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PUNITHA RAJA G
Quick Points
1. Globe and the Rose theatres associated with William Shakespeare.

2. In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Shakespeare writes the following lines:
Brutus: Peace! Count the clock.

Cassius: The clock has stricken three (Act II, scene I, lines 193-94).
3. Nietzsche said, "Talent is an adornment; an adornment is also a concealment."
4. Ann Landers once claimed, "The poor wish to be rich, the rich wish to be happy, the
single wish to be married, and the married wish to be dead."
5. Samuel Johnson writes,"Labour and care are rewarded with success, success
produces confidence, confidence relaxes industry, and negligence ruins the
reputation which diligence had raised" (Rambler No. 21).
6. The character of Yoda states in Star Wars, Episode I: "Fear leads to anger; anger
leads to hatred; hatred leads to conflict; conflict leads to suffering."
7. Beowulf, in which a hero with the strength of thirty men wrestles with the monster
Grendel.
8. In medias res (Latin for “in the midst of things”) means Opening of the plot in the
middle of the action.
9. Tetrameter – a verse in a poem consisting of four metric feet.
10. Tercet – a grouping of three consecutive lines of poetry that may or may not
rhyme.
11. Trimeter –a line of a poem that contains three metric feet.
12. The autobiography of Mohandas K. Gandhi, My Experiments with Truth, originally
written in Gujarati between 1927 and 1929, is now considered a classic.
13. Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose elegy on the death of John Keats (Adonais,
1821) contains a prophetic vision of his own death.
14. Benjamin Kurtz’s The Pursuit of Death (1930) is on Shelley.
15. “The Owl and the Nightingale” (c. 1220), in which two birds, the symbols of love
and religion, debate their respective values.
16. David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)
17. John Donne compared two separated lovers to the twin legs of a compass in his
poem “The Anniversary.”
18. Plato called Archilochus “the prince of Sages”.
19. George Eliot’s pen name is Mary Ann Evans. Her famous debut novel is Adam Bede.
20. A Doll’s House is a three act play in prose by Henrik Ibsen.
21. A House’s Tale is a novel by Mark Twain. His pen name is Samuel Clemens.
22. A Marriage Proposal is a one-act play (Farce) by Anton Chekhov written in 1888-
1889 and first performed in 1890. Natalia, Stepan Stepanovitch Chubokov, Ivan are
the characters in this play.
23. A Tale of a Tub is a satire by Jonathan Swift. It is a prose parody which divided into
sections of “Digression” and “A Tale” of three brothers Peter, Martin and Jack.
24. Aeschylus is often described as “the father of tragedy”.
25. Alexander Pope translated Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Pope is the third most
frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare
and Tennyson. The Rape of the Lock is dedicated to his friend John Caryll. Pope also
contributed to Addison’s play Cato. The Rape of the Lock was published in 1712;
with a revised version published in 1714. It is a mock epic which satirizes high
society quarrel between Arabella Fermor (Belinda) and Lord Petre. Belinda is
Gopura’s Education Solutions Page 2

Quick Points
compared to the Sun in the poem. “An Essay on Criticism” (1711) and “Windsor
Forest” (1713) are also his works.
26. Arms and the Man is a comedy by George Bernard Shaw. The title was borrowed
from Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin ( Arms and the man I Sing). Raina is a character in the
play. Shaw’s other works are Candida, You Never Can Tell, The Man of Destiny.
27. Between the Acts is the final novel by Virginia Woolf published in 1941 shortly after
her suicide.
28. George Bernard Shaw’s Candida set in the month of October.
29. Confidence is a novel by Henry James in 1879.
30. Death in Venice (1912) is a novella by German author Thomas Mann.
31. Dream of Four to Middling Women is Samuel Beckett’s first novel. It is an
autobiographical novel. The main character Belacqua is a writer and teacher in the
novel.
32. Edgar Allan Poe began his own journal “The Penn”. ( Later it was renamed as “The
Stylus”)
33. Thomas Hardy first employed the term “Wessex” in Far from the Madding Crowd.
34. Franklin Evans or The Inebriate is the only novel ever written by Walt Whitman.
35. George Bernard Shaw is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize
in literature ( 1925) and an Oscar (1938). Shaw wrote 63 plays. His first novel
Immaturity was written in 1879 but last one to be printed in 1931. His last
significant play was In Good King Charles Golden Days.
36. George Eliot’s pen name was Mary Ann Evans. Her works- Adam Bede(1859), The
Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1866), Felix Holt, the Radical
(1866), Middlemarch(1871-72), Daniel Doronda (1876).
37. Jonathan Swift wrote “Drapier’s Letters” in 1724.
38. Gustav Flaubert was a French writer and well known for his first published novel,
Madame Bovary (1857).
39. Happy Days is a play in two acts by Samuel Beckett. Winnie, Willie are the
characters in the play.
40. Henrik Ibsen is often regarded to as “the father of realism” and one of the founders
of Modernism in Theatre.
41. Love in Several Masques was Henry Fielding’s first play.
42. Chaucer lived during the reigns of : Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV
43. William Langland was the closest contemporary of Chaucer.
44. The Hundred Year's War was fought between England and France.
45. The War of Roses figures in the works of Shakespeare.
46. John Wycliffe is called 'the morning star of the Reformation'.
47. Twenty Nine pilgrims in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were going on the pilgrimage
from the Tabard Inn.
48. Three pilgrims in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales represent the military
profession.
49. Eight ecclesiastical characters are portrayed in the Prologue in Canterbury Tales.
50. It is believed that the Host at the Inn was a real man. His name was Harry Bailly.
51. The pilgrims were going to Shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
52. Three women characters figure in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
53. “The Parson's Tale” is in prose in Canterbury Tales.
54. “Bath” is the name of the town to which she belonged in Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath”.
55. "He was as fresh as the month of May " .This line occurs in the Prologue. This is
referred to the Squire.

Quick Points
56. Treatise on the Astrolabe is Chaucer's prose work.

57. The War of Roses was fought between The House of York and The House of
Lancaster
58. The followers of Wycliffe were called “ the Lollards”
59. John Wycliffe was the first to render the Bible into English in 1380.
60. The Piers the Plowman is a series of visions seen by its author Langland. ‘The
Vision of a 'Field Full of Folks' was the first vision that he saw.
61. Occleve in The Governail of Princes wrote a famous poem mourning the death of
Chaucer.
62. Caxton was the first to set up a printing press in England in 1476.
63. William Tyndale’s English New Testament is the earliest version of the Bible.
64. Tottle's Miscellany is a famous anthology of 'Songs and Sonnets' by Wyatt and
Surrey.
65. Amoretti contained 88 sonnets of Spenser.
66. Thomas Mores' Utopia was first written in Latin in 1516. It was rendered into
English in 1551.
67. Roister Doister is believed to be the first regular comedy in English by Nicholas
Udall.
68. Gorboduc is believed to be the first regular tragedy in English by Sackville and
Norton in collaboration.
69. Chaucer's Physician in the Doctor of Physique was heavily dependent upon
Astrology.
70. Spenser described Chaucer as "The Well of English undefiled’.
71. Chaucer's pilgrims go on their pilgrimage in the month of April.
72. Forest of Arden appears in the play As You Like It by William Shakespeare.
73. Globe Theatre was built in 1599.
74. When Sidney died, Spenser wrote an elegy on his death called “Astrophel”
75. Spenser’s Epithalamion is a wedding hymn.
76. The first tragedy Gorboduc was later entitled as Ferrex and Porrex.
77. Sidney's “Apologie for Poetrie” is a reply to Gosson's “School of Abuse”.
78. In his Apologie for Poetrie, Sidney defends the Three Dramatic Unities.
79. Christopher Marlowe wrote only tragedies. He first used Blank Verse in his Jew of
Malta.
80. "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships” . This line occurs in Doctor
Faustus by Marlowe.
81. Ben Jonson used the phrase 'Marlowe's mighty line' for Marlowe's Blank Verse.
82. Ruskin said, "Shakespeare has only heroines and no heroes".
83. The phrase 'The Mousetrap' used by Shakespeare in Hamlet. It is the play within the
play.
84. Spenser dedicates the Preface to The Faerie Queene to Sir Walter Raleigh.
85. The Faerie Queene is an allegory .In this Queen Elizabeth is allegorized through the
character of Gloriana.
86. Charles Lamb called Spenser the 'Poets' Poet'.
87. Spenser first used the Spenserian stanza in Faerie Queene.
88. In the original scheme or plan of the Faerie Queene as designed by Spenser, it was
to be completed in Twelve Books. But he could not complete the whole plan. Only
six books exist now.
89. Twelve Cantos are there in Book I of the Faerie Queene.

