseus on the island of Ogygia for 7 years (the point where the poem begins) but finally releases him at Zeus's command
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Penelope
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Homer's Odyssey; Odysseus's wife, beset by suitors in Odysseus's long absence but manages to put them off with ruses and sheer obstinacy
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Telemachus
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Homer's Odyssey; Odysseus's son; almost killed by angry suitors; helps Odysseus slaughter the suitors and the servants who had helped suitors
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Aeneas
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Virgil's Aenid; Trojan soldier and son of Venus; leads fleet to find a new home in Italy (as prophesied), but not before he has an intense love affair with Dido, leaving her in a pit of despair and ultimate suicide
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Laocoon
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Virgil's Aenid; Trojan priest who warned against accepting the gift of the Trojan horse before being eaten by two giant sea snakes
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Dido
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Virgil's Aenid; queen of Carthage; Aeneas's lover, but left behind when Aeneas continues journey to Rome; kils herself ofgrief, vowing that Carthage will avenge her (for Virgil's contemporary audience, Rome's recent wars w/ Carthage, known as the Punic wars, fulfill this prophesy); Dido is the subject of many allusions and often lumped along with other tragic women like Eve, Philomela (fr/ Ovid's Metamorphoses), Cleopatra, and Ophelia
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Anchises
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Virgil's Aenid; Aeneas's father; carried out of a war-torn Troy on Aeneas's back
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Philomela
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tragic character fr/ Ovid's Metamorphoses
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Evander
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Virgil's Aenid; king of the Latins who teams up w/ Aeneas to combat Turnus (later killed) and the Rutuli
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Aegisthus
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in Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy, marries his lover Clytemnestra after they murder her husband, Agamemnon (technically Aegisthus's cousin); eventually killed by Orestes and Electra, who avenge death of their father Agamemnon
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Clytemnestra
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daughter of Leda; in Aeschylus's Oresteia, Agamemnon's wife; becomes angry over sacrifice of daughter and mistress in the house, so she and her lover Aegisthus murder Agamemnon; killed by Orestes and Electra, who avenge death of their father Agamemnon
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Cassandra
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in Aeschylus's Oresteia, daughter of Trojan King Priam, abducted by Agamemnon after the war
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Iphigenia
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in Aeschylus's Oresteia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, sacrificed in order to create fair wind to sail to Troy; victim of the curse on the House of Atrius
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Electra
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in Aeschylus's Oresteia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, sister of Iphigenia and Orestes; she and Orestes murder Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus to avenge their father's death
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Orestes
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in Aeschylus's Oresteia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; murders Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus to avenge father's death; plagued by the Furies for killing w/in family but in trial Athena declares a tie in his favor, finally breaking curse on House of Atrius
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Julia
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Robert Herrick's so-called "Julia" poems, including "Upon Julia's Breasts," "Upon Julia's Clothes," and "The Night Piece, to Julia"
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Lucy
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subject of William Wordsworth's so-called "Lucy" poems, including "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways," "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known," "Three Years She Grew," "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," and "I Traveled Among Unknown Men"
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Palamon
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Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale; aided by Venus to fight for Emily's hand; after buddy Arcite dies, he gets the girl
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Arcite
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Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale; aided by Mars to fight for Emily's hand; wins the battle but dies so that opponent Palamon gets the girl
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The Knight
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Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; valorous, chivalrous, polite; everything you'd expect a knight to be; tells a tale about two knights fighting for love
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The Prioress
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Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; dainty, materialistic, sentimental about her little dogs; wears a well-pleated wimple, a rosary made of coral, and a golden brooch with "Love conquers all" inscribed upon it; tells a tale about the miracle of a Christian boy singing after death
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The Nun's Priest(s)
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Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; in Prologue, three priests accompany the prioress; one of them tells the story of Chaunticleer the rooster escaping the fox's mouth
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Chanticleer
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Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale; handsome, vain rooster who gets snatched by Sir Russel the fox
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Perteltote
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Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale; Chanticleer's favorite hen
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Sir Russel
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Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale; silver-tongued fox
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The Merchant
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; wears motley and a beaver hat, talks about little else but business concerns, which he unfailingly points out are profitable; he's actually in debt, but he bears himself with such calculated dignity that no one suspects it; tells a bawdy story about blind and batty January being cuckolded by young wife
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The Wife of Bath
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; a bit deaf, gap-toothed, plump, ruddy, not bad-looking in her preposterous way, wears scarlet stockings, an enormous hat, comfortable both riding a horse and swapping stories with the boys; has had five husbands, feminist philosophies of love, sex, and (re) marriage; tells story of King Arthur's knight trying to learn what women want
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January
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Chaucer's Merchant's Tale; old blind knight who is cuckolded by his wife May; gains sight back only to witness the deed being done in a pair tree; naive
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May
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Chaucer's Merchant's Tale; young wife who cuckolds old husband January in a pear tree; clever enough to convince him that she did the deed only to help him get his sight back
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The Miller
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; huge, strong, hard-drinking, rough-talking, fight-picking, unpleasantly coarse fellow, with a shovel-sized red beard and a big, hairy wart on his nose; he knows and uses the tricks of the trade when it comes to weighing out grain; tells the tale of a carpenter (or Reeve) getting cuckolded by his boarder Nicholas
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The Pardoner
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; thin, vain, smooth-skinned blond with a bag full of pardons "all hot from Rome;" the host calls him a pretty boy, and Chaucer suggests he's not "all man;" nothing more than a successful huckster w/ bits of the true cross, a scrap of St. Peter's sail, and a holy sheep bone that when dunked in a well turns the water into a cure-all potion; the host threatens to cut off his testicles
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"Handy" Nicholas
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Chaucer's Miller's Tale; good-looking, clever young scholar and boarder with the carpenter and his wife; takes a liking to carpenter's wife Allison, with whom he's plays tricks on Allison's lovers
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Alison
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Chaucer's Miller's Tale; carpenter's wife; cuckolds husband with attractive young Nicholas and tricks other suitor Absalom into kissing her ass
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Absalom (Chaucer)
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Chaucer's Miller's Tale; suitor who gets farted upon by Alison and Nicholas; sticks Nicholas with a hot poker
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Aurelius
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Chaucer's Franklin's Tale; Dorigen's lover
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Dorigen
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Chaucer's Franklin's Tale; Averagus's faithful wife
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Arveragus
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Chaucer's Franklin's Tale; Dorigen's husband
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Simkin
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Chaucer's Reeve's Tale; greedy miller (designed to upset Chaucer's Miller); has his wife and daughter enjoyed by a pair of clerks
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John and Alan
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Chaucer's Reeve's Tale; clerks whom Simkin the miller swindles and they later "enjoy" Simkin's wife and daughter
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Griselda
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Chaucer's Clerk's Tale; patient wife who endures trials of her needlessly jealous husband
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Virginia
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Chaucer's Doctor's Tale; has her father kill her in order to avoid falling into the clutches of the evil judge Apius
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Apius
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Chaucer's Doctor's Tale; evil judge who wants to take Virginia's virginity
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Tamburlaine
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Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great; Scythian shepherd who becomes an extraordinarily ferocious and successful conqueror in Asia Minor
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Zenocrate
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main female character in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great
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Absalom (Dryden)
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John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel; allegorical character representing the Duke of Monmouth
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Achitophel
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John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel; allegorical character representing the Earl of Shaftesbury
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King David (Dryden)
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John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel; allegorical character representing Charles II
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Mr. Horner
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William Wycherley's The Country Wife
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Pinchwife
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William Wycherley's The Country Wife
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Jasper Fidget
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William Wycherley's The Country Wife
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Mrs. Squeamish
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William Wycherley's The Country Wife
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Dainty Fidget
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William Wycherley's The Country Wife
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Dorimant
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George Etherege's The Man of Mode
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Sir Fopling Flutter
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George Etherege's The Man of Mode
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Mrs. Loveit
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George Etherege's The Man of Mode
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Millimant
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female character in William Congreve's The Way of the World
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Mirabell
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male character in William Congreve's The Way of the World
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Mr. Fainall
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William Congreve's The Way of the World
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Lady Wishfort
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William Congreve's The Way of the World
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Mincing
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William Congreve's The Way of the World
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Sir Peter Teazle
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Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal
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Maria
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Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal
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Lady Sneerwell
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Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal
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Sir Benjamin Backbite
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Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal
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Charles Surface
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Richard Sheridan's The School for Scandal
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Belinda
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Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock; modeled after Arabella Fermor, whose hair was cut by Lord Petre
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Elinor and Marianne Dashwood
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Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility
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Lucy Steele
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Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility
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Edward Ferris
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Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility
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John Willoughby
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Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility
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Colonel Brandon
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Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility
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Elizabeth Bennet
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Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
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Charles Bingley
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Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
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George Wickham
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Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
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Fanny Price
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Jane Austen's Mansfield Park
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Emma Woodhouse
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Jane Austen's Emma; "handsome, clever and rich"
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Mr. Knightley
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Jane Austen's Emma
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Miss Bates
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Jane Austen's Emma
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Frank Churchill
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Jane Austen's Emma
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Harriet Smith
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Jane Austen's Emma
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Jane Fairfax
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Jane Austen's Emma
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Catherine Morland
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Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
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Henry Tilney
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Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
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John Thorpe
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Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
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Sir Walter Elliot
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Jane Austen's Persuasion
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Anne Elliot
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Jane Austen's Persuasion
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Frederick Wentworth
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Jane Austen's Persuasion
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Elizabeth Elliot
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Jane Austen's Persuasion
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Professor Teufelsdröckh
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Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus; ie: the "Wanderer"
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Roger Chillingworth
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husband in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter
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Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale
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lover in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter
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Hester Prynne
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bearer of the Scarlet A of adultery in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter
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Pearl
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illegitimate offspring of Hester and Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter
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Miles Coverdale
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Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance
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Hollingsworth
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Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance
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Zenobia
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Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance
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Priscilla
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Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance
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Hepzibah Pyncheon
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Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables
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old Maule
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Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables
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Phoebe
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Nathaniel Hawthorne's the House of Seven Gables
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Clifford
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Nathaniel Hawthorne's the House of Seven Gables
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Queequeg
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savage harpooner in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
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Dashoo
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savage harpooner in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
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Tashtego
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savage harpooner in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
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Starbuck
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first-mate in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
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Septimus Smith
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shellshocked veteran whose story offers a partial parallel to Clarissa's in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
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Sally Seton
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Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
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Peter Walsh
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Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
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Lily Briscoe
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Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
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Charles Tansley
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Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
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Augustus Carmichael
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Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
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Paul Rayley
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Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
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Minta Doyle
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Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse
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Stephen Dedalus
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James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; name comes fr/ creator of the labyrinth that housed the Minotaur
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Leopold Bloom
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James Joyce's Ulysses; "Odysseus"
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Thomas Sutpen
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William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!; poor white who moves to Mississippi to become rich and powerful, but Civil War "ruins" things
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John Caryll
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friend of Alexander Pope's; suggested Pope write The Rape of the Lock; invoked as a kind of "muse" in the opening of the poem
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Leda
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figure fr/ Greek mythology who was raped by Zeus, who came to her in the form of a giant swan; mother of Clytemnestra, twins Castor and Pollux, Helen of Troy; in most versions of the story, Helen is conceived when Leda is raped
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King Minos
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ordered Daedalus to create a labryth on the island of Crete to house the Minotaur
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Minotaur
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housed in King Minos's labyrinth, created by Daedalus
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Daedalus
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created the labyrinth to house the Minotaur; name later used in James Joyce's character Stephen Daedalus in the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
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Epeius
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Greek craftsman who built the Trojan horse
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Jonathan Harker
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main narrator of Dracula
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Natty Bumppo
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main character of James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking Tales; also known as "Deerslayer," "Hawkeye," and "Leather-stocking;" nature lover and a crack shot who always does the righteous thing
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Mr. and Mrs. Macawber
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Dickens's David Copperfield
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Uriah Heep
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Dickens's David Copperfield
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Scheherazade
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narrator of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights; uses the suspense of interrupted stories to keep from being beheaded by the Sultan
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Raskolnikov
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eventually repentant murderer (kills noxious landlady with an ax) in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment
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Mr. Lockwood
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first narrator of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
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Sancho Panza
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fat, ignorant, lovable, faithful squire of Don Quixote, the main character of the eponymous novel by Miguel de Cervantes
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Setebos
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deity Caliban and his witch mother Sycorax worship in Shakespeare's The Tempest
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Jefrey Aspern
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fictionalized version of Lord Byron devised by Henry James in his novella The Aspern Papers
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Beatrice
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Florentine woman of whom Dante thought highly enough to make her his guide through Heaven in Paradiso; their meeting (when both were 9 years old) is possibly the single most famous example of love at first sight in literary history--recorded in Dante's Vita Nuova
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Charon
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ferryman of Greek mythology who carries dead souls across the River Styx to the underworld
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Imogen
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Shakespeare's Cymbeline; embodiment of goodness
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Jason
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Medea's lover in Euripides's play of the same name
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Gilgamesh
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main character of ancient Assyrian work called the Gilgamesh Epic (at least 1500 yrs. older than The Iliad); like Beowulf, concerns a questing hero who must battle supernatural monsters
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Volpone
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(the fox) main character of Ben Johnson's comedy Volpone, or The Fox
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Mosca
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(the fly) Volpone's friend in Ben Johnson's comedy
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Corvino
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(the raven) character in Ben Johnson's comedy Volpone
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Siegfried
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main character of Niebelungenlied
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Goody Brown
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Henry Fielding's Tom Jones
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Molly
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Henry Fielding's Tom Jones
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Sisyphus
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mythology; man condemned to push a rock up a hill ad infinitum
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Hudibras
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Samuel Butler; foolish knight errant (muddle-headed squire is Sir Ralpho), similar to Don Quixote; responsible for term "hudibrastic"
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Vautrin
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Balzac's Lost Illusions and Pere Goriot; criminal mastermind
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Sentimental Education
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Flaubert; extended reworking of first part of Lost Illusions; main character, Frederick Moreau, is stuck with an obsesive love for a married bourgeois which comes to naught; as ever, Flaubert pitilessly exposes everyone and everything as petty, vain, despicably commercial, and utterly unable to live up to his or their own ideals
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Growth of the Soul
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Knut Hamsun; story of a rustic Norwegian's stoic, self-reliant determination to perservere in a hard land
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"The Emperor of Ice Cream"
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Wallace Stevens; ambiguously about death; characteristic Stevens: use of odd and vivid imagery to convey a zen-like vision of the cosmos
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400-1300
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Old English (c. 1000, the English language became strongly influenced by medieval French); Battle of Hastings; authors: Caedmon (c. 670); author of Beowulf, (c. 750)
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1300-1500 (14th-16th centuries)
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Middle English; Battle of Agincourt; Gutenberg Bible; authors: William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Malory
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1500-1558 (early 16th century)
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Early Tudor period; reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary; authors: John Skelton, Thomas More
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1558-1603 (late 16th century)
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Elizabethan period; reign of Elizabeth I; authors: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare
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1603-1625 (early 17th century)
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Caroline period; reign of Charles I; authors: John Donne, John Webster
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1649-1660 (mid 17th century)
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Charles I executed; Cromwell and the Interregnum; authors: John Milton, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell
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1660-1714 (late 17th/ early 18th century)
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Restoration, Reign of Charles II; authors: William Congreve, George Etherege, John Bunyan, John Dryden
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1714-1727 (early/ mid 18th century)
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reign of Anne, the last Stuart monarch; authors: Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope
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1727-1760 (mid 18th century)
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reign of George I of the House of Hanover; authors: Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Thomas Gray
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1760-1790 (late 18th century)
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reign of George II; Enlightenment; first 30 years of reign of George III; American Revolution; The Gothic Novel; authors: Samuel Johnson, Lawrence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Thomas Chatterton, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Cowper
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1790-1820 (late 18th/ early 19th century)
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early Romantic period; second 30 years of reign of George II; Sturm und Drang in Germany; authors: Anne Radcliffe, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Jane Austen
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1820-1837 (early/ mid 19th century)
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middle Romantic period; Reign of George IV; reign of Wiliam IV; British authors: Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson; American authors: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe
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1837-1869 (mid 19th century)
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late Romantic and Victorian periods; first 32 years of reign of Victoria; Transcendentalism in US; British authors: Thomas Macaulay, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning; American authors: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph-Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville
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1869-1901 (late 19th century)
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second 30 years of reign of Victoria; Realism; British authors: John Ruskin, George Meredith, Charles Swinburne, George eliot Gerard, M. Hopkins, Thomas Hardy; American authors: Mark Twain, Henry James
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1901-1939 (early 20th century)
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modernism; British authors: William Butler Yeats, Joseph Conrad, DH Lawrence, WH Auden, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf; American authors: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, WEB Du Bois
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*Marxist theory
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"left wing" criticism; economic situation surrounding lit; texts are not timeless; inspired: New Historicism, feminist criticism, black criticism, post-colonial criticism, identity criticism; buzzwords: base (material economic reality), superstructure (cultural superstructure built upon it), class, proletariat, means of production, bourgeoisie, imperialism, dialectical materialism
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*Psychological theory
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investigates the personality and biography of author and reader as sources of overarching meaning (ie: the things which Marxist theory misses); concerned w/ universals of human consciousness; inspired: freudian/ psychoanalytic criticism, archetype/ myth criticism
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*Linguistic theory
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Hegel; examines the philosophy of language and linguistics; aim to professionalize discipline in early 20th century; inspired: formalist criticism, new criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism
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Feminist theory
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product of New Historicism; bring awareness to gender, esp. using male to represent all; buzzword: patriarchy, marginalization, other, phallocratic hegemony (white male dominance of systems of power)
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Lacanian theory
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Jacques Lacan; signifiers are substitutions w/o clear referent (compare to Saussure or Hegel); language structures the unconscious (compare to Freud, the other way around); marriage of linguistic and psychological theory; buzzwords: mirror, phallus, signifier/ signified, substitution, desire, jouissance, objet petit a, imaginary order, symbolic order, real order
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Psychoanalytic/ Freudian theory
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Freud, Herald Bloom; interpretation of dreams where unconscious comes first and language mapped onto it; buzzwords: oedipal complex, libido, id, ego, superego, subconscious, repression, resistance
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Saussure's theory
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Saussure; discontinuity btw/ signifiers and signifieds, where signifiers float in endless chain of substitution
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New Historicist theory
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product of Marxist theory; specifics of culture matter profoundly and institutions shape societal consciousness known as "ideology;" tendency for dominant class to have the voice--struggling voice of the oppressed (hence, feminist criticism, black criticism, and post-colonial criticism)
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Identity criticism
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school of literary theory that investigates definitions/ constructions of the self; EX: feminist criticism, black criticism, post-colonial criticism
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Herald Bloom's theory
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product of Freudian theory; authors subconsciously position their work against an earlier author "father" figure or "strong-poet"
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Archetype/ Myth criticism
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product of Freudian theory; Carl Jung, James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough (study of myth and ritual), Joseph Campbel, Northrop Frye; looks for recurring symbols, motifs, character types, plots; buzzword: collective unconscious
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Formalist criticism
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product of linguistic criticism; fr/ 1920s Russia; attempts to discern the underlying laws/ features that shape literature; belief that certain devices make literature familiear and aesthetic; buzzword: defamiliarization, devices
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New Criticism
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product of linguistic criticism; fr/ mid-century US and Britain; TS Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, IA Richards, John Crowe Ransom, FR Leavis; focus on the words on the page; buzzwords: intentional fallacy (speculation about authorial intent), affective fallacy (subjective effusions about the beauty of literature), heresy of paraphrase (trying to extract the germ of content); close reading
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Structuralism
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in continental Europe while New Criticism was in US and England; related to semiotics; buzzwords: sign, signifier, signified, binary oppositions
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Post-Structuralism
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critiques and makes use of structuralism; includes: deconstruction; buzzwords: mimesis, alterity, marginality, desire, lack
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Deconstruction
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opposite of structuralism: focuses on displacements, excesses, and gaps where struturalism posits a tidy, orderly structure to meaning; buzzwords: erasure, trace, bracketing, differance, slippage, dissemination, logocentrism, indeterminacy, decentering
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Reader-Response criticism/ Reception Aesthetics
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reader's experience of a text is the literary event; involve an implied or ideal reader; judge whether a work broke a horizon of expectations in its time
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Symbolism
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late 19th century phenomenon of French origin; practiced by Yeats
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auxiliary
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"Helping verb;" often a form of "be," "have," or "do;" (EX: I am working on it)
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gerund
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a verb acting as a noun clause; usually using the "-ing" form of the verb; (EX: "Eating worms is bad for you")
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indicative
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plain old verb in present tense (EX: "John plays with the ball")
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infinitive
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unconjugated verb w/ "to" in front of it; (EX: "to be or not to be")
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participle
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the "-ed" form of a verb (EX: "John has played with the ball many times")
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subordinate conjunction
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a word that introduces a subordinate clause (EX: "Since you're awake, I'll just turn on the TV")
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substantive
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a group of words acting as a noun (EX: "playing the banjo is annoying")
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vocative
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expression of direct address; differs fr/ imperative, which is just the version of verb used to express a command, in that it can be a whole phrase (EX: "Sit, Lily, sit!")
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"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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Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"
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"No coward soul is mine/ No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere"
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Emily Bronte's "No Coward Soul Is Mine"
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"Make use of time, let not advantage slip;/ Beauty within itself should not be wasted;/ Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime/ Rot and consume themselves in little time."
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Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis
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"Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry"
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Denise Levertov's "The Secret" (1960s)
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"No worst, there is none. Pitched past with grief,/ More pangs will, schooled at forelands, wilder wring."
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Gerard Manley Hopkins's "No worst, there is none;" example of sprung rhythm
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"Thou art my father, thou my author, thou my being gav'st me; whom should I obey but thee, whom follow?"
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John Milton's Paradise Lost; late 17th century
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"Nothing shall come of nothing"
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Shakespeare's King Lear
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"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"
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Shakespeare's Hamlet
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"writing on the wall"
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comes fr/ Daniel's interpretation of drunk and terrified King Belshazzar's dreams
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"For when my outward action doth demonstrate/ The native act and figure of my heart/ In compliment extern, 'tis not long after/ But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve/ For daws to peck at. I am not what I am"
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Shakespeare's Othello; Iago
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"She swore in faith 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange,/ 'Twas pitiful, 'twas wonderful pitiful."
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Shakespeare's Othello
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"Men should say what they seem;/ Or those that be not, would they might seem none!"
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Shakespeare's Othello; Iago
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"O! beware, my lord of jealousy;/ It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on"
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Shakespeare's Othello; Iago
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"Put out the light, and then put out the light"
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Shakespeare's Othello
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"I kissed thee ere I killed thee, no way but this,/ Killing myself, to die upon a kiss"
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Shakespeare's Othello
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"All lost! to prayers, to prayers! All lost"
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mariners in Shakespeare's The Tempest
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"I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated/ To closeness and the bettering of my mind..."
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Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest
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"...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..."
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Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest
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"You taught me language, and my profit on't/ Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you/ For learning me your language!"
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Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest
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"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."
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Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
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"The devil can cite Scripture for purpose./ an evil soul producing holy witness/ Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,/ A goodly apple rotten at the heart./ O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!"
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Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
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"But love is blind, and lovers cannot see/ the pretty follies that themselves commit... What, must I hold a candle to my shames?"
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Jessica in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
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"Now is the winter of our discontent [...] I am determined to prove a villain/ And hate the idle pleasures of these days"
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opening line spoken by Richard in Shakespeare's Richard III; direct address example of how the play is much more about Richard himself than the narrative action; plotting or evildoing
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"This is the story of an angry man"
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opening line of Homer's Illiad, which begins in medias res (10 years into the Trojan war); refers to Achilles
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"Come live with me and be my love/ And we with all the pleasures prove"
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Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love;" often quoted and alluded to by English poets like Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, Robert Herrick, and C. Day Lewis
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"Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest,/ Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood"
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Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard"
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"Nature, red in tooth and claw"
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Alfred Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H."
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"Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old/ It is the rust we value, not the gold/ Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learn'd by rote/ And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote"
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Alexander Pope
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"murder will out"
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Geoffrey Chaucer's Prioress's Tale
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"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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ending lines of John Milton's Comus
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"Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more"
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John Milton's Lycidas; exemplifies mixture of nature and poetry as Lycidas becomes point of contact between pastoral past, classical tradition, and Christian tradition
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"Without the meed of some melodious tear"
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John Milton's Lycidas
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"But, oh! the heavy change, now thou art gone,/ Now thou art gone and never must return!"