Quick Points
90. In the Dedicatory Letter, Spenser Says that the real beginning of the allegory in the
Faerie Queene is to be found in Book XII.
91. The Faerie Queene is basically a moral allegory. Spenser derived this concept of
moral allegory from Aristotle.
92. Ben Jonson said 'Spenser writ no language.'
93. Spenser divided his ‘Shepheardes Calender’ into twelve Ecologues. They represent
twelve months of a year.
94. Bacon's Essays are modelled on the Essais of Montaigne.
95. Bacon is the author of Novum Organum.
96. Spenser dedicated his Shepheards Calendar to Sir Philip Sidney.
97. Ten Essays were published in Bacon's First Edition of Essays in 1597.
98. 58 essays of Bacon were published in his third and last edition of Essays in 1625.
99. "......... a mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make
the metal work the better , but it embaseth it". These lines occur in Bacon’s “Of
Truth”.
100. Hamlet said "Frailty thy name is woman” in Hamlet by Shakespeare.
101. "Life is a tale, told by an idiot, Full of sound and fury signifying nothing." These lines
occur in Macbeth by Shakespeare.
102. "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact." These lines
occur in A Mid - Summer Night's Dream.
103. "Neither a borrower nor a lender be”. This line was told by Polonius in Hamlet.
104. "Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the
stage And then is heard no more." These lines are in Macbeth.
105. Ben Jonson's comedies are called 'Comedies of Humour' because each of them deals
with a particular 'Humour' in human nature.
106. The Age of James I is called the Jacobean Age.
107. Samson Agonistes is an epic written by John Milton.
108. Milton wrote Areopagitica to defend people's Freedom of Speech.
109. Twelve books are there in Paradise Lost. In Book IV of Paradise Lost, Adam and
Eve meet for the first time. Paradise was first published in 1667 in ten books. The
Second Edition was followed in 1674 in twelve books. The longest book is BOOK IX
with 1,189 lines and the shortest book is BOOK VII with 640 lines. It was written in
blank verse. Satan is considered as the “Hero” in Paradise Lost. The story opens in
Hell. Eve was created by God taken from one of Adam’s ribs.
110. Milton became blind in 1652 (at the age of 44) and he wrote Paradise Lost through
dictation with the help of Amanuenses and friends.
111. The term 'Metaphysical School of Poets' was first applied to Donne and this
companion poets by Dr. Johnson.
112. ‘Fame is the last infirmity of noble mind'. This line occurs in Milton’s Lycidas.
113. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”. Satan says this line in Paradise Lost.
114. Samson Agonistes loved Delilah and he was betrayed by her in Samson Agonistes.
115. Lycidas is a pastoral elegy written by Milton on the death of his friend Edward King.
116. Wordsworth says of Milton: 'Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart'.
117. 'Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour!’. Wordsworth remembers Milton in one
of his sonnets.
118. Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy is a critical treatise on dramatic art developed
through dialogues.
119. Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy develops through dialogues amongst four
interlocutors. They are - Eugenius, Crites, Neander , Lisideius.

Quick Points
120. In Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy Neander speaks for Modern English
Dramatists. (Neander is Dryden in Essay of Dramatic Poesy)
121. Conquest of Granada is a play written by Dryden.
122. Dryden's All For Love is based on Antony and Cleopatra.
123. John Locke is the author of The Essay on Human Understanding.
124. The central theme of Dryden's The Hind and the Panther is Defence of Roman
Catholicism.
125. Samuel Butler's Hudibras is a satire on Puritanism.
126. Grace Abounding is an autobiographical work by John Bunyan.
127. Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory.
128. 'Gather ye rose - buds while ye may'. This is the opening line of 'Counsel to Girls'
written by Robert Herrick.
129. "Here is God's plenty". Dryden refers Chaucer in the line.
130. Nahum Tate gave a happy ending to King Lear.
131. The theatres were closed down during the Commonwealth period in England. In
1660 they were reopened.
132. "Here lies my wife, here let her rest ! Now she is at rest, and so am I ! " This was a
proposed epitaph to be engraved on the tomb of John Dryden’s wife.
133. Dryden's The Medal is a personal satire on Shaftesbury.
134. Dryden is hailed as 'The Father of English Criticism' by Dr. Johnson.
135. "The Restoration marks the real moment of birth of our Modern English Prose."
Matthew Arnold says this.
136. The term 'Augustan' was first applied to a School of Poets by Dr. Johnson.
137. Matthew Arnold called the eighteenth century "Our admirable and indispensable
Eighteenth Century".
138. Matthew Arnold called the eighteenth century 'the Age of Prose and Reason'.
139. 'Dryden found English poetry brick and left it marble.' Dr. Johnson remarked this.
140. 'If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found? This observation was made by
Dr.Johnson.
141. "I shall endeavour to enlighten morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality."
Addison made this endeavor.
142. Richard Steele started the journal The Tatler.
143. The ‘Four Wheels of the Van of the English Novel are- Fielding, Smollett, Sterne,
Richardson.
144. Referring to one of his novels, Jonathan Swift said, "Good God! What a genius I had
when I wrote that book! “He was referring A Tale of the Tub.
145. Pope said "The proper study of mankind is man”.
146. Absolem and Achitophel deals with the Popish Plot'.
147. The Elegie in praise of John Donne was written by Thomas Carew.
148. In Joseph Andrews Fielding parodies Richardson's Pamela.
149. Swift said 'Pope can fix in one couplet more sense than I can do in six'.
150. The 'Coffee House Culture' flourished in The Age of Dr. Johnson.
151. Pope observed, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing Drink deep or taste not the
Pierian spring."
152. Lady M.W .Montagu said Pope's Essay on Criticism is 'all stolen'.
153. Matthew Prior's The Town and Country Mouse is a parody of Dryden's The Hind
and the Panther.
154. Dr. Johnson wrote the “Lives” of 52 poets in his "Lives of the Poets”.
155. Dr. Johnson left out Goldsmith in his Lives of the Poets.

Quick Points
156. Tennyson called Milton "the mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies".