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John Milton's Lycidas
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"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise/ (That last infirmity of noble mind)/ To scorn delights and live in laborious days"
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John Milton's Lycidas
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"Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth:/ And/ O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth"
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John Milton's Lycidas
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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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William Blake's "The Tyger" (late 18th century)
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"Water, water, every where,/ And all the boards did shrink;/ Water, water, every where,/ Nor any drop to drink."
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (late 18th century)
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"For not this man and that man, but all men wake up mankind, and their united tasks the task of mankind"
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Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (mid 19th century)
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"Such, I say, is the wonderful virtue of even the beginnings of perfection, of having conquered even the plain faults of our animality, that the religious organisation which has helped us to do it can seem to us something precious, salutary, and to be propagated, even when it wears such a brand of imperfection on its forehand as this"
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Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (late 19th century)
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"Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spaced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all storms, the Typoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudeless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town"
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Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, "The Candles"
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"nothing is merely one thing"
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Virginia Woolfe's To the Lighthouse
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"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"
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Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (early 20th century)
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"Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it"
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James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake
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"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"
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Gertrude Stein's "Sacred Emily"
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Othello (the work)
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William Shakespeare; Othello is a war hero married to Desdamona (daughter of Duke of Venice, who is slow to accept marriage); Othello appoints Cassio as lieutenant, sparking Iago's jealousy; Iago convinces Othello that Cassio and Desdamona are lovers, leading Othello to strangle Desdamona; Othello kills self when realizes; engages issues of race (Othello is a "Moor," a black man ruling white subjects); major characters: Iago (typical antagonist, forebear of Milton's Satan)
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Northanger Abbey
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Jane Austen (late 18th/ early 19th century); parody of Anne Radcliffe's gothic novels; characters: Catherine Morland, the Allens, Henry Tilney, John Thorpe
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Heart of Darkness
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Joseph Conrad; set in colonial Africa and told aboard a ship
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The Castle of Otranto
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Horace Walpole; first gothic novel
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King John
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Shakespeare; late 16th century
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Troilus and Cressida
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Shakespeare; early 17th century
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She Stoops to Conquer
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Oliver Goldsmith; example of restoration comedy; late 18th century
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The Duchess of Malfi
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John Webster; early 17th century; macabre, tragic play; begins as a love story about a duchess (known only as The Duchess) who marries beneath her class; ends as a nightmarish tragedy in which two brothers (Ferdinand and The Cardinal) exact their revenge, undoing themselves in the process
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The Spectator
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Joseph Addison and Richard Steele; 18th century; periodical
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The Rambler
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Samuel Johnson; 18th century; periodical
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The Tatler
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Richard Steele; early 18th century; periodical; this is where Steele published his "lubrications" under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff prior to starting the periodical The Spectator w/ Addison
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The Review
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Daniel Defoe; 18th century; periodical
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The Examiner
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Jonathan Swift; 18th century; periodical
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The Female Spectator
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Eliza Haywood
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Howard's End
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E.M. Forster; early 20th century
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The Age of Innocence
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Edith Wharton; early 20th Century
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A Hazard if New Fortunes
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William Dean Thomas; late 19th century
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Nostromo
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Joseph Conrad
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King Lear
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Shakespeare; King asks his daughters Regan, Goneril, Cordelia (the good one) who loves him more, and they all fawn over him in a big power play; King goes nuts in the Heath; characters: Gloucester, Edmund, Edgar, Albany; "Nothing shall come of nothing"
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Paradise Lost
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John Milton (late 17th century); epic entirely concerned with first two chapters of Genesis; written in blank verse with merciless torture of English sentence structure;
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Richard III
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Shakespeare; Richard, duke of Gloucester, states his intension to wrest the kingship fr/ brother King Edward IV; first kills other brother George, Duke of Clarence; Edward falls ill but decides to pass crown to young sons (not Richard); upon Edward's death, Richard kills princes in Tower of London and Edward's widow Elizabeth flees with sons fr/ 1st marriage; Richard plans to marry Elizabeth's daughter, but Richard killed in battle started by Henry Tudor, and HT crowned king
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The Iliad
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Homer, 8th century BCE (though author and date are in dispute); epic poem; describes events that took place in 12th century BCE Troy (modern Turkey); Agamemnon and Achilles of Sparta besiege Troy b/c Paris of Troy stole married Helen of Sparta; Achilles's best friend dies as the Trojans beat back the Spartan Greeks (including Odysseus); Achilles avenges his death by killing Paris's brother, Hector
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The Oddysey
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Homer, 8th century BCE (though author and date are in dispute); epic poem; Odysseus tries to return home after sacking Troy (see the Iliad); cursed by Poseidon, he drifts at sea for ten years, has various adventures (cyclops Polyphemus, giants, Circe who turns men into pigs, the monsters Scylla and Charybdis, the Siren's song, Zeus striking down men who killed cows of Helios, Calypso's island, an angry cyclops daddy and sea god Poseidon sending him to land of Scheria) and finally gets home to find wife Penelope fending off avid suitors; he and Telemachus get rid of the lot
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The Aenid
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Virgil; begins in medias res; after the Greek defeat of Troy, it prediction that the Trojans will found a great nation in Italy; Trojan soldier Aeneas tries to find new home, but Juno's wrath blows them off course; in Carthage, Aeneas woos Carthaginian Queen Dido and fills in what happened btw/ end of Iliad and now (Ulysses' Trojan Horse led the Trojans to flee) but then leaves to fulfill duty, causing Dido's grief and eventual suicide; Aeneas and his men partake in a series of battles on the shores of Italy, eventually to settle there
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Choephoroe/ "the Libation Bearers"
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Aeschylus; part of the Oresteia; based on the advice of an oracle, Orestes (Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's exiled son) decides to avenge his father's murder; he and his sister Electra murder Clytemnestra and lover Aegisthus, but Orestes is tormented by the Furies
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Agamemnon (the work)
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Aeschylus; part of the Oresteia; Clytemnestra, angry with husband Agamemnon for sacrificing their daughter and for bringing home his prescient love slave Cassandra, conspires with her lover Aegisthus to murder Agamemnon
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The Eumenides/ "Benevolent Ones"
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Aeschylus; part of the Oresteia; one of three works about the cursed House of Atreus; Athena presides over a precedent-setting murder trial: Orestes vs. the Furies for the murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus; the jury is hung; Athena decides in favor of Orestes but placates the Furies by offering to share the ruling of Athens
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Oedipus the King
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Sophocles; one of three works about Oedipus; the Oracle prophesies that King Laius will have a son who will kill Laius and marry Queen Jocasta; but instead of killing newborn Oedipus to avoid the prophesy, they give him up for adoption; grown-up Oedipus solves a sphinx's riddle and marries the Queen; when incest is revealed, Jocasta commits suicide and Oedipus blinds himself
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Oedipus at Colonus
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Sophocles; one of three works about Oedipus; Oedipus goes to Colonus with daughters Antigone and Ismene; his sons fight each other to the death for his vacated throne
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Antigone
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Sophocles; one of three works about Oedipus; despite penalty of death, Antigone attempts to bury her brother Polyneices; King Creon, her uncle, banishes her to a cave where she hangs herself; Creon's son Haemon, her lover, stabs himself in grief
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Seven against Thebes
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Aeschylus; story of house of Thebes (ie: Oedipus's offspring); war btw/ the brothers Eteocles and Polyneices, who can't agree to share the throne
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"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"
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Christopher Marlowe (late 16th century); often alluded to; famous line "Come live with me and be my love/ And we will all the pleasures prove;" 4-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter with AABB rhyme scheme
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"To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare"
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Ben Jonson (early 17th century); references many other poets (incl. Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont, Lyly, Kyd (wrote The Spanish Tragedy), Marlowe, Eschylus, Sophocles ; comprised of rhymed couplets; famous lines: "He was not of an age, but for all time!" "Sweet Swan of Avon" "Star of Poets"
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the "Julia" poems
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Robert Herrick (mid 17th century); includes "Upon Julia's Breasts," "Upon Julia's Clothes," and "The Night Piece, to Julia," inspired other poets to invent mistresses for themselves about which to write poems
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"To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time"
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Robert Herrick (mid 17th century); same theme as Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"--which is come and have sex with me immediately because before you know it we'll be rotting in our graves
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"To His Coy Mistress"
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Andrew Marvell (late 17th century); epitomizes recurring theme among 17th century cavalier poets: come and have sex with me immediately because before you know it we'll be rotting in our graves; famous line: "But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near;/ And yonder all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity"
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"Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard"
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Thomas Gray (mid 18th century); meditation upon death, especially death without worldly fame/ recognition/ full expression of one's gifts; ending epitaph likely written for Gray's friend Richard West; tremendously popular in it's time means many famous lines: "Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest,/ Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood"
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"She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways"
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William Wordsworth (1800); one of the "Lucy" poems; well-known and often alluded to; theme similar to Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard"--death of one lovely person unknown to larger society
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"Ulysses"
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Alfred Lord Tennyson (mid 19th century); incl. many classical references; Odysseus is hanging around Ithaca, very old and very bored; he gazes out over the water and contemplates sailing with his companions off beyond the sunset; famous lines: "Old age hath yet his honor and his toil./ Death closes all; but something ere the end,/ Some work of noble note, may yet be done,/ Not unbecoming men that strove with gods."
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"In Memoriam A.H.H."
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Alfred Lord Tennyson (mid 19th century); popular and influential poem; exemplifies "in memoriam" stanza form, composed of four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming ABBA; famous line: "Nature, red in tooth and claw"
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"The Second Coming"
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William Butler Yeats (early 20th century); probably the most quoted poem of the 20th century
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Beowulf
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(ca. 750) Beowulf slays monster Grendel and Grendel's mother and becomes king; years later, he is killed by a dragon and Wiglaf becomes king; characters: Beowulf, Grendel, Grendel's mother, Hrothgar, Beaw, Scyld Scefing, Heorot (not a person--Beowulf's mead-hall), Wiglaf
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Piers Plowman
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William Langland (late 14th century); long poem composed of a series of eight allegorical visions, wherein Will, in his dreams, seeks out Truth; masterpiece of the revival of the alliterative verse from the 14th century
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Canterbury Tales
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Geoffrey Chaucer (late 14th century); written in Middle English; a group of pilgrims, including the author, journeys to the religious shrine at Canterbury, telling stories on the way to pass the time; written in several different meters, but rhyming couplet used in prologue predominates
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The Knight's Tale
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Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales; Arcite and Mars fight Palamon and Venus for Emily; Arcite wins but dies and Palamon gets Emily; first tale told following the general prologue
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The Prioress's Tale
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Jews kill a Christian boy; he continues to sing Alma Redemptoris after his throat is slit, allowing murderer to be found; considered to be anti-simetic, though likely not strange for a time when Christians were trying to justify their systematic killing of Jews
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The Nun's Priest's Tale
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Chaunticleer the rooster is kidnapped by sir Russel, a sweet-tongued fox; Chaunticleer gets away when the fox opens his mouth to brag; one of the most frequently studied tales b/c it's a mock-heroic, parodying some of the conventions of classical epic poetry such as the Illiad
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The Merchant's Tale
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Knight January is old and blind; his young wife, May, cheats on him (in a pear tree), but when his sight is restored, May said she did it to cure him
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The Wife of Bath's Tale
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; King Arthur's knight commits rape; to escape sentencing, he must discover what women desire most; he marries an old witch for the answer (sovereignty); she turns into a beautiful woman
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The Miller's Tale
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; a cuckold is tricked into sleeping on his roof in a washtub while his wife consorts with various suitors
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The Pardoner's Tale
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; three drunkards search for death but instead find a treasure, over which they murder each other; moral is supposedly "Radix malorum est Cupiditas," or "Love of money is the root of all evil"
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The Franklin's Tale
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; romantic tale about lover Aurelius, faithful wife Dorigen, and Dorigen's husband Arveragus
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The Reeve's Tale
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; a greedy miller named Simkin has his wife and daughter enjoyed by a pair of clerks, John and alan, whom he'd swindled earlier; Reeve's response to the miller's tale about the foolish carpenter
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Clerk's Tale
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; Griselda, a patient wife, who endures trials of her needlessly jealous husband, the Marquis Walter
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Doctor's Tale
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Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; a woman, Virginia, who has her father kill her in order to avoid falling into the clutches of Apius, an evil judge
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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
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the Pearl Poet (late 14th century); long poem that draws on the legend of Arthur and the court of Camelot; an enormous, mysterious, entirely green knight shows up at a New Year's party and issues a challenge: anyone who desires can behead him, but he who fails must in turn be beheaded; Gawain succeeds, but the knight re-heads himself; Gawain shows up for his own beheading but the Green Knight (really a lord) spares him; written in distinct verse stanzas of alliterative lines, ending with a bob and wheel
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Morte D' Arthur
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Sir Thomas Malory (late 15th century); late Middle English King Arthur story, though draws from a French source; NOTE: prose, so doesn't use the same bob-and-wheel structure as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
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The Faerie Queene
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Edmund Spenser (late 16th century); exemplifies the 9-line Spensarian stanza: ABAB BCBC C with first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the last in iambic hexameter, known as an alexandrine
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Tamburlaine the Great
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Christopher Marlowe (late 16th century); story of a Scythian shepherd, Tamburlaine, who becomes an extraordinarily ferocious and successful conqueror in Asia Minor; characters: Tamburlaine, Zenocrate (main female character)
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Dr. Faustus
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Christopher Marlowe (late 16th century); story of a sorcerer who sells his soul in return for power; Faustus is served and persecuted by Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Mephistopheles
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Faust
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Goethe; differs from Marlowe's telling in that protagonist's soul is bartered in exchange for knowledge and Faust deals with a single satanic agent, Mephistopheles
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"The Flea"
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John Donne (late 16th/ early 17th century); class example of early Donne because playful and sensual; similar theme to Marvell's poetry
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"The Sun Rising"
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John Donne (late 16th/ early 17th century); class example of early Donne because playful and sensual; upset with sun for waking him from lover's sleep
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"An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul's, Dr. John Donne"
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Thomas Carew (early 17th century); celebrates Donne's masterfully-crafted verse; famous line: "The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds/ O'erspread, was purged by thee; the lazy seeds/ Of servile imitation thrown away,/ and fresh invention planted..."
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Areopagitica
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John Milton (mid 17th century); political prose; defense of free expression and condemnation of censorship blocking God's word; argues that free press is God's will because published books are the means by which man will hear God's Revelation; famous line: "...as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye."
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Comus
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John Milton (mid 17th century); example of a masque (also known as A Mask, Presented at Ludlow Castle); a lady lost in the woods is, upon falling asleep, captured by the lecherous Comus and carried back to face a series of erotic harassments
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Lycidas
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John Milton (mid 17th century); written as pastoral elegy for Milton's recently passed friend Edward King; name comes from Theocritus's Idylls and from Herodotus; Lycidas is point of contact between some shared pastoral past, classical tradition, and Christian tradition; includes irregular rhythms and rhymes and heavily wrought allusiveness that makes his poetry so difficult
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The Pilgrim's Progress
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John Bunyan (late 17th century); allegory of the believer's journey toward redemption; protagonist, Christian, slogs through life, passing places like the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair on his way to the Celestial City
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Absalom and Achitophel
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John Dryden (late 17th century); uses biblical characters to analogize a political crisis during the reign of Charles II; hedonistic Charles (King David in the story) spent so much time with his mistress that he had plenty of offspring but no legitimate (Protestant) heir, which left his Catholic brother, James, successor to the throne; characters: Absalom, Achitophel, King David; uses heroic couplets, poetic handling of sensitive situation
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Mac Flecknoe
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John Dryden (late 17th century); withering satirical attack upon dramatist Thomas Schadwell; relates the succession of Shadwell (Mac Flecknoe) to the throne of dullness; told in the form of a mock epic, strewn with allusions wot literary figures
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The Country Wife
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William Wycherley (late 17th century); example of Restoration comedy; characters: Mr. Horner, Pinchwife, Sir Jasper Fidget, Mrs. Squeamish, Mrs. Dainty Fidget
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The Man of Mode
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George Etherege (late 17th century); example of Restoration comedy; characters: Dorimant, Sir Fopling Flutter, Mrs. Loveit
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The Way of the World
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William Congreve (late 17th/ early 18th century); example of Restoration comedy; characters: Millimant (woman); Mirabell (man); Mr. Fainall, Lady Wishfort, Foible (a woman), Mincing (woman)
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The School for Scandal
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Richard Sheridan (late 18th century); example of Restoration comedy; characters: Sir Peter Teazle, Maria, Lady Sneerwell; Sir Benjamin Backbite, Charles Surface
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Gulliver's Travels
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Jonathan Swift (early/ mid 18th century); example of Restoration comedy; incl. Liliput (where everyone is six inches tall), Brobdingnag (where everyone is enormous), Laputa (a flying island); The Struldburgs (unhappy immortals who wish they could die); Houyhnhnms (intelligent, clean-living, right-thinking horses); Yahoos (idiotic, dirty, violent creaturs who turn out to be people, or at least look like them)
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The Dunciad
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Alexander Pope (late 17th/ early 18th century); mock epic (compare to Rape of the Lock); savage assault on bad poetry and writing by anyone who'd crossed Pope's path or otherwise offended him, esp. Colley Cibber, poet laureate of England; concentrates on the coronation ceremony of Bayes as the poet laureate of Dulness, during which everyone in attendence falls asleep; suggests that Dulness will ultimately prevail over arts and sciences
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Rasselas
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Samuel Johnson (mid/ late 18th century); melancholy novel about the Prince of Abyssinia's unsuccessful quest for a happy and fulfilling "choice of life"--a subject no doubt influenced by the fact that Johnson wrote it in a week in order to settle debts arising from his mother's funural
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The Mysteries of Udolpho
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Anne Radecliffe (late 17th/ early 18th century); inspired by Horace Walpole's gothic aesthetic; example of gothic explique (summing up and revealing the true causes of seeming impossibilities), laying the foundation for the Detective Story
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The Monk
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M.G. "Monk" Lewis; gothic novel
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Sense and Sensibility
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Jane Austen (late 18th/ early 19th century); characters: Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Lucy Steele, Edward Ferris, John Willoughby, Colonel Brandon
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Pride and Prejudice
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Jane Austen (late 18th/ early 19th century); characters: Elizabeth Bennet, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Charles Bingley, George Wickham
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Mansfield Park
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Jane Austen (late 18th/ early 19th century); characters: Bertrams of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, Mrs. Norris
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Emma
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Jane Austen (late 18th/ early 19th century); characters: Emma Woodhouse (handsome, clever, rich); Mr. Knightley, Miss Bates, Frank Churchill, Harriet Smith, Jane Fairfax
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Persuasion
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Jane Austen (late 18th/ early 19th century); characters: Sir Walter Elliot, Elizabeth Elliot, Anne Elliot, Frederick Wentworth, Kellynch Hall (a manor, not a person)
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Lyrical Ballads
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William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (late 18th/ early 19th century); contain some of the poets' finest works; typical romanticism
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Biographia Literaria
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge; outlines aesthetic principles--that imagination is the supreme faculty of the human intellect, and its cultivation is both the prerequisite and the aim of poetry; imagination is the process of keenly perceiving the phenomena of the world (not just fantasy), then re-expressing that phenomena through creative faculties of mind and soul, rational and irrational
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"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge's masterpiece; dramatic poem where Coleridge's mariner tells a man on the way to a wedding the story of how, by senselessly killing an albatross, he brought a world of bad luck down upon himself and his companions and must now, in penance, travel the world relating his tale
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Sartor Resartus
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Thomas Carlyle (early to mid 19th century); means "the tailor reclothed," concerns the relationship of outward appearances and inward essences; relates Carlyle's spiritural growth; characters: Professor Teufelsdröckh (ie: the Wanderer), Weissnichtwo (professor's hometown), Everlasting Yea, Everlasting No
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Apologia Pro Vita Sua
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John Newman (mid 19th century); example of Victorian essay; details reasoning behind controversial switch fr/ Anglican faith to Roman Catholicism
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The Idea of a University
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John Newman (mid 19th century); example of Victorian essay; eloquent essay espousing the value of a liberal arts education
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On Liberty
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John Stuart Mill (mid 19th century); example of Victorian essay; argues that in democracy, the rights of individuals must be safeguarded against the tyranny of the majority
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What Is Poetry?
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John Stuart Mill (mid 19th century); example of Victorian essay; defines poetry as the expression of the self to the self, as opposed to "eloquence," which is the expression of the self to another
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The Subjection of Women
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John Stuart Mill (mid 19th century); excoriates--on the moral, rational, and practical levels--the social fact of its title
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"Dover Beach"
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Matthew Arnold (mid 19th century)
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Culture and Anarchy
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Matthew Arnold (mid 19th century); example of Victorian essay; attacks philistinism in favor of classical "sweetness and light"
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Battle of the Books
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Jonathan Swift; coined the phrase "sweetness and light"
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The Stones of Venice
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John Ruskin (mid to late 19th century); example of Victorian essay; brilliant architectural study of Venice in which Ruskin "reads" the economic, social, and moral history of Venice through its permanent structures
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The Scarlet Letter
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (mid 19th century); characters: Roger Chillingworth, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne, Pearl
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The Blithedale Romance
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (mid 19th century); characters: Miles Coverdale, Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla; much of the action takes place on Blithedale Farm, based on an actual transcendentalist utopian community called Brook Farm (founded by prominent Boston social and literary figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau)
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The House of Seven Gables
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (mid 19th century); characters: the Pyncheons, esp. Hepzibah Pyncheon, old Maule, Phoebe, Holgrave, Clifford; theme: the sins of the fathers visited upon later generations
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Moby-Dick
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Herman Melville (mid 19th century); characters: Ishmael, Queequeg, Dashoo, TAshtego, Starbuck; ship's name is Pequod
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Billy Budd
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Herman Melville (mid 19th century); story of a handsome sailor (a stock seafaring character elevated to Christlike status in this tale) undone by his own goodness and the plottings of the repulsive Claggart
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"Bartleby the Scrivener"
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Herman Melville (mid 19th century); short story about the bizarrely alienated Bartleby, whose mantra, whenever asked to do anything is "I prefer not to"
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"Song of Myself"
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poem in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass
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"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"
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Walt Whitman; poem memorializing Abraham Lincoln
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"O Captain, My Captain"
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Walt Whitman; poem memorializing Abraham Lincoln
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Mrs. Dalloway
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Virginia Woolf; narrates a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she readies her home for a party; novel eschews traditional beginning-middle-end form and foregrounds the minor details of the lives of the characters; written in stream-of-consciousness; interested in characters' interiority; characters: Septimus Smith, Richard Dalloway, Sally Seton, Peter Walsh
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To the Lighthouse
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Virginia Woolf; describes the Ramsay family's two separate visits to a lighthouse; concerned with effects of passage of time; split into three sections, including middle section that is an elliptical prose experiment; invested in epistemological questions, particularly as they are inflected by temporality and characters' psychological experience of events; characters: Lily Briscoe, Charles Tansley, Augustus Carmichael, Paul Rayley, Minta Doyle
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A Room of One's Own
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Virginia Woolf; one of the most important statements in 20th century feminist aesthetics; woman must be afforded the autonomy that men enjoy if they are to write; uses the story of Shakespeare's (invented) sister Judith to demonstrate the various impediments that would block Judith from ever having the freedom to write as her brother had
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"The Dead"
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James Joyce; part of short story collection Dubliners; Gabriel Conroy attends a party with his wife Gretta; a series of events, including Gretta's solemn reaction to one of the songs sung at the party, reveal a side of Gretta's past that Gabriel didin't know--a girlhood lover, Michael Furey, who died from illness; epiphany ruptures the pastoral construction of the rest of the story, ending with Gabriel's meditation on the snow
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Ulysses
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James Joyce; sequel to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Stephen Dedalus becomes the Telemachus to Leopold Bloom's Odysseus; follows the travels of Bloom throughout Dublin in an unremarkable day in 1904; structurally analogous to Homer's epic, and each of the episodes of the book based on an episode of in the epic; famous for its difficulty; incl. famous stream-of-consciousness from "Penelope," Leopold Bloom's wife Molly Bloom ending w/ the famous line "yes I said yes I will Yes"
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Finnegans Wake
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James Joyce; tough language, English incorporating a variety of languages into a kind of dreamspeak
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Absalom, Absalom!
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William Faulkner; life and death of Thomas Sutpen, poor white who moves to Mississippi with the intention of becoming rich and powerful; does so, with all the attendant riches of an antebellum Southern dynasty; so much is ruptured for the American South after its defeat in the Civil War that Sutpen is unable to restore his home to its former glory, and the story becomes tangled in the literal and figurative pairings of Sutpen with his slaves; Quentin Compson is the primary narrator, telling the story to his Harvard roommate in fragments
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"The Waste Land"
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T.S. Eliot; one of the greatest works of Anglophone Modernism; split into 5 sections and supplemented by 7 pages of notes; fragmented, polyglot vocabulary, dense cultural allusions; famous line: "April is the cruelest month" (allusion to Canterbury Tales)
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"The Hollow Men"
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T.S. Eliot; commonly seen as the last great poem of the early phase of Eliot's career; difficulty of search for meaning in post-war Europe; famous lines: "This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but with a whimper."