157. James Thomson’s Seasons is a Nature poem divided into four parts.
158. John Dyer is the author of the poem Grongar hill.
159. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” begins with the line "The
curfew tolls the knell of parting day".
160. 1798 was taken to be the year of the beginning of the Romantic Movement because
Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads was published in the year.
161. Wordsworth's Prelude is an Autobiographical poem.
162. Cowper wrote, "God made the country and man made the town."
163. "We are laid asleep in body and become a living soul." This line occurs in
Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey.
164. Collins's poem "In Yonder Grave a Druid lies" is an elegy on the death of James
Thomson.
165. Thomas Love Peacock satirises Shelley and Coleridge in Nightmare Abbey.
166. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good
fortune must be in want of a wife". This line occurs in Pride and Prejudice by Jane
Austen.
167. The phrase, "willing suspension of disbelief" is applied to Coleridge.
168. "When lovely woman stoops to folly" occurs in a play written by Oliver Goldsmith.
(She Stoops to Conquer)
169. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven." This line
occurs in Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
170. According to Shelley "Hell is a city much like London."
171. The Mariner kills an albatross in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
172. Robert Southey’s A Vision of Judgment is a ludicrous eulogy of George II.
173. Shelley was expelled from the Oxford University for the publication of On the
Necessity of Atheism.
174. Lord Byron was the poet who woke one morning and found himself famous.
175. Matthew Arnold called Shelley "an ineffectual angel beating in the void his
luminous wings in vain".
176. Walter Scott’s novels are called Waverly Novels.
177. 'Elia' is a pen-name assumed by De Quincey.
178. Shelley's Defense of Poetry is a rejoinder (reply) to Love Peacock's The Four Ages of
Poetry.
179. Adonais is a Pastoral Elegy written by Shelley on the death of Keats.
180. Madeline is the heroine in Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats.
181. Matthew Arnold said about Keats, "He is with Shakespeare".
182. Keats said himself, "My name is writ in water."
183. Coleridge said. "I have a smack of Hamlet myself".
184. Shelley's death was caused by drowning.
185. "Life, like a dome of many coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity
Until death tramples it to fragments, die."
These lines occur in Shelley’s Adonais.
186. Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn ends with the line: "For ever wilt thou love, and she be
fair.”
187. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever ." This line is in Keats’s Endymion.
188. Charles Lamb has written Tales from Shakespeare.

Quick Points
189. Walter Scott is considered to be the most remarkable Historical Novelist of the
Romantic Period.
190. Ode of wit is a small masterpiece of Abraham Cowley.
191. The first poet laureate of England was Ben Jonson (unofficial).
192. After Walter Scott’s refusal the Poet Laureateship was conferred on Robert Southey
.
193. Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, dealt with the people's plan to prevent James
from coming to the throne and make Duke of Monmouth the king, which is known
as the Popish plot.
194. The title of poet of laureate was first conferred by letters patent to John Dryden.
195. Queen Victoria succeeded to the throne of England after William IV.
196. D.G.Rossetti was the leader of the Pre-Raphaelite group of artists in England. (Pre-
Raphaelites : D.G.Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne)
197. Elizabeth Barret Browning is the author of Aurora Leigh.
198. The basic theme of Arnold’s Literature and Dogma is Theology.
199. Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy deals with the subject of Education.
200. The subtitle of Vanity Fair is “Novel Without a Hero”.
201. George Eliot's novel Romola is a Historical novel.
202. Charles Dickens left Edwin Drood (his novel) unfinished.
203. Voltaire wrote: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’
204. In Memoriam Tennyson mourns the death of Arthur Hallam.
205. Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis is an elegy written on the death of Hugh Clough.
206. Arnold defines Poetry as "Poetry is a criticism of life, under the conditions fixed for
such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty".
207. The Dynasts is an epic drama written by Hardy. It deals with The Napoleonic Wars.
208. The scene of a wife's auction takes place in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge.
209. The phrase 'Stormy Sisterhood' is applied to Bronte Sisters-Charlotte, Emily, and
Anne.
210. "Happiness is but an occasional episode in the general drama of pain." This line
appears in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge .
211. Charles Dicken’s David Copperfield is most autobiographical.
212. Wilkie Collins is the author of the novel No Name.
213. In Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities', the two cities referred to are : London and Paris.
214. Tennyson's Queen Mary is a drama.
215. Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra begins with the lines: "Grow old along with me ! The
best is yet to be ."
216. "Truth sits upon the lips of dying men." This line occurs in Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab
and Rustum.
217. War Poets : Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell and Siegfried Sassoon
218. Rudyard Kipling said "Oh, East is East, and West is West, And never the twain can
meet."
219. The Waste Land by T S Eliot is dedicated to Ezra Pound.
220. The Waste Land is divided into five parts.
221. The Waste Land ends with the line, "Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata, Shanti, Shanti,
Shanti."
222. James Joyce's Ulysses is based on the pattern of Homer’s Odyssey.
223. D.H.Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers has autobiographical overtones.
224. D.H.Lawrence called one of his novels Kangaroo as “Thought Adventure".
225. The phrase ‘religion of the blood' is associated with D.H.Lawrence.

Quick Points
226. A character in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando changes his sex. Charles II is
characterised in this novel.
227. A woman's search for a fitting mate is the central theme of Bernard Shaw's Man and
Superman.
228. ‘Chocolate cream hero' appears in Shaw’s Arms and the Man.
229. The phrase 'Don Juan in Hell' occurs in Shaw’s Man and Superman.
230. Prostitution is the central theme of Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession.
231. Labour and Capital conflict is the central theme of Galsworthy’s Strife.
232. "The law is what it is -a majestic edifice sheltering all of us, each stone of which
rests on another." These lines occur in Galsworthy’s Justice.
233. Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925.
234. Joseph Conrad's novels are generally set in the background of the sea.
235. Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem “ If”
236. The term 'Stream of consciousness' was first used by William James.
237. The terms 'Inscape' and 'Instress' are associated with Hopkins.
238. 'Sprung Rhythm' was originated by Hopkins.
239. T .S. Eliot called 'Hamlet' an artistic failure.
240. The World Within World is an autobiography of Stephen Spender.
241. G. B. Shaw said, "For art's sake alone I would not face the toil of writing a single
sentence”.
242. Aldous Huxley borrowed the title ‘Brave New World’ from Shakespeare’s The
Tempest.
243. William Morris is the author of The Earthly Paradise.
244. T S Eliot was believed to be "a classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-
catholic in religion”.
245. Virginia Woolf was the founder of the Bloomsbury Group, a literary club of England.
246. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty – Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are
prophetic novels.
247. Plato said, ‘Art is twice removed from reality'.
248. Plato proposed in his Republic that poets should be banished from the ideal
Republic.
249. Five principal sources of Sublimity are there according to Longinus.
250. In Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy there are four speakers representing four
different ideologies. Neander expresses Dryden's own views.
251. Dr. Johnson called Dryden 'the father of English criticism'
252. Shelley said, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
253. Dr . Johnson preferred Shakespeare's comedies to his Tragedies.
254. Coleridge said, "I write in metre because I am about to use a language different
from that of prose."
255. Heroic Couplet is a two-line stanza having two rhyming lines in Iambic Pentameter.
256. Alexandrine is a line of six iambic feet occasionally used in a Heroic couplet.
257. Terza Rima is a run-on three-line stanza with a fixed rhyme-scheme.
258. Rhyme Royal stanza is a seven-line stanza in iambic pentameter.
259. Ottawa Rima is an eight-line stanza in iambic pentameter with a fixed rhyme-
scheme.
260. Spenserian stanza is a nine-line stanza consisting of two quatrains in iambic
pentameter, rounded off with an Alexandrine.
261. Blank verse has a metre but no rhyme.
262. Simile is a comparison between two things which have at least one point common.

Quick Points
263. Hyperbole is an exaggerated statement for the sake of emphasis.