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"Ash Wednesday"
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T.S. Eliot; first long poem Eliot published after his conversion to Anglicanism; marks a stylistic turning point of Eliot's career in which he began to rely more heavily on traditional forms of melody and prosody; famous lines: "Because I do not hope to turn again"
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"Tradition and the Individual Talent"
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T.S. Eliot; critical work acting as a poetic manifesto for Eliot's pre-conversion work; offers sustained argument in favor of impersonal poetry; tradition is not a collection of cultural artifacts from the past but an order for timeless work, uniting past and present; great artists attach themselves to tradition instead of breaking with it (compare w/ Joyce, where artist is "like the God of creation")
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"Hamlet and his Problems"
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T.S. Eliot; "objective correlative"; impersonality
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"My Last Duchess"
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Robert Browning
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Prometheus Bound
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Aeschylus; Prometheus is an (immortal) Titan who befriends and helps to civilize man; bestows fire upon mankind, which he stole fr/ god of fire and craftsmen, Hephaistos; enrages Zeus, who has Prometheus bound to a cliff and tormented; ea. day a vulture eats his liver
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Prometheus Unbound
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P.B. Shelley; uses Aeschylus's version of the Prometheus story
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Playboy of the Western World
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JM Synge (early 20th century); play; morally unflattering portrayal of the Irish working class drew protest and angry criticism even as Synge's language was praised for its poetic richness
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The Countess of Cathleen
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Yeats's first published play (late 19th century); dramatizes an Irish fable concerning people who sell their souls in order to obtain food during a famine
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The Plough and the Stars
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O'Casey (early 20th century); Irish nationalism; sparked outrage at its premiere for presenting an unidealized vision of the Irish folk
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Mrs. Warren's Profession
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George Barnard Schaw; scandalous Irish play having to do with Prostitution
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Dracula
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Bram Stoker; narrated mostly by Jonathan Harker
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David Copperfield
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Charles Dickens; partly autobiographical; characters: Mr. and Mrs. Macawber, Uriah Heep, David Copperfield
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The Adventures of Augie March
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Saul Bellow; coming-of-age novel set in depression-era Chicago
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"Caliban upon Setebos"
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Browning; dramatic monologue about the character fr/ The Tempest
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"Youth"
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Joseph Conrad; seafaring story in which the main character undergoes a terrible ordeal at sea and loves it because he is young and craves experience/ having his mettle tested
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The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
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Carson McCullers; story of the chaos wrought on a woman's life when her cousing Lymon Willis, a dwarf both deformed and powerfully charismatic, enters her world
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The Aspern Papers
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Henry James; novella about the unsuccessful attempts of the biographer of a famous long-dead poet Jeffrey Aspern to secure some papers from the poet's aged former mistress and her homely daughter; set in Venice; protagonist encourages the daughter's growing infatuation with him in order to get the papers
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Lysistrata
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Aristophanes; title character's name means "she breaks up armies"
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Clouds
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Aristophanes; ridicules the philosopher Socrates
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Frogs
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Aristophanes; pokes fun at the Greek tragedians Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus
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Medea
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Euripides; a woman who, outraged at being ungratefully abandoned by her lover, Jason, kills his bride-to-be, the bride's father Creon, and her own children (by Jason); she gets away with it, too
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"On the Pulse of Morning"
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Maya Angelou; read at the inauguration of Bill Clinton;
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The Country of the Pointed Firs
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Sarah Orne Jewett; quiet and lyrical
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Volpone, or The Fox
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Ben Johnson; set in Venice; Volpone and his confederate Mosca try to bilk everyone who comes across their path, esp. Volpone's heirs; manage to outwit everyone but each other, which ultimately proves their downfall; Mosca tries to blackmail Volpone, who is too proud to be victimized and so reveals his and Mosca's scheming ways to the authorities, bringing ruin on them both; characters named according to personalities animals are given by folclore
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Niebelungenlied
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tenth-century epic poem concerning romances, marriages, wars, betrayals, and murders that occur over time as an enormous treasure called the Niebelung hoard changes hands and places; earlier version of the same legend used by William Morris as the source for his Sigurd the Volsung
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Sigurd the Volsung
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William Morris; Nieblung legend
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Tom Jones
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Henry Fielding; characters: Goody Brown, Molly
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An Apology for Poetry
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Sir Philip Sidney; probably the most important piece of literary criticism fr/ the 16th century; humorously uses ironically hyperbolic praise and scorn to offset author's genuine passion for the subject
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Remembrance of Things Past
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Marcel Proust; epic masterpiece which deals with his memories of ordinary childhood
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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
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Rainer Maria Rilke's most important prose work; series of almost autobiographical musings; poetry-like
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The Stranger
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Albert Camus; begins with the death of the narrator's mother; centers around seemingly motiveless killing of a stranger on a beach and the subsequent trial; disaffected, matter-of-fact narrator
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Yoknapatawpha novels
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William Faulkner; focus on the successive generations of a few families: the Snopes, Compsons, Sartorises; Quentin given to a Compson in each generation, but the first is a young Mississippi man who harbors a deeply felt, guilt-provoking incestuous passion for his sister Caddy leading to his suicie
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The Red and the Black
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Stendhal; built around notice Stendhal chanced across in the newspaper: a young man of humble origins and formerly a seminary student had been executed for the attempted murder of a woman he loved
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La Comedie Humaine
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Balzac; panorama of Post-Napoleonic French life
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Lost Illusions
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Balzac; young, handsome, talented man, Lucian de Rubempre, travels to Paris with a married woman to make his literary name; loses the woman, betrays his talent, sells out not only himself but his family, mistresses, etc; dies after making an unlikely comeback orchestrated by Balzac's criminal mastermind, Vautrin
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Jane Eyre
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Charlotte Brontë; Bildungsroman; follow's Janes' love of Mr. Rochester, master of fictitious Thornfield Hall; gradual unfolding of Janes' moral and spiritual sensibility; preoccupied with social criticism and morality
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Wuthering Heights
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Emily Brontë; stark depiction of mental and physical cruelty; challenged Victorian ideals; characters: Heathcliff (orphan, in love with Catherine), Catherine, Edgar Linton, Nelly Dean, Lockwood,
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Samuel Butler (the former)
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mid 17th century; wrote Hudibras (hence the term hudibrastic); had a genius for bad poetry
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Charles Lamb
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late 18th/ early 19th century; London essayist and friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge; wrote a response to Lyrical Ballads; took note of difference between Lake Poet's muddy-boots-and-daffodils joys vs. pleasures of urbanity; adopted the name Elia in charming, witty, sophisticated Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia
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Sherwood Anderson
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late 19th/ early 20th century American novelist/ short story writer; subjective, self-revealing works; nervous breakdown that caused him to abandon business and become a writer; inspired Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck; style similar to Hemingway's; wrote Dark Laughter (inspired by time in New Orleans in 1920s), Winesburg Ohio (short story collection)
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Earnest Hemingway
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early 20th century; wrote A Fairwell to Arms; famous character: Nick Adams
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Edgar Allan Poe
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early/ mid 19th century American; inspired by Horace Walpole and Anne Radcliffe's gothic conventions, which he formed into the detective novel; wrote "The Murders on the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter"
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Jane Austen
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early 19th century; knwon for understated ironic treatment of character; wrote Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion
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William Empson
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early/ mid 20th century; wrote Seven Types of Ambiguity, Some Versions of the Pastoral; literary critic; buzzword "ambiguity"
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Kenneth Burke
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literary critic; buzzwords "symbols," "pentad," "literature as equipment for living"
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Cleanthe Brooks
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New Critic; buzzwords "paraphrase," "irony," "paradox;" wrote "The Heresy of Paraphrase" in The Well-Wrought Urn, "Irony as a Principle of Structure"
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Harold Bloom
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prolific literary theorist; wrote "The Anxiety of Influence;" buzzwords "misreading" and "misprision"
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T.S. Eliot
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early 20th century American poet and literary critic; towering figure in pre-WWII letters, and influence extends even today; buzzword "objective correlative;" wrote "The Waste Land," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Ash Wednesday," "The Hollow Men," "Tradition and Individual Talent," "The Metaphysical Poets;" heavy use of allusion to Biblical, classical, and literary sources; bleak sense of cultural emptiness and barrenness; mash-up of poetry and prose styles
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Christopher Marlowe
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late 16th century; pioneered blank verse; wrote: Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, "The Passionate Shephard to His Love"
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Thomas Pynchon
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late 20th century; wrote The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity's Rainbow; V. Oedipa Maas; Tyrone Slothrop; encyclopedic, heavily allusive (to lit, history, and pop-culture), dense prose; postmodernism
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Caedmon
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c. 670; Anglo-Saxon; cared for animals at monastery; wrote: Caedmon's hymn; contemporaneous w/ time Beowulf was written down
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William Langland
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14th century; contemporaneous with Chaucer; Middle English; wrote Piers Plowman
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Geoffrey Chaucer
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14th century; Middle English
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Sir Thomas Malory
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15th century; late Middle English; wrote Le Morte D'Arthur while he was in prison
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John Skelton
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early 16th century English poet; poet laureate during time of the Tudors; responsible for "skeltonics" (short verses of irregular meter; satyrical/ protest; similar to doggerel)
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Thomas More
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early 16th century humanist; wrote Utopia for an international in Latin, but its later translation into English added some prestige to the Engl. language; beheaded for treason after his refusal to take a position of unequivocal support for Henry VII in the king's conflict with the Pope
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Philip Sidney
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late 16th century; Renaissance literature and rhetorical culture (convincing); wrote Defense of Poesy, which argued that poetry's ability to create perfect worlds was also a moral power, encouraging readers towards virtue
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Edmund Spenser
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late 16th century (close contemporary of Shakespeare, though uses older-looking syntax to give work an antique flavor); wrote The Faerie Queene
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John Lyly
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late 16th century poet, playwright, politician; mannered literary style; wrote: Eupheus
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William Shakespeare
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late 16th century
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Ben Jonson
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early 17th century; acute observer of urban manners; wrote "To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare"
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John Donne
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early/ mid 17th century poet and sermon-giver; young (courtier playboy) vs. old (religious career as Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral) poetry differs greatly; overlap btw/ sexual and religious love; wit, razor-sharp intellect, direct, clear, beautiful, original; wrote "The Sun Rising," "The Flea"
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John Webster
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early/ mid 17th century; Jacobean dramatist (overlapped w/ end of Shakespeare's life); wrote: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi (tragedy)
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John Milton
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mid/ late 17th century; wrote Paradise Lost, Areopagatica, Comus, Lycidas, influential divorce tracts; enjoyed blank-verse and torturing English sentence structure; interested in separated spheres of spiritual and temporal authority
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Robert Herrick
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mid/ late 17th century; wrote a series of "Julia" poems and "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time"
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Andrew Marvell
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mid/ late 17th century; colleague and friend of Milton; metaphysical poet; wrote: "To His Coy Mistress," "Upon Appleton House," "The Garden" (evocations of aristocratic country house)
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William Congreve
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late 17th/ early 18th century; Restoration comedy; wrote The Way of the World
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George Etherege
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late 17th/ early 18th century; Restoration comedy; wrote The Man of Mode
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John Bunyan
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late 17th/ early 18th century; preacher; wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners
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John Dryden
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late 17th/ early 18th century; wrote Absalom and Achitophel, Mac Flecknoe; prolific, both in poetry and in plays
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Daniel Defoe
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early 18th century; among the founders of the Englsih novel; wrote Robinson Crusoe, The Review
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Alexander Pope
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early 18th century; wrote verse almost exclusively in heroic couplets, consistently ending lines on natural pauses; wrote An Essay on Criticism, the Dunciad, and The Rape of the Lock
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Jonathan Swift
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mid 18th century; Restoration comedy; wrote Gulliver's Travels
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Henry Fielding
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mid 18th century; tone of comic irony; wrote Tom Jones; parodied Samuel Richardson
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Thomas Gray
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mid 18th century; wrote "Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard"
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Samuel Johnson
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one of the best Engl. literary minds of late 18th century; achieved success late in life b/c struggled with poverty into his 40s; wrote "The Vanity of Human Wishes," The Lives of English Poets, essays/ edits for the journal The Rambler, the first modern English Dictionary, Rasselas, Volpone
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Laurence Sterne
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late 18th century; Irish novelist and Anglican clergyman; wrote: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, sermons
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Horace Walpole
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late 18th century
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Thomas Chatterton
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late 18th century; also known as Thomas Rowley; denounced by Horace Walpole; unusual life (raised in poverty, exceptionally studious, poison self) of interest to romantic poets
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Mary Wollstonecraft
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late 18th century; English; wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women; mother of Mary Shelley
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William Cowper
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late 18th century; respect for good judgement of ordinary people; able to write only between recurring bouts of suicidal madness; wrote: The Task
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Anne Radcliffe
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late 18th/ early 19th century; gothic novelist; wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho
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William Blake
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late 18th/ early 19th century; wrote Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, "The Tyger," (exemplifying childlike simplicity of meter and syntax); also wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughtors of Albion (exemplifies no-holds-barred visionary mystic, elaborate personal theology); interested in the reconciliation of opposites; early Romantic--had a profound effect upon Romantic movement; displeased by enlightenment thinking, believing its over-reliance on rationality left no place for the visionary; instead, interested in contradiction and the illogical (put Blake at odds with Voltaire and Newton)
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William Wordsworth
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late 18th/ early 19th century; one of the Romantic "Lake" poets (lived in the Lake District of England); wrote "Lucy" poems, including "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways," "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known," "Three Years She Grew," "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," "I Traveled Among Unknown Men;" also wrote "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," Lyrical Ballads (w/ Coleridge); value rustic people, rural settings, nonacademic language; wrote "Intimations of Immortality"
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Samuel Coleridge
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late 18th/ early 19th century; one of the Romantic "Lake" poets (lived in England's Lake District); wrote Biographia Literaria, Lyrical Ballads (with Wordsworth), "Rime of the Ancient Mariner;" believed in the power of imagination
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Percy Bysshe Shelley
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late 18th/ early 19th century; wrote "Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude" (Milton-esque, inverted writing style), The Cenci (deemed unstageable on political grounds)
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Lord Byron
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late 18th/ early 19th century; wrote Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
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John Keats
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late 18th/ early 19th century; Romanticism; reputation didn't grow till after death; odes most well known; wrote "Bright Star," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightengale,"
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Thomas Carlyle
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early/ mid 19th century Victorian essayist; prolific, often exasperating, opinionated, inventive, passionate, humorous, sometimes downright weird, strong sense of the ridiculous; wrote Sartor Resartus; student of German philosophy
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Alfred Lord Tennyson
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early/ mid 19th century; wrote "Ulysses," "In Memoriam A.H.H.," "Tithonus"
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Washington Irving
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early/ mid 19th century American short story writer, essayist, biographer, diplomat; success in England inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe; wrote: "Rip Van Winkle," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,"
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Thomas Macaulay
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mid/ late 19th century; applauded England's progress during Victorian era
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Emily Brontë
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mid/ late 19th century; wrote under the pseudonym Ellis Bell; wrote Wuthering Heights
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Charles Dickens
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mid/ late 19th century; wrote David Copperfield (funny!); industrial; Victorian Londoner; characters include: Bounderby, Gradgrind, Coketown
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Robert Browning
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mid/ late 19th century; wrote "My Last Duchess"
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Nathaniel Hawthorne
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mid/ late 19th century American; wrote The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance, The House of Seven Gables
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
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mid/ late 19th century American; transcendentalism; wrote: "The American Scholar"
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Henry David Thoreau
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mid/ late 19th century American; transcendentalism; wrote Walden, Civil Disobedience
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Walt Whitman
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mid/ late 19th century American; distinct and influential style: long, rolling, exuberant lines, use of repetition instead of rhyme lends structure to otherwise shaggy verse; grew up in Brooklyn where early career involved newspaper work; in mid-thirties spent wandering, writing took turn: sappy to celebratory; influenced fr/ German metaphysical philosophers like Hegel, Hindu religious texts like Upanishads, Emerson's transcendental philosophy; loved brotherhood and democracy--spent much of Civil War as volunteer; wrote "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "O Captain, My Captain"
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Herman Melville
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mid/ late 19th century American; wrote Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, "Bartleby the Scrivener"
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John Ruskin
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late 19th century Victorian essayist; art critic; originated the critical term "the pathetic fallacy (projection of author's sentiment onto inanimate object); wrote The Stones of Venice
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George Meredith
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late 19th century; Victorian novelist and poet; early novels largely conformed to Victorian literary conventions, his later novels demonstrated a concern with character psychology, modern social problems, and the development of the novel form; influenced by Keats and Tennyson; wrote An Essay on Comedy; "The Lark Ascending," The Egoist (comic novel)
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Charles Swinburne
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late 19th century; Victorian poet; known for rebellious attitude toward Victorian morality and excellent sense of rhyme and meter
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George Eliot Gerard
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late 19th century; wrote Daniel Deronda
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Thomas Hardy
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late 19th century; wrote Tess of the D'Urbervilles (serious work)
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Mark Twain
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late 19th century American
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Henry James
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late 19th century American, moved to Britain; long sentences w/ clause upon clause, heavy use of pronouns w/o antecedents; Americans experiencing Europe; character pt. of view, unreliable narrator; wrote: The Ambassadors, The Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl, The Bostonians, The Wings of the Dove, The Aspern Papers; famous characters Isabel Archer, Maggie Verver, Daisy Miller, Lambert Strether
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William Butler Yeats
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early 20th century; known for poetry but also contributed to Irish theater; interested in symbolism; wrote "The Second Coming," The Countess of Cathleen
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Joseph Conrad
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early 20th century British; wrote Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, "Youth"
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DH Lawrence
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early 20th century British
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WH Auden
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early 20th century British (later became American citizen); wrote love poems such as "Funeral Blues," poems on political and social themes such as "The Shield of Achilles," poems on cultural and psychological themes like The Age of Anxiety; noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content; wrote plays in collaboration with Isherwood; end rhyme
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James Joyce
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early 20th century American; stream of consciousness; famously difficult; wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Dubliners, "The Dead," Finnegan's Wake,
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Virginia Woolf
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early 20th century American; incredibly prolific with profound impact on literature as both novelist and literary critic; wrote Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own
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Ernest Hemingway
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early 20th century
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
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early 20th century American; wrote: This Side of Paradise, Tender is the Night, The Great Gatsby, many short stories
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Gertrude Stein
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early 20th century American, though lived and worked abroad; founder of Modernism; literary-historical figure, living with her partner Alice B. Toklas in Paris; coined the term "lost generation" to mean literary ex-pats in the 1920s; wrote Three Lives (incl. "The Good Anna," "Melanctha," and "the Gentle Lena"), "Sacred Emily," The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
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Ezra Pound
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early 20th century American, though spent lots of time in Europe; modernism; influenced by Asian poetry and contemporary economics; fond of juxtapositions of images and the importation of quotes and allusions into his work; fan of Yeats; edited TS Eliot The Wasteland; wrote "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (rhyming satyric poem), "The Cantos" (long, difficult, possibly fascist, life's work); proficient translator of Old English, Chinese, Latin, modern languages (though booted from his first college teaching position)
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WEB Du Bois
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early 20th century American; Harvard-educated; instrumental in formation of NAACP; strongly critical of Booker T. Washington's accommodationist politics; wrote: The Souls of Black Folk
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Homer
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ancient Greek author; supposedly blind; wrote the Iliad and the Oddysey
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Virgil/ Vergil
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admirer and student of Homer; wanted to write an epic that could be for the Romans what the Iliad and Odyssey had been for the Greeks; the formal qualities true of Homer's epics are also true of Virgil's; writing in Latin means great influence over later works (EX: Virgil leads Dante through Inferno and Purgatorio; structure of Milton's Paradise Lost lifted fr/ the Aenid; George Bernard Shaw's play Arms and the Man an allusion to poem's first line); wrote the Aenid
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Aeschylus
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5th century BCE Greek tragedian; drew upon a set of stories concerning an ancient familial curse on the House of Atreus (abduction of Menelaues's wife and subsequent Trojan War, ill wind for Greek fleet and subsequent sacrafice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia to turn the wind, offending Achilles, etc...) write his Oresteia trilogy; also wrote Prometheus Bound
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The "Pearl" Poet
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(late 14th century) supposed to have written Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience, Cleanness
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Thomas Carew
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(early 17th century) wrote "An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul's, Dr. John Donne"
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William Wycherley
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late 17th century; Restoration comedy; wrote The Country Wife
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Richard Sheridan
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late 18th century; Restoration comedy; wrote The School for Scandal
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James Boswell
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late 18th century; wrote a gushing biography of Samuel Johnson called The Life of Johnson; Johnson's disciple but in no way peer; paints Johnson as a supremely witty and erudite conversationalist with a deep melancholy streak--both generosity of spirit and outbursts of irritability; notably, shows Johnson "in life" in conversations of the day; famous literary drunk
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M.G. "Monk" Lewis
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19th century; gothic novelist; wrote The Monk
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Robert Southey
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late 18th/ early 19th century; one of the Romantic "Lake" Poets (resided in England's Lake district)
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John Newman
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mid 19th century Victorian essayist; converted fr/ Anglican to Roman Catholicism; wrote Apologia Pro Vita Sua, The Idea of a University; remarkable religious clarity and logic, without pedantry
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John Stuart Mill
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mid 19th century Victorian essayist; committed social theorist and reformer; father was the founder of Utilitarianism; suffered fr/ depression in early life b/c education favored logic over fine arts; wrote: Autobiography, On Liberty, "What Is Poetry?," The Subjection of Women; character: Jeremy Bentham
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Matthew Arnold
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mid 19th century Victorian essayist; poet and essayist; wrote "Dover Beach;" no distinctive style; works tend to call on prior ages, esp. on ancient greeks, as models of virtue and culture; attackes "philistinism" (tacky middle class tastes) and sings the praises of classical "sweetness and light" (phrase taken fr/ Jonathan Swift's Battle of the Books)
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Emily Dickinson
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mid 19th century American poet; distinctive verse style: short, clipped lines, radiant mystic intensity; frequent use of dashes; lived in the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts her entire life, seldom traveled, did not marry; prolific w/ extraordinary inner life
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William Faulkner
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early/ mid 20th century; main author of High Modernist tradition in the US; work focused on American South; stream-of-consciousness; major themes: perspective, race, effects of history on life in the present; unique style identifiable b/c of regular perspectival shifts and employment of italics to indicate internal reflection; invented the name Yoknapatawpha County; wrote The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!
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Maya Angelou
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20th century; wrote "On the Pulse of Morning;" best known for her autobiographies, esp. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
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Honoré de Balzac
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early 19th century novelist and playwright; known for his examinations of bourgeois life in Paris; wrote: Pere Goriot, Lost Illusions, La Comedie Humaine
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John Berryman
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mid 20th century
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Jorge Luis Borges
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early/ mid 20th century; Argentinian poet and short story writer; like Kafka, came to international attention through short stories; characteristic stories less concerned with the portraiture of individual actors than with the philosophical exploration of modernist anxieties concerning the self and meaning; becoming lost; wrote Ficciones and El Aleph
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Anne Bradstreet
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mid 17th century
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Anne Brontë
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mid 19th century; used the pen name Acton Bell
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Charlotte Brontë
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mid 19th century; wrote under the pseudonym Currer Bell; oldest Brontë sister; wrote: Jane Eyre
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Robert Burns
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late 18th century
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Samuel Butler (the latter)
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mid/ late 19th century; wrote: Erewhon (NOTE: anagram for nowhere), The Way of All Flesh (semi-autobiographical work)
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Albert Camus
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mid 20th century
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Kate Chopin
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late 19th century
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Hart Crane
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early 20th century; finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope; wrote The Bridge
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RH Dana, Jr.