264. The poem by Chaucer known to be the first attempt in English to use the Heroic
Couplet is The Legend of Good Women.
265. Chaucer introduced the Heroic couplet in English verse and invented Rhyme Royal.
266. The invention of the genre, the Eclogues (pastoral poetry) is attributed to Alexander
Barclay.
267. Mort D' Arthur is the first book in English in poetic prose.
268. First to use blank verse in English drama Thomas Sackville.
269. The first English play house called The Theatre was founded in London, 1576.
270. Thomas Wyatt introduced the sonnet form to England.
271. Thomas Nash was the creator of the picaresque novel. ( The Unfortunate Traveler)
272. Francis Bacon is the first great stylist in English prose.
273. Marlowe wrote only tragedies.
274. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote the introductory sonnet to Spencer's Fairy Queen.
275. Wordsworth viewed that "poetry divorced from morality is valueless".
276. Longinus is called the first romantic critic.
277. Dr. Johnson defined poetry as "Metrical Composition".
278. Carlyle defined poetry as 'Musical thought'.
279. Bacon is known as the father of English essay.
280. Imaginary characters were first introduced in the periodical essay of Addison and
Steele.
281. Montaigne is known as the father of Essay.
282. To Arnold, Nature is , “A Calm refuge and solace to the troubled heart”.
283. Father of Greek tragedy – Aeschylus
284. Father of Comedy – Aristophanes
285. Father of English Poetry - Geoffrey Chaucer
286. Father of English Printing - William Caxton
287. Father of detective story - Edgar Allen Poe
288. Father of English Prose - King Alfred
289. Morning Star of Reformation - John Wycliffe
290. Wolf Hall (2009) is a historical novel by English author Hilary Mantel.
291. Boz is the pen name of Charles Dickens.
292. Henry James described novels as "loose baggy monsters".
293. T. S. Eliot has made attempt to combine religious symbolism and society comedy
in his plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party.
294. In 1960, the ban finally lifted on D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover,
written in 1928.
295. Strophe, antistrophe and epode are the components of Pindaric ode.
a. Strophe : Dancers danced from the right to the left
b. Antistrophe : Left to the right or counter turn
c. Epode: When the dancers were fixed in the stage.
296. Pneumonia was the cause of William’s death in Sons and Lovers.
297. ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’ is a quotation from William Shakespeare.
298. Sir Toby Belch speaks the lines : “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there
shall be no more cakes and ale.” in Twelfth Night.
299. In Paradise Lost, Book I, Satan is the embodiment of Milton’s Spirit of revolt.
300. Wordsworth called poetry “the breadth and finer spirit of all knowledge”.
301. Twelfth Night opens with the speech of Duke.

Quick Points
302. Kubla Khan of Coleridge is an opium dream. (Xanadu is a place in this poem)
303. Shelley used Terza rima stanza form in his famous poem ‘Ode to the West Wind’.
304. The phrase ‘Pathetic fallacy’ is coined by John Ruskin.
305. Five soliloquies are spoken by Hamlet in the play Hamlet.
306. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” These
lines are from “The Second Coming” by W. B Yeats.
307. Sensuousnessisthe most notable characteristic of Keats’ poetry.
308. Optimismisthe key-note of Browning’s philosophy of life.
309. The title of Carlyle’s ‘Sartor Resartus’ meansTailor Repatched.
310. “Epipsychidion” is composed by Shelley.
311. “The better part of valour is discretion” occurs in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I.
312. Graham Greeneused a pseudonym, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, for much of his early
work.
313. Pride and Prejudice was originally a youthful work entitled‘First Impressions’.
314. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” The line given above occurs
inHamlet.
315. Sir John Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s greatest comic figures. (The character
appears both in Henry IV Part 1 and The Merry Wives of Windsor)
316. Samuel Pepys began his diary in New Year’s Day 1660 and wrote till 1669.
317. Blakesaid “That Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it”.
318. Women’s Education and Rights isthe theme of Tennyson’s Poem ‘The Princess’.
319. Oedipus complex and Electra complex are the terms used by Carl Jung.
320. D. H. Lawrence wrote“My own great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh as
being wiser than the intellect.”
321. Shakespeare makes fun of the Puritans in his playTwelfth Night.
322. “The rarer action is in virtue that in vengeance.” This line occurs inThe Tempest.
323. ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy’. This line occurs in the poemImmortality Ode
by Wordworth.
324. Wordsworth calls himself ‘a Worshipper of Nature’ in his poemTintern Abbey.
325. Direct or epic methodof narration has been employed by Dickens in his novel Great
Expectations.
326. Coleridgesaid ‘Keats was a Greek’.
327. D. G. Rossetti was a true literary descendant ofKeats.
328. Browning’s famous poem ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ is included inDramatis Personae.
(Browning has used Italian styles in his poetry)
329. Sandition is the unfinished novel by Jane Austen.
330. Miss Havisham was arrogant in Great Expectation and she remained a spinster
throughout her life.
331. The Romantic Revival in English Poetry was influenced by theFrench Revolution.
332. ‘O, you are sick of self-love’ . Malvoliois referred to in these words in Twelfth Night.
333. Hamlet isa passionate lover.
334. Mirandaexclaims; ‘Brave, new, world!’ in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.
335. Paradise Lost shows an influence ofChristianity and the Renaissance.
336. Poloniusin Hamlet suggests that one should neither be a lender nor a borrower.
337. How do I love theepoem ends 'I shall but love thee better after death' by Elizabeth
Barrett.
338. Lord Byronis considered a national hero in Greece.
339. The three gallants weregoing to a wedding in the poem 'The rime of the Ancient
Mariner' by Coleridge.

Quick Points
340. Harold Nicholson described T. S. Elliot as 'Very yellow and glum. Perfect manners'.
341. Emily Dickinsonrarely left home.
342. Rupert Brooke wrote his poetry duringFirst World War.
343. Maya Angelou wrote 'A brave and startling truth' in 1996.
344. Using words or letters to imitate sounds is called onomatopoeia.
345. The study of poetry's meter and form is calledProsody.
346. Shakespeare composed much of his plays inIambic pentameter.
347. 'Did my heart love til now?/ Forswear it, sight/ For I never saw a true beauty until
this night' is famous lined from Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare.
348. Auld Lang Syne is a famous poem by Robert Burns.
349. Arthur Conan Doylewrote "The Hound of the Baskervilles”.
350. Agatha Christiewrote "Ten Little Niggers”.
351. Haiku is a Japanese poetic form.
352. Dylan Thomas's 'Under Milk Wood’ is known as A radio play.
353. A funny poem of five lines is called Limerick.
354. W. H. Auden described poetry “A game of knowledge”.
355. Bildungsroman and Erziehungsroman German terms signifying “novels of
formation” or “novels of education”.
356. Black Death is the name given to the epidemic of plague that occurred in Chaucer's
Age.
357. Occleve wrote a famous poem The Governail of Princes mourning the death of
Chaucer.
358. William Tyndale’s English New Testament is the earliest version of the Bible.
359. Thomas Mores' Utopia was first written in Latin in 1516. It was rendered into
English in 1551.
360. Roister Doister is believed to be the first regular comedy in English in Nicholas
Udall.
361. Spenser described Chaucer as "The Well of English undefiled”.
362. Rahel and Estha are the twins in Arundhati Roy’s The God of small Things.
363. Tinu and Dinu are the characters in Mrinal Pande’s Daughter’s Daughter.
364. In The Branded, Laxman Gaikwad retrospects the subhuman condition of Uchalya
community.
365. The sunshine Cat is an outstanding poem by Kamala Das.
366. Bianca or The Young Spanish Maiden is a novel by Toru Dutt.
367. Rukmini is the protagonist in Nectar in the Sieve by Kamala Marakandaya.
368. The Good Earth is a novel by Pearl C Buck.
369. Mahesh Dattani is the founder of a theatre group known as ‘Playpen’.
370. In Part II of An Essay on Criticism by Popeincludes a famous couplet:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
371. An Essay on Criticism was famously and fiercely attacked by John Dennis, who is
mentioned mockingly in the work. Consequently, Dennis also appears in Pope's
later satire, The Dunciad.
372. “To err is human, to forgive divine” is a famous line appears in Pope’s An Essay on
Criticism
373. An Essay on Man is a poem published by Alexander Pope in 1734.
374. Pope's Essay on Man and Moral Epistles were designed to be the parts of a system of
ethics which he wanted to express in poetry.

Quick Points
375. Voltaire calledPope’s An Essay on Man "the most beautiful, the most useful, the most
sublime didactic poem ever written in any language"
376. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramaturge and author.
Chekhov was a doctor by profession.
377. Anton Chekhov said , "Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress."
378. Anton Chekhov’s works are : The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry
Orchard
379. Keat's Endymion has 4,000 lines.
380. Venus and Adonis, Glaucus and Scylla, Arcthusa and Alpheus – These pair of lovers
Endymion meets in Keat’s Endymion.
381. Wordsworth wrote the famous Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
382. Lyrical Ballads were published in1798.
383. The Lyrical Ballads opens with Rime of the Ancient Mariner
384. The Lyrical Ballads closes with Lines Written above Tintern Abbey.
385. Dorothy Wordsworth was the third person with Coleridge and Wordsworth at
Quantico Hills when the Lyrical Ballads were composed.
386. John Keats is known for his Hellenic Spirit.
387. PB. Shelley wrote: "Our Sweetest songs are those that tell our saddest thoughts"
388. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound is a lyrical drama.
389. S.T Coleridge wrote this: "He prayed well, who loved well both man and bird and
beast"
390. The journal to which Southey contributed regularly was The Quarterly Review.
391. Sir Walter Scott collected Scottish ballads, and published them along with his own,
in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
392. Byron was 19 years old when he published Hours of Idleness, a collection of poems
in heroic couplet.
393. When Hours of Idleness was criticized by the Edinburgh Review, Lord Byron
retaliated by writing a satiric piece. The title of this satire was English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers
394. The first two cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold take a reader to Spain, Portugal, and
Greece and Albania
395. In Byron’s Childe Harold, the description of the "Battle of Waterloo" appears in
Canto III.
396. The hero of Childe Harold is the poet himself.
397. "Michael", "The Solitary Reaper," "To a Highland Girl" - all these poems depict
simple common folk.
398. Purchas's Pilgrimage inspired Coleridge's Kubla Khan.
399. The Vision of Judgment is satire on Southey.
400. Don Juan has 16 cantos.
401. Halide is the Daughter of an old pirate in Don Juan
402. "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, "Tis woman's whole existence...." These
lines appear in Don Juan.
403. Don Alfonso, Julia, Sultana , Don Juan – are the characters in Don Juan.
404. Shelley was only 18, When he wrote Queen Mab.
405. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound has a story from Greek mythology.
406. Asia, Hercules, Jupiter- are the characters in Shelly’s Prometheus Unbound.
407. Enmity of Saxon and Norman is the background of Ivanhoe.
408. Thomas Love Peacock wrote Headlong Hall, Maid Marian, Melincourt, Nightmare
Abbey, Misfortunes of Elphin, Crotchet Castle and Gryll Grange.

Quick Points
409. Sidney Smith, Henry Brougham, Francis Jeffrey are associated with the 'Edinburgh
Review'.
410. "A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to
matrimony in a moment." These lines are said by Darcy in Pride and Prejudice
( Jane Austen’s novel)
411. His sonnet was rejected by a magazine “Gem”, on the plea that it would "shock
mothers". At this he wrote to a friend, "I am born out of time .... When my sonnet
was rejected, I exclaimed 'Hang the age, I will write for antiquity.' He is Charles
Lamb.
412. This patriotic song is often prescribed for school anthologies in India: "Breathes
there the man, with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, this is my own, my
native land." The Poet is Walter Scott.
413. Bingley is a character in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
414. "About thirty years age, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand
pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram ". This is the beginning
of the novel Mansfield Park by Jane Austen.
415. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice begins with: "It is a truth universally
acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of
a wife."
416. America's Age of Reason took place in 1750-1800.
417. Genres and styles of the Age of Reason were typically political pamphlets, essays,
travel writing, speeches, and highly ornate writing.
418. Romantic author Mary Robinson wrote the lines:
"Pavement slipp'ry, people sneezing,
Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;
Title gluttons dainties carving,
Genius in a garret starving"
419. Unto This Lost was written by John Ruskin. This work of Ruskin influenced
Mahatma Gandhi.
420. R.L.Stevenson is the author of Dr . Jakyll and Mr. Hyde.
421. Charles Dickens's characters are generally : Flat
422. The theme of Tennyson's Idylls of the King is The story of King Arthur and His
Round Table
423. "Others abide our question. Thou art free
We ask and ask : Thou smilest and art still,
Out - topping knowledge."
In these lines from a poem written by Matthew Arnold, 'Thou' refers to
Shakespeare.
424. Some Elizabethan Puritan critics denounced poets as 'fathers of lies' and
'caterpillars of a commonwealth'. Stephen Gosson used these offensives terms in
his The School of Abuse.
425. "The tragi-comedy , which is the product of the English theatre, is one of the most
monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet's thoughts." - Joseph Addison
426. "Be Homer's works your study and delight. Read them by day, and meditate by
night." This advice was given to the poets by Pope.
427. "The end of writing is to instruct ; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing." –
Dr.Johnson
428. "There neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of
prose and metrical composition." – William Wordsworth

Quick Points
429. "I write in metre because I am about to use a language different from that of prose."
– Coleridge
430. Walter Pater gave the concept of "Art of Art's sake'.
431. Matthew Arnold gave the concept of "Art for life's sake’.
432. 'Objective correlative', 'Dissociation of sensibilities', 'Unification of sensibilities,
Impersonality theory- are associated with T S Eliot.
433. John Crowe Ransom is believed to be the pioneer of the so-called New Criticism.
434. Prosody is science of all verse forms, poetic metres and rhythms.
435. Longinus is called the first romantic critic.
436. Aristotle is known as the first scientific critic.
437. Fred invites Scrooge to Christmas dinner in A Christmas Carole.
438. "Lycidas" is a poem by John Milton, written in 1637 as a pastoral elegy. It is
dedicated to the memory of Edward King. Milton describes King as "selfless."
439. Elizabthan Theatres : Blackfriars Theatre, The Boar’s Head Theatre, Cockpit
Theatre or The Phoenix, The Curtain, The Fortune, The Globe, The Hope, The Red
Bull ( Play House), The Red Lion, The Rose Salisbury Court Theatre, The Swan, The
Theatre, White friars Theatre.
440. The Globe Theatre was built in 1599 by Shakespeare’s playing company and was
destroyed by fire on 29June, 1613.A second theatre was built on the same land by
June 1614 and closed in 1642. A modern reconstruction of the Globe, named
“Shakespeare’s Globe “opened in 1997.
441. Samuel Taylor Coleridge adopted Absolute principle in developing his theory of
literature, a theory in which NATURE appears as the Absolute.
442. New Humanism: It was led by the scholars Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More,
called for a rejection of transcendental, idealist terms, of which the Coleridge an
Absolute was a major example.
443. The scholar Robert Calasso used the term absolute literature to describe writings
that reveal a search for an absolute.
444. French writer Albert Camus employed the term “Absurd” to describe the futility of
human existence, which he compared to the story of Sisyphus, the figure in Greek
mythology condemned for eternity to push a stone to the top of a mountain only to
have it roll back down again.
445. Martin Esslin found “the theatre of the absurd,” to describe plays that abandoned
traditional construction and conventional dialogue.
446. Absurd Play and playwrights : Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and
Endgame (1957), Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1960), Arthur Adamov’s Ping Pong
(1955), Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1959), Edward Albee’s The American Dream
(1961) and The Zoo Story, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Gunther Grass’s The Tin
Drum (1959) etc
447. Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd was written in 1961. He first used
“Theatre of Absurd” in this work.
448. The ELIZABETHAN five-act structure derives from the Roman playwright Seneca.
449. Kenneth Burke analyzes the tragic rhythm of action in his A Grammar of Motives
(1945).
450. Action painting is a term coined by the critic Harold Rosenberg to describe a
central principle of the Abstract Expressionist art movement that developed in the
1940s and ’50s.