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mid 19th century
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Dante Alighieri
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late 13th/ early 14th century
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John Dos Passos
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early/ mid 20th century
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Fydor Dostoyevsky
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mid 19th century; wrote Crime and Punishment
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George Eliot
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mid 19th century English novelist whose real name was Marian Evans
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Robert Frost
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early/ mid 20th century
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George Gascoigne
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mid 16th century
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Elizabeth Gaskell
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mid 19th century novelist; along with Charles Kingsley and Benjamin Disraeli, interested in the condition of England during industrial revolution; wrote: North and South, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Mary Barton, Cranford, Wives and Daughters
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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late 19th/ early 20th century
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Allen Ginsburg
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late 19th/ early 20th century; Beat writer; inspired by Walt Whitman--similar style of long lines and emphatic repetition; wrote: "Howl"
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William Dean Howells
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late 19th/ early 20th century; prolific novelist/ playwright; realism, social politics, moralizing; saw literature as potentially injurious; wrote: The Rise of Silas Lapham (novel in which a nouveau riche Bostonite loses his wealth but learns about the things that really matter)
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Langston Hughes
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mid 20th century; responsible for original "raisin in the sun" quote that Lorraine Hansberry later adopted in the title of her play; experimented with African-American vernacular and blues and jazz rhythms
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Walter Savage Landor
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early 19th century
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Hugh Latimer
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early 16th century
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TE Lawrence
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early 20th century; ie: "Lawrence of Arabia;" wrote: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
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Wyndham Lewis
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late 19th/ early 20th century
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Malcolm Lowry
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early/ mid 20th century
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JS Mill
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mid 19th century
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Edna St. Vincent Millay
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early 20th century
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Flannery O'Connor
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mid 20th century; wrote Mystery and Manners; advocated violent means to get her vision across to a hostile audience; writes about the South, which "still believes that man has fallen and that he is only perfectible by God's grace, not by his own unaided efforts;" Southern gothic writer
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Samuel Pepys
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late 17th century
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Marcel Proust
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late 19th/ early 20th century
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Rainer Maria Rilke
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late 19th/ early 20th century; known for lyric "object poems" (attempts to describe physical objects so that there is no separation between observer and object being observed; wrote: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
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Arthur Rimbaud
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late 19th century
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George B. Shaw
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late 19th/ early 20th century
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Sir Philip Sidney
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late 16th century; wrote An Apology for Poetry (probably the most important statement of literary criticism of the 16th century)
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Dylan Thomas
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mid 20th century; known for extravagantly musical verse, gorgeous prose; wrote: "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night"
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Edith Wharton
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late 19th/ early 20th century; style similar to Henry James; polished
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Oscar Wilde
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late 19th century
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Irving Babbitt
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late 18th/ early 20th century; like Matthew Arnold, master of the humanist agenda; saw art has having a primarily moral/ educational function
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Mikhail Bakhtin
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(early-mid 20th century) buzzword: heteroglossia; Russian critic rediscovered in 1970s; the novel as a form is characterized by the play of the microlanguages that exist within a language; dialects "do battle"
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Bram Stoker
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wrote Dracula
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James Fenimore Cooper
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early 19th century American; frontier tales of men who live freely, communing with nature; wrote Leather-Stocking Tales, the Last of the Mohicans
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Thomas Mann
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also wrote a Faust myth
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Carson McCullers
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(female) American southern gothic writer; early-mid 20th century; wrote The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
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Aristophanes
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wrote the comedies Lysistrata, Clouds, Frogs
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Euripides
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wrote Medea
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George Chapman
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early English translator of the Greeks; subject of Keats's poem "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer;" called "High Priest of Homer" by Charles Swinburne
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Voltaire
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prominent figure of Enlightenment, along with Rousseau and Denis Diderot; wrote Candide
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Rosseau
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prominent figure of Enlightenment, along with Voltaire and Denis Diderot
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Denis Diderot
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prominent figure of Enlightenment
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Gwendolyn Brooks
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poet
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Nikki Giovanni
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poet
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Lorraine Hansberry
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dramatist
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Sarah Orne Jewett
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nineteenth century New England writer; wrote The Country of Pointed Firs
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Mary Shelley
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wrote Frankenstein; daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and wife of PB Shelley
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Eudora Welty
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late 20th century; like Flannery O'Connor, Southern gothic writer whose works often comment on the religious preoccupation typical of the South, but not as extreme as O'Connor
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Willa Cather
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early 20th century; associated with the West and Midwest; wrote: My Antonia
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Nadine Gordimer
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late 20th century (still alive); South African novelist
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May Sarton
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contemporary New England poet, novelist, diarist
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Samuel Richardson
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wrote huge epistolary novels Pamela and Claressa in a work called Shamela; tiresome habit of lecturing people how to live, parodied by Henry Fielding
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Joseph Addison
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18th century; wrote The Spectator with Richard Steele
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Richard Steele
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18th century; Irish; wrote The Spectator with Joseph Addison, The Tattler, The Conscious Lovers (sentimental comedy)
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Aphra Behn
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18th century; first woman to make her way writing; she and her successors Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood denounced for scandalous lives; wrote: The Rover
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Romantic poets
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Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats
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Dos Passos
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early 20th century; wrote: anti-war poetry, USA trilogy (experimental)
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EM Forster
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early 20th century; coined terms flat and round character; examine the intricacies of human relationships in critical work Aspects of the Novel; also wrote: Howard's End
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Countee Cullen
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mid 20th century poet of the Harlem Renaissance; peer of Langston Hughes; African-American; traditional/ academic verse
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Amiri Baraka
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mid 20th century; African-American poet, playwright, novelist, belles-lettrist; wrote: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (collection of poetry), The Dutchman (play), Blues People (study of jazz in America)
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Paul Lawrence Dunbar
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late 19th century; African-American poet; used idioms of black speech in verse
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William Carlos Williams
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American modernist; spare but warm verse associated with the imagist school of poetry; "no ideas but in things;" easily accessible language and quotidian imagery; wrote: Paterson (concerns life in hometown of Paterson, NJ, where he practiced medicine), "This is just to say" ... I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox...
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Ted Hughes
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poet laureate of Great Britain before death in late 20th century; unflinching investigation of the darker side of human nature, people portrayed as beasts; wrote: Crow (collection)
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Sylvia Plath
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American poet; married to Ted Hughes for several years before committing suicide in late 20th century; poems about stormy relationships with father; wrote: Ariel (collection known for the haunting, violent, bitter, pitiless poems), The Bell Jar (recounts the events surrounding her nervous breakdown)
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Miguel de Cervantes
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wrote: Don Quixote
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Wallace Stevens
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late 20th century; modernism; use of odd and vivid imagery to create zen-like vision of the cosmos; wrote: "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Anecdote of the Jar," "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Sunday Morning," "The Snow Man," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."
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ballad
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typical stanza of folk ballad; length of lines determined by stressed syllables only; ABCB rhyme scheme (EX: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner")
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in memoriam
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stanza composed of four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming ABBA (EX: Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H.")
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ottava rima
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eight-line stanza (usually iambic pentameter) rhyming ABABABCC (EX: Lord Byron's Don Juan)
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rhyme royal
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seven-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ABABBCC (EX: "They flee from me that sometimes did me seek/ With naked foot stalking in my chamber./ I have seen the gentle, tame, and meek,/ That now are wild, and do not remember" -Sir Thomas Wyatt's "They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek")
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spenserian
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9-line stanza that Spenser created for The Faerie Queene; first 8 lines are iambic pentameter, final line in iambic hexameter is an alexandrine; rhyme scheme ABABBCBCC (EX: Spenser's The Faerie Queene); has also been used by noble poets up into 20th century
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terza rima
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3-line stanzas w/ interlocking rhyme scheme ABA BCB CDC etc... (EX: Dante's Divine Comedy)
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blank verse
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unrhymed iambic pentameter (EX: "One equal temper of heroic hearts,/ Made weak by time and fate, but strong will/ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." -Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses"
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free verse
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unrhymed verse w/o strict meter (EX: Walt Whitman "Song of Myself")
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old English verse
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characterized by internal alliteration (rather than rhyme) and strong midline pause called a caesura; lines structured according to number of accented syllables only; fallen into disuse by 1100, but Middle English revived many of the elements, incl. alliteration (EX: "Protected in war; so warriors earn/ Their fame, and wealth is shaped with a sword" -Beowulf; later, Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight simulated some Old Engl. qualities)
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sonnet
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14-line form composed of rhyming iambic pentameter lines
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Italian/ Petrarchan sonnet
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14-line poem rhyming ABBAABBA CDECDE; first 8 lines called the octave and last 6 called the sestet; has 0 final couplets (EX: John Milton's "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent")
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English/ Shakespearean sonnet
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14-line poem rhyming ABAB CDCS EFEF GG; has 1 final couplet (EX: Shakespeare's Sonnet 73)
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Spenserian sonnet
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14-line poem rhyming ABAB BCBC CDCD EE; has 1 final couplet plus 2 couplets in the body (EX: Edmund Spenser's "One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand")
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villanelle
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19-line form rhyming ABA AB1 AB3 AB1 AB3 AB13 w/ repetition of 1st and 3rd lines throughout the poem (EX: Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night")
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sestina
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39-line poem of 6 stanzas of 6 lines each and a final stanza (called an envoi) of 3 lines; not rhymed--instead, repeated end words (EX: Rudyard Kipling's "Sestina of Tramp-Royal")
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epic poem
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a long narrative about sustained heroicism; often begins w/ invocation of muse and in medias res (in the midst of things) and includes epic catalogs (long descriptions/ lists of equipment of participants), epic simile (lengthy comparison), interfering supernatural beings who toy with human participants, and a great battle/ contest/ or deed at the end; EX: Homer's Illiad
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epic invocation/ epic question
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invocation of a muse at the beginning of an epic poem; often a request for the muse to help the poet remember the past
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madrigal
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a part-song for several voices, especially one of the Renaissance period, typically unaccompanied and arranged in elaborate counterpoint; "melodious birds sing madrigals" in Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love"
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bob-and-wheel
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ends the stanzas of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the "bob" is a single very short line (one foot) and the "wheel" that follows is a short quatrain of trimeter lines rhyming (with the bob) ABABA; EX: "And he falls in his fury and floats down the water,/ ill-sped./ Hounds hasten by the score/ To maul him, hide and head;/ Men drag him in to shore/ And dogs pronounce him dead." -Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
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masque
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dramatic form that flourished in 17th century in which all entertainment systems are go in music, singing, dancing, acting, stage design; offered in performance as tribute to the patron; EX: Milton's Comus, or A Mask, Presented at Ludlow Castle
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heroic stanza
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four-line stanza, usually in iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB (though ballad stanza can sometimes take this form, too)
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"Call me Ishmael," Herman Melville's Moby Dick
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biblical figure Ishmael (Abraham's first son by servant Hagar); NOTE: book also alludes to the story of Jonah
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William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury
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"It is a tale/ told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ signifying nothing" -William Shakespeare's Macbeth
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Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises
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title is a biblical allusion to Ecclesiastes
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F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night
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title is a phrase fr/Keat's "Ode to a Nightengale"
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Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls
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"Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It rolls for thee" -John Donne sermon
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China Achebe's Things Fall Apart
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"Things fall apart; The center cannot hold" -William Butler Yeat's "The Second Coming"
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William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
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allegorical telling of King David's son Absalom, who tried to usurp throne
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John Dryden's long poem Absalom and Achitophel
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allegorical telling of King David's son Absalom, who tried to usurp throne
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Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh
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biblical allusion
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Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder
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biblical allusion
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Jean Toomer's Cane
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biblical allusion
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"Goodnight" lines in TS Eliot's The Waste Land
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Ophelia's (fr/ Hamlet) final and craziest lines before she drowns
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Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
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Hamlet allusion; two dummies whom Hamlet has killed in order to save his own life
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George Bernard Shaw's play Arms and the Man
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title alludes to the first line of Virgil's epic poem the Aenid, "I sing of arms and the man..."