Quick Points
451. In novels such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856–57), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
(1875–77) and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), the heroines of all three of
these novels commit adultery and are punished as social outcasts.
452. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne forms the basis of three novels by Updike (A Month
of Sundays,1975; Roger’s Version,1986; and S,1988) in which the perspectives of
the three main characters of the Hawthorne novel (Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger
Chillingworth, and Hester Prynne) are recreated in contemporary terms.
453. Donald Greiner’s Adultery in the American Novel (1985) looks at the uses of the
theme in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and John Updike.
454. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was written in 1883.
455. Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which concludes
with the famous invitation to “burn with a hard gemlike flame” in the “desire for
beauty, the love of art for its own sake.”
456. Oscar Wilde, who at the end of his life lamented in De Profundis (1905), “I treated
art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.”
457. Affective fallacy is a term in NEW CRITICISM used to describe the error, from a
New Critical perspective, of analyzing a work of literature in terms of its impact
upon a reader. William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley coined the term to call
attention to the distinction between the text of a work and “its results in the mind
of its audience.” “The Affective Fallacy” is included in Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon
(1954).
458. Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was the first
novel by an African American writer to be published in the United States.
459. African-American literature was dominated by three novelists: Richard Wright,
Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Wright’s Native Son (1940), Ellison’s The Invisible
Man (1952), and Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).
460. Major African-American Writers : Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings,1969), Ishmael Reed ( Mumbo Jumbo,1972), Alice Walker ( The Color
Purple,1982), the playwright August Wilson (Fences,1987), and the Nobel laureate
Toni Morrison (Beloved,1987).
461. Dr. Samuel Johnson was a poet, critic, editor, and lexicographer.
462. Gibbon wrote Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–87)
463. Boswell wrote Life of Johnson (1791).
464. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), and Oliver Goldsmith’s
She Stoops to Conquer (1773) , William Congreve’s A Way of the World– are the
examples for Comedy of Manners.
465. Tobias Smollett wrote the novel Humphrey Clinker (1771).
466. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–67), is one of the great comic novels in
English.
467. At the polar opposite of the view of age in King Lear is Robert Browning’s depiction
in “Rabbi Ben Ezra”:
Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be
468. John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and
Rabbit at Rest (1990). Rabbit, Run depicts three months in the life of a 26 year-old
former high school basketball player Harry’Rabbit’ Angstrom.
469. Clifford Odets’s waiting for Lefty (1935), a passionate prolabor union drama
focusing on a taxi drivers’ strike.

Quick Points
470. Shakespeare’s notable drinkers, Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night and Falstaff in his
three plays.
471. Sidney Carton, in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) declares “It is a far,
far better thing I do than anything I have ever done.”
472. “I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference” is a line from
the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost.
473. “Good fences make good neighbours” is a line from “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost.
474. Alexandrine is a line of six iambic feet (12 syllables). Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie
Queene, which consists of nine-line stanzas, the first eight in iambic pentameter,
with the ninth line an alexandrine.
475. Eugene O’Neill wrote Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1940)
476. Sartre wrote No Exit in 1945.
477. Alienation Effect is a term coined by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht to
describe a desired detachment on the part of both actors and audience to prevent
them from becoming emotionally involved in the action of the play.
478. Allegory: Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704), Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman
Melville’s Moby Dick (1851).
479. Allusion is a reference within a literary text to some person, place, or event outside
the text.
480. William Butler Yeats’s reference to “golden thighed Pythagoras” in his poem
“Among School Children.” It is an example for personal allusion.
481. William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), a work that had a powerful
impact on the development of New Criticism. Empson used the term to describe a
literary technique in which a word or phrase conveys two or more different
meanings.
482. William Empson defined ambiguity as “any verbal nuance, however slight, which
gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”
483. The American critic F. O. Matthiessen first employed the term American
renaissance to describe the major works of Emerson (Essays, 1841, Poems, 1847);
Thoreau (Walden, 1854); Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, 1850); Melville (Moby
Dick, 1851), and Whitman (Leaves of Grass, 1855).
484. Anapaest is a metrical FOOT containing two unaccented syllables followed by an
accented syllable.
485. Anaphora: In RHETORIC, a figure of speech in which a word or words are repeated,
usually at the beginning of successive sentences or lines of verse. William Blake’s
“London” provides an example:
In every cry of every man

In every infant’s cry of fear
In every vice, in every ban
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
486. Janie Crawford is the heroine of Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Are Watching God.
487. In his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye defines the term as “a form of
fiction . . . characterized by a great variety of subject matter and a strong interest in
ideas.”
488. Androgyny is combination of male and female characteristics. The word itself
combines the Greek words for male (andros) and female (gynous). Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night, Dickens’s unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), Poe’s

Quick Points
“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1838), and John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor
(1974) employ opposite-sex twins as embodiments of androgynous ideals.
489. Anglo-Irish Writers: George Farquahr, Richard Steele, Laurence Sterne, Richard
Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Edmund
Burke and Jonathan Swift.
490. William Butler Yeats returned to Celtic mythology as the inspirational source of his
poetry.
491. Angry young men: A term applied to a group of English writers, whose novels and
plays in the 1950s featured protagonists who responded with articulate rage to the
malaise that engulfed post-war England.
492. “She tragedies” is a term coined by Nicholas Rowe which focused on the sufferings
of an innocent and virtuous woman became the dominant form of pathetic tragedy.
493. Victor Brombert points out, “Nineteenth and twentieth century literature is . . .
crowded with weak, ineffectual, pale, humiliated, self-doubting, inept, occasionally
abject characters . . .”
494. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) has unnamed protagonist.
495. Albert Camus wrote The Fall (1954)
496. Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820)
497. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876)
498. Aphorism is a brief, elegant statement of a principle or opinion, such as “God is in
the details.” An aphorism is similar to an EPIGRAM, differing only in the epigram’s
emphasis on WIT.
499. Apollonian/Dionysian are the Contrasting terms coined by the 19th-century
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche employs these terms in his The
Birth of Tragedy (1872), in which he argues that Greek tragedy is essentially
Dionysian, rooted in powerful and primitive emotions, and that the Apollonian
element is a later accretion.
500. Aporia: The Greek word for complexity, used in classical philosophy to describe a
debate in which the arguments on each side are equally valid. The “answer” to the
question “Which comes first, the seed or the tree?” is an example of an aporia.
501. Apostrophe: A figure of speech in which a speaker turns from the audience to
address an absent person or abstract idea. It differs from a soliloquy in that the
speaker of an apostrophe need not be alone on the stage. An example occurs in the
second act of Hamlet, when the Prince turns from a conversation with Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern.
502. Apron stage is a stage that is thrust out into the audience on three sides, creating
closer contact than is the case with a PROSCENIUM stage. The apron stage was a
common feature of Elizabethan theatres, such as Shakespeare’s GLOBE THEATRE.
503. Arab-American literature: An early and important force in Ameen Rihani, a
Lebanese-born scholar and diplomat, whose The Book of Khalid (1911), a novel
written in free verse records the struggles and triumphs in the immigrant
experience. The most important early work of Arab-American literature is Kahil
Gibran’s world-famous The Prophet (1923), a meditative prose poem, extolling love
as the central fact of the human condition.
504. Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1587, 1590) is an elaborate, pastoral prose-romance that
exerted a strong influence on English Renaissance literature.
505. Aristotle defined literature as imitation (MIMESIS); gave an account of the origins,
development, and structure of drama; distinguished between comedy and tragedy;
and introduced the concept of CATHARSIS and the UNITIES.