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James Joyce's Ulysses
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allusion to Homer's the Odyssey (using Latin name for Odysseus); previous poets had favored Virgil over Homer b/c Latin historically more accessible, so Joyce's use of Homer is somewhat anomalous
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Friedrich Schiller's essay "Laocoon"
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alludes to a statue that was inspired by Virgil's description of Laocoon's cruel fate (Laocoon was a Trojan priest who tried to warn against the surprise attack on the Trojans before being eaten by two giant sea snakes)
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Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
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alludes to the character of Dido from Virgil's the Aenid
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Dante's Inferno
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among many other allusions, Dido from Virgil's the Aenid appears in the second circle of hell, punished for all eternity for her lust
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Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage
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character fr/ Virgil's the Aenid
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T.S. Eliot's character Lil in "A Game of Chess" in The Waste Land
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composite of abandoned lovers, including Dido fr/ Virgil's the Aenid
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Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"
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allusion (reply) to Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"
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alexandrine
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line of iambic hexameter; ends a Spensarian stanza (EX: "A needless alexandrine ends the song/ that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along" -Alexander Pope, "Essay on Criticism"
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apostrophe
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a speech addressed to someone not present or to an abstraction; innate grandiosity often leads to parody (EX: "Busy old fool, unruly sun,/ Why dost thou thus,/ Through windows, and through curtains call on us?" -John Donne's "The Sun Rising")
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bildungsroman
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German term meaning "novel of education;" typically follows a young person over years fr/ naivete and inexperience through the first struggles w/ harsher realities and hipocrisies of the adult world (EX: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; The Catcher in the Rye)
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caesura
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a pause that breaks a line of Old English verse; OR a particularly deep pause in a line of poetry (EX: "Lo! We Spear-Danes/ in days of yore" -Beowulf; "I sing of arms and the man,/ who first from the shores of Troy..." -Aenid)
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decorum
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neoclassical principal of drama; relation of style to content in the speech of dramatic characters--for example, a character's speech should be appropriate to social station (EX: in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, characters rarely exhibit decorum in speech)
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doggerel
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derogatory term used to describe poorly written poetry of little to no lit. value (EX: Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors employs doggerel in dialogue btw/ Dromio twins for comedic effect)
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epithalium
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work, esp. poem, to celebrate a wedding (EX: Spencer's "Epithalium")
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euphism
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derived fr/ Lyly's Euphues (1580) to characterize writing that is self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech; popular and influential mode of speech and writing in 16th century (EX: "To thine own self be true," "Neither a borrower nor a lender be," "Brevity is the soul of wit" -Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet
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feminine rhyme
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lines rhymed by final 2 syllables; penultimate syllable stressed and ultimate syllable unstressed (EX: "A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted/ Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;/ A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted/ With shifting change, as false as woman's fashion" -Shakespeare's Sonnet 20)
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flat character
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term coined by E.M. Forrester to describe characters built around a single dominant trait (EX: Mrs. Micawber in Charles Dickens' David Copperfield)
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round character
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term coined by E.M. Forrester to describe characters shaded and developed w/ greater psyvhological complexity (EX: Anna Karenina in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina)
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georgic
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derived fr/ Virgil's Georgics; not to be confused w/ pastoral (ie: idealization of life in countryside); describes poetry that deals w/ ppl laboring in the country side (EX: Virgil's Georgics is a poem about the virtues of farming life)
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hamartia
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Aristotle's word for "tragic flaw" but doesn't imply fate--instead, implies an inherrent psychological flaw in tragic character (EX: Oedipus's hasty temper; Macbeth's lust for power)
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homeric epithet
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repeated descriptive phrase, as found in Homer's epics (EX: "rosy-fingered dawn," "the wine-dark sea," "the ever-resourceful Odysseus")
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hudibrastic
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derived fr/ Samuel Butler's Hudibras; couplets of rhymed tetrameter/ 8-syllable lines which Butler employed; OR any deliberate, humorous, I'll-rhymed couplets (EX: "We grant, although he had much wit/ He was very shy of using it")
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metonymy
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a phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature of the person (EX: "The pen is mightier than the sword" where the pen represents the written word and the sword represents violence -Edward Bulwer-Lytton's play Richelieu)
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neoclassical unities
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principles of dramatic structure outlined in Aristotle's Poetics; popular in 17th and 18th centuries; incl. unity of time (happens in single day), unity of place (happens in single locale), unity of action (contains single dramatic plot w/o subplots)
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pastoral elegy
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lament for a beloved, dead poet sung by a shepherd, who is a stand-in for the author (EX: Milton's "Lycidas;" Shelley's "Adonias" for John Keats)
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pathetic fallacy
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coined by John Ruskin; ascribing emotion and agency to inanimate objects (EX: "the cruel crawling foam" -Ruskin)
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picaresque
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a novel, typically loosely constructed along an incident to incident basis, that follows the adventures of a more or less scurrilous rogue whose primary concerns are filling his belly and getting out of jail (EX: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn; Defoe's Moll Flanders is a rare example of a female picaresque)
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skeltonics
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a form of humorous poetry, using very short, rhymed lines and a pronounced rhythm, made popular by John Skelton; NOTE: the only real difference btw/ a skeltonic and doggerel is the quality of thought expressed (EX: "O Ye wretched Scots,/ Ye puant pisspots,/ It shall be your lots,/ To be knit up with knots" - Skelton's "How the Doughty Duke of Albany")
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sprung rhythm
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rhythm created and used by 19th century Gerard Manley Hopkins; like Old English verse, fits a varying number of unstressed syllables in a line and only the stresses count in scansion (EX: "Glory be to God for dappled things--/ For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow" -Gerald Manley Hopkins "Pied Beauty")
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synecdoche
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phrase that refers to a person or object by single important feature (EX: "pair of ragged claws" represents the whole animal in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")
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voice
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perspective fr/ which a story is written; incl. 1st person, 3rd person, 2nd person, 1st person plural
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tour de force
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display of technical virtuosity in a work of art (EX: in Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," the speaker's voice has a natural quality though obeying the formal rules of traditional metered verse)
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Hellenism
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ancient Greek culture; fascinated authors like Matthew Arnold
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prosopopoeia
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personification, when the personified object not only has human qualities but also speaks
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metaphysical poets
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term coined by Samuel Johnson in his The Lives of English Poets to describe 17th century English poets loosely related by their use of conceits, or extended metaphors; highly intellectualized, use strange imagery, frequent paradox, complicated thought, wit; incl. Abraham Cowley, John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan
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"To an Athlete Dying Young"
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AE Housman; four-line stanzas of heroic couplets
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A.E. Housman
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late 19th/ early 20th centuries; scholar of classical literature; poetry records interior life; dealt with death b/c of war; wrote: "To an Athlete Dying Young" in the collection A Shropshire Lad
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Aspects of the Novel
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EM Forster; literary criticism; formulation of flat and round characters
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George Orwell
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early 20th century English novelist, autobiographist, journalist; remarkable life including jobs as a colonial policeman in Burma and a hotel dishwasher in Paris, experiences in war, passionate but undogmatic commitment to social justice; wrote: Animal Farm, 1984, Homage to Catalonia
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Vladimir Nabokov
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mid 20th century; moved fr/ Russia and wrote later novels in English; characterized by erudite, self-conscious style put to humorous effect; proclivity for experimentation with form; wrote: Lolita, Pale Fire
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Pale Fire
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Vladimir Nabokov; told through annotations to a mediocre poem; annotator is an insane academic named Charles Kinbote
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Charles Kinbote
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insane annotator in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire
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Lolita
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Vladimir Nabokov; controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a middle-aged literature professor called Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with the 12-year-old Dolores Haze, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather
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Dolores Haze
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Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita; nicknamed Lolita by stepfather Humbert Humbert, with whom she becomes sexually involved
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Humbert Humbert
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Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita; creepy stepfather
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Andre Gide
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early 20th century; French author known for his novels and diaries; symbolism; anticolonialism
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"Tithonus"
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Tennyson; a man is granted eternal life but not eternal youth
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Hotspur
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Henry IV's rival in Shakespeare's play of the same name
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Falstaff
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Shakespeare's Henry IV and V plays; In The Merry Wives of Windsor, he is the buffoonish suitor of two married women; comic: fat, vain, boastful; important quotes: "eaten out of house and home," "the world is my oyster"
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Henry IV, Part I
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Shakespeare history; part of series that deals with successive reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V; depicts a span of history that begins with Hotspur's battle at Homildon in Northumberland against Douglas; ends with the defeat of the rebels at Shrewsbury in the middle of 1403
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Henry IV, Part II
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Shakespeare history; extension of aspects of Henry IV, Part 1, rather than a straightforward continuation of the historical narrative, placing more emphasis on the highly popular character of Falstaff and introducing other comic figures as part of his entourage, including Ancient Pistol, Doll Tearsheet and Justice Robert Shallow
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Candide
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Voltaire; Candide lives in a sort of Eden of optimism; he goes on adventures with Professor Pangloss and learns that optimism isn't so great after all
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Axel's Castle
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Edmund Wilson's collection of essays; popularized the play Axel by Le Compte Villiers De L'isle Adam
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Sturm und Drang
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youthful, romantic hero confronts the arbitrary or unnatural laws of society, flouts them, ultimately pays the price; EX: Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther
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Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
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Stephen Crane; dystopic story of a girl who is raised in wretched poverty by a hideous, alcoholic mother; heroine, Maggie, is driven to prostitution after having been manipulated, seduced, and cast aside by her lover Pete; ultimately kills herself
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My Antonia
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Willa Cather; story of the hard-scrabble Nebraska pioneer life of Jim Burden and Antonia Shimerda
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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 a British order of chivalry
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"cognito ergo sum"
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"I think therefore I am"
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Utopia
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Thomas More; prose work in Latin; translation into Engl. important for the prestige of the language; frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs; reminiscent of life in monasteries; characters: Mr. Windbag, Nonsenso
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Sir Walter Raleigh
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late 16th century; "an adventurer (ie: spy), poet, and confidante to Queen Elizabeth;" quoted Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd"
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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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Gerard Manley Hopkins's "God's Grandeur"
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"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 Donne's sermon (the same sermon that includes "for whom the bell tolls")
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"Death is a dialogue between the spirit and the dust"
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Emily Dickinson
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George Sand
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French novelist whose real name was actually Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin
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Shamela Andrews
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main character of a book Fielding wrote in parody of Richardson's Pamela
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Jacques
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Shakespeare's As You Like It; provides a sharp contrast to the other characters in the play, always observing and disputing the hardships of life in the country; responsible for the speech that includes "the seven ages of man" and "All the world's a stage..."
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As You Like It
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William Shakespeare; pastoral comedy; follows its heroine Rosalind as she flees persecution in her uncle's court, accompanied by her cousin Celia to find safety and, eventually, love, in the Forest of Arden. In the forest, they encounter a variety of memorable characters, notably the melancholy traveller Jaques who speaks many of Shakespeare's most famous speeches; lines "all the world's a stage," "A fool! A fool! I met a fool in the forest," "too much of a good thing"
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Cantos
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Ezra Pound; story of Odysseus; rhythm suggests Old English caesura; by alluding to Anglo-Saxon epic form, mimics the antiquity of Homer's ancient Greek; opening line: "And then went down the ship,/ Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea"
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Samuel Beckett
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mid/ late 20th century; Irish-born playwright, novelist, poet who wrote all but his earliest works in French; plays are Spartan in decor and the cast is rarely larger than four; characters always in some way disabled (physically, mentally, economically, spiritually) and inhabit a bleakly absurd world of futility, alienation, discomfort in which things typically go from awful to perfectly hideous, though gloom is enlivened by moments of humor, violence, and even lyricism; along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet, "Theater of the Absurd;" wrote: Waiting for Godot
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Waiting for Godot
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Samuel Beckett; pair of bums, Vladimir and Estragon (ie: Didi and Gogo), who await the arrival of the mysterious Godot, who fails to appear; another pair of bums, Lucky and Pozzo, also briefly but disturbingly take the stage
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Long Day's Journey into Night
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Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical play; not performed until after his death
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Eugene O'Neill
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early/ mid 20th century; can seem sentimental, windy, tedious, sloppy, ill-constructed, implausible, incomprehensible, but no other playwright since Shakespeare has worked successfully and repeatedly on so large a scale, or created characters of such epic weight; Irish-American origin, troubled family life, profound melancholy at the heart of much of his rok, paralels btw/ his work and Greek tragedy; overall sense of enormous and powerful emotion; wrote: Long Day's Journey into Night
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Jean Genet
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"Theater of the Absurd;" French; one of the great antisocial authors of world lit. and spent much of his time in jail; turns the moral universe on its head, aestheticizing and eroticizing vice, crime, and cruelty in a gorgeously fevered, baroque prose; not prolific, but masterful; wrote: novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief's Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers; plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens
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Anton Chekov
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late 19th century; doctor of medicine, playwright, short story writer; plays typically set in upper-middle-class Russian homes; wrote intricately plotted and dramaturgically innovative plays, noteworthy ability to convey characters' inner life
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The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
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TE Lawrence; account of involvement in the Arab revolt against the Turks at the time of World War I; suggestion of homosexual practice in the British army ranks (scandal!)
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Dreamsongs
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John Berryman; mordant style; characters: Henry, Mr. Bones
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Henry
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NOTE: in modern poetry, when you see the name Henry or the name Mr. Bones, the author is probably John Berryman
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