Quick Points
506. Arnold introduced a number of terms that have enjoyed wide currency:
HEBRAISM/ HELLENISM, PHILISTINE, SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, and the
TOUCHSTONE principle.
507. Art for art’s sake: The argument that art should be autonomous and not compelled
to serve a specific c social or moral purpose. The phrase was used in 19thcentury
France and England as a slogan of AESTHETICISM.
508. Aside: In drama, a comment by a character directed to the audience, not intended
to be heard by the other characters on stage. The use of the aside affects the role of
the audience in the play.
509. Assonance is a form of RHYME in which the vowels rhyme, but not the consonants.
Examples: kite-bike; rate-cake.
510. Aubade: A poem in which lovers complain of the appearance of dawn, which
requires them to part. The form achieved great popularity in medieval France and
was employed by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde and by Shakespeare in Romeo and
Juliet.
511. Walter J. Ongwrote an essay, “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction.”
512. Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” is included in his Image, Music,
Text(1977)
513. Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” is reprinted in The Foucault Reader (1984).
514. Ballad is originally a song associated with dance, the ballad developed into a form
of folk verse narrative. The majority of folk ballads deal with themes of romantic
passion, love affairs that end unhappily, or with political and military subjects. The
story usually is in dialogue form. The ballad form was imitated by Romantic poets,
signalled by the publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
Lyrical Ballads in 1798.
515. “Motiveless malignity” is the phrase by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
516. Bathos is a term used to describe a writer’s failure to elicit a strong emotion,
inadvertently producing laughter or ridicule.
517. Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books (1697) satirized the modernist position.
518. Beat is a term for a group of American writers who came into prominence during
the 1950s and offered a radical critique of middle class American values.
519. Berliner Ensemble is a Theatrical company established in East Berlin in 1949 by the
playwright Bertolt Brecht. It offered Brecht the opportunity to implement his
theoretical conceptions, such as EPIC THEATRE and the ALIENATION EFFECT.
520. Bildungsroman (education novel): A German term for a type of novel that focuses
on the development of a character moving from childhood to maturity. Sometimes
known as a Coming of Age novel, the form usually charts a movement from
innocence to knowledge. Prominent examples include Goethe’s The Sorrows of
Young Werther (1774), Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), James
Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Günter Grass’s The Tin
Drum (1959).
521. BIOGRAPHERS : James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Leon Edel’s
five-volume biography of Henry James (1953–72), Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce
(1959), and David Riggs’s Ben Jonson: A Life (1989).
522. Blank verse: The term for verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter,
unrhymed lines of about 10 syllables, in which the accent falls on the even
numbered syllables.

Quick Points
523. Blazon is a lyric poem, typically a SONNET, in which the poet praises the beauty of
his beloved, detailing her specific c features: eyes, hair, cheeks, and usually her
“fair” complexion. Ex: Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty like the Night.”
524. Bloomsbury group: A circle of English writers, artists, and philosophers with a
shared set of values who frequently socialized at the homes of the novelist Virginia
Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, located in the Bloomsbury section of London.
Among its members were the economist John Maynard Keynes, the novelist E. M.
Forster, the biographer Lytton Strachey, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell.
525. Braggart warrior (miles gloriosus): In classical comedy, a Stock Character who
boasts of his military valor, but is usually shown to be a coward. Shakespeare’s
Falstaff is a type of braggart warrior, as is Captain Boyle in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and
the Paycock (1924).
526. Brat pack: Name given to a group of young writers who enjoyed brief fame in the
1980s. They included Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City, 1984), Bret Easton Ellis
(Less Than Zero, 1985) and Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York, 1986).
527. Bricoleur is a term coined by the French Structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss to
describe someone who assembles disparate objects to produce a tool that serves a
particular purpose.
528. Bunraku is the modern term for the puppet theater of Japan. Chikamatsu
Monzaemon’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703) is one of the most celebrated
examples of the genre.
529. Burlesque: A type of literature or drama designed to mock a serious work or an
entire GENRE. As a form of Parody, burlesque is usually distinguished from satire
by its broad comic effects and its willingness to depart from serious criticism of its
subject in favor of simple entertainment. Ex: John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728),
Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic (1779).
530. Philip Massinger wrote tragedy The Roman Actor (1626)
531. Byronic hero: A term for the dark, brooding, rebellious and defiant hero associated
both with the character of George Gordon, Lord Byron and the heroes of many of
his poems and plays. In the l9th century the Byronic hero became a major feature of
Romanticism, its internally conflicted, alienated, and demonic strain at once
attractive and dangerous. Ex: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and the figure of
Jeffrey Aspern in Henry James’s The Aspern Papers (1888).
532. Campus novel: A novel set at a college or university, in which academic life
assumes not merely a background role but is a determining factor in the lives of its
characters. Campus novels may be divided between those dealing with students’
experiences and those that focus on the faculty. Ex: Philip Roth’s When She Was
Good (1967), Tom Wolfe’s My Name Is Charlotte Simmons (2004).
533. Ezra Pound’s major work is a poem consisting of over 100 cantos entitled simply
The Cantos (collected and published in one volume in 1971).
534. Thomas Dekker wrote The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599).
535. Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974) deals with a corporate ambience.
536. William Gaddis’s JR (1975), a satire focusing on a child capitalist.
537. Carnival is a term used by the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to explore the
subversion of authority and official culture in popular entertainment and festivals.
538. “Cavalier Poetry,” specialized in witty, elegant love lyrics. A group of poets
connected to the court of Charles I of England, who supported the King during the
English Civil Wars (1641–49). The king’s followers were called Cavaliers while his
Parliamentary opponents were known as Roundheads. Among the better known

Quick Points
cavalier poets are Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, Edmund Waller, Thomas
Carew, and the finest poet of the group, Robert Herrick.
539. ‘Carpe Diem’ means “seize the day”: A Latin term expressing the idea of taking
advantage of the present moment. In literature, the term refers to a type of poetry
in which the poet implores the beloved to seize pleasure rather than to be “coy.”
Two outstanding examples of the type date from the 17th century, Robert Herrick’s
“To the Virgins, To Make Most of Time” and Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy
Mistress.”
540. Seize the Day (1956) is a novel written by Saul Bellow.
541. Catastrophe: In Tragedy, the final phase—the denouement—of the tragic action.
In Henry IV, Part II, Shakespeare uses the term comically in the sense of “rear end”:
“I’ll tickle your catastrophe.”
542. Catharsis means “purgation”.
543. In his Poetics, Aristotle defines tragedy as “an imitation of an action . . . through pity
and fear effecting the proper catharsis of these emotions.”
544. Chamberlain’s/King’s Men: The two names of the acting company of which
Shakespeare was a member and for which he wrote his plays. The Lord
Chamberlain’s Men was formed in 1594 under the patronage of Henry Carey, (Lord
Hunsdon), Lord Chamberlain from 1585 to 1596 and under his son George until
1603. The two star performers were Richard Burbage, who excelled in the leading
tragic roles, and Will Kempe, the principal comic actor. In 1599 the players erected
their own playhouse, the GLOBE THEATRE, on the outskirts of London.
545. A basic distinction between types of characters is that between “flat” and “round.”
Flat characters tend to be minor figures, who remain unchanged throughout the
story. Round characters—those seen in a more rounded fashion-usually change in
the course of the story.
546. Chiasmus: In RHETORIC, the inversion of words from the first half of a statement
in the second half. A famous example is John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your
country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” The critic Louis
Montrose employs chiasmus in his definition of NEW HISTORICISM as “the history
of texts and the textuality of history.”
547. Chicago renaissance: A period in early 20th-century American literary history
when a significant number of important writers, including Theodore Dreiser, Edgar
Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Sherwood Anderson, lived in and wrote about
Chicago.
548. Chicago school: A critical movement centered at the University of Chicago from the
1930s to the 1960s that adopted an Aristotelian approach to literary texts. Ronald
Crane was the group’s leader. In addition to Crane, other prominent Chicago critics
included W. R. Keast, Richard McKeon, Elder Olson, and Norman Maclean (later
celebrated as the author of A River Runs Through It, 1976).
549. George Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play (1923).
550. Climax is the turning point in a DRAMA or work of fiction. Although usually located
near the end of a NARRATIVE or play, the climax occasionally occurs earlier, as
Mark Antony’s address to the crowd at the midpoint of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
551. Closet drama: A play designed to be read either silently or in a group, not
performed “Closet” in this sense means private library or study. Among notable
examples of the type are John Milton’s “Samson Agonistes” (1671), Lord Byron’s
Manfred (1817), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820).

Quick Points
552. Cockney school of poetry: A derisive term first employed in 1817 to describe the
poetry of Leigh Hunt, John Keats, Percy Shelley and William Hazlitt.
553. Aristophanes’ last play, Plutus (388 B.C.), is the sole surviving example of “Middle
Comedy,” a form that employed parody and satire of classical myth.
554. Comic Novels: Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy (1759–67), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961).
555. Flannery O’Connor wrote A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
556. Coming of age: A sociological term for the movement of an individual from
childhood or adolescence to adulthood. Ex: Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
(1860–61), Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Henry James’s
What Maisie Knew (1897), J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Harper
Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).
557. Confessional Poetry: Name for a type of post–World War II American poetry in
which the poet appears to reveal intimate details of his or her life and a fragile,
fragmented sense of self. A major practitioner of the form was Robert Lowell,
whose book of poems Life Studies (1959) had a powerful influence on two younger
poets, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Plath’s Ariel (1965), a collection of brilliant,
angry, suicidal revelations, proved to be prophetic: two years before their
publication, she took her own life. The title of Sexton’s first book of poetry, To
Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), is indicative of the personal anguish that
motivated her poetry.
558. Robert Penn Warren wrote All the King’s Men (1946).
559. Connecticut wits: Name of a group of late 18th century American writers who
attended Yale University around the time of the American Revolution. The
members represented conservative political and cultural values, endorsing the
study of literature as a source of moral improvement. Stylistically, they were
influenced by the English tradition of the Augustan age, the examples of Pope and
Swift. Among their better-known practitioners were the poets John Trumbull,
Timothy Dwight, who became president of Yale in 1795, and Joel Barlow, who later
served as ambassador to France.
560. The term “Courtly love” was coined in 1883 by the French medieval scholar Gaston
Paris and developed by C. S. Lewis in his The Allegory of Love (1938).
561. The Criterion was an influential literary quarterly published in England from 1922
to 1939. Edited by T. S. Eliot, whose most famous poem The Waste Land appeared in
its first issue, the journal helped to propagate the principles of New Criticism.
562. Cultural Studies:An interdisciplinary movement that focuses on Popular Culture,
placing it in a socio-historical context. The movement originated in Great Britain in
the 1960s and spread to the United States in the 1980s.
563. Curtal sonnet: It is a term coined by the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to
describe a sonnet of 10 and a half lines rather than the 14 lines of the usual sonnet.
Ex: Hopkins’s celebrated poem “Pied Beauty”.
564. Cyberpunk is a form of SCIENCE FICTION in which the world of high-tech
computer networks (cyberspace) dominates life in the near-future.
565. Dactyl is a metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two
unstressed syllables, as in the word “courtesy”.
566. Dada is a movement of writers and artists that rejected conventional modes of art
and thought in favour of consciously cultivated, deliberate nonsense. According to
its founder, Tristan Tzara, “DADA MEANS NOTHING.”
567. Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species (1859).

Quick Points
568. Dasein: A term used by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to describe the
distinctively human way of being in the world. Dasein literally means “being there,”
and Heidegger employs it to avoid the notion—implicit in terms like “self ” or
“man”—of an isolated private entity set off from the objective world.
569. Shakespeare’s FIRST FOLIO appeared in 1623.
570. Shelley’s poems represented what the critic Mario Praz has called the “Romantic
agony,” the aesthetic that pairs death with beauty.
571. Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886)
572. Thomas Mann’s novella is Death in Venice (1912).
573. “Yale critics”: Paul De Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman.
574. Defamiliarization is a principle associated with RUSSIAN FORMALISM which
asserts that one function of art and literature is to disturb its audience’s routine
perception of reality. The term (in Russian ostranenie) was coined by the critic
Viktor Shklovsky, who argued that in disrupting our everyday sense of what is real
and important, art puts us in touch with our deepest experiences. The techniques of
defamiliarization include placing characters and events in unfamiliar contexts,
FOREGROUNDING dialects and slang in formal poetry, and employing unusual
imagery.
575. Deism held that belief in God was consistent with human reason, but not with the
beliefs of specific c religions that claim truth on the basis of divine revelation. Thus
most Deists rejected Christianity’s claim that the BIBLE contained the revealed
word of God. In literature, Deistic elements appear in the poetry of Alexander Pope.
Pope himself remained a practicing Christian all his life, but his Essay on Man
(“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/The proper study of Mankind is
Man.”) is considered a deistic poem, as is James Thompson’s The Seasons (1730).
576. Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is a detective story.
577. Diachronic/Synchronic are the two terms designed to reflect two approaches to
the study of language. To look at language diachronically is to study its historical
development, while the synchronic approach analyzes a language system at a given
moment in its history. The terms are associated with the French linguist Ferdinand
de Saussure, who advocated the synchronic approach to the study of language, a
position that had a significant impact on the development of Structuralism.
578. The Dial was a quarterly American journal advocating the principles of
Transcendentalism published from 1840 to 1844. Its first editor was the early
feminist Margaret Fuller. She was succeeded as editor by Ralph Waldo Emerson. A
second Dial, published from 1890–1929, first as a monthly, later bi-weekly, and
after 1918 as a monthly, became a distinguished literary and artistic journal.
Among its contributors were the poets E. E. Cummings and T. S. Eliot, the novelists
D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann, and the critic Kenneth Burke.
579. Dialectic is an art of arriving at the truth through debate or discussion. The term
was used by the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel.
580. Dialogism is a term associated with the work of the Russian theorist Mikhail
Bakhtin, who maintained that any specific c utterance is a contribution to a
continuing human dialogue—that is, it is both a response to past uses of the
language and an occasion for future uses.
581. David Hume wrote “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” (1779).
582. Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, published in 1952, written while she was hiding
from the Nazis during World War II.
583. Dimeter is a line of verse consisting of two feet.

Quick Points
584. Dirge is a funeral song lamenting someone’s death. Two famous examples from
Shakespeare are: “Full fathom five” in The Tempest and “Fear no more the heat of
the sun” in Cymbeline, which contains the memorable couplet:
a) Golden lads and girls all must,
b) As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
585. Dissociation of sensibility is a phrase coined by T. S. Eliot to describe the
separation of feeling and thought.
586. Eliot’s essay “The Metaphysical Poets” appears in his Selected Essays(1932).
587. Aristotle’s claim, in his Poetics, that the dithyramb was one of the roots out of which
Tragedy emerged.
588. Doggerel is Crude, shallow verse, sometimes consciously employed for comic
effect, as in the poems of the English poet John Skelton.
589. Domestic tragedy is a form of tragedy in which the protagonists are middle or
working class people whose downfall takes place within a family relationship. EX:
Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), George Lillo’s The
London Merchant (1731), G. E. Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson (1755), Tennessee
Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
(1948), and Eugene O’Neill’s most important play, A Long Day’s Journey into Night
(1940, produced, 1956).
590. Doppelgänger (the double) is a German word used to describe a character whose
divided mind or personality is represented as two characters. Ex: Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer
(1912), Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Double (1840).
591. Dramatic monologue is a type of lyric poem in which a person speaks to a silent
audience and, in the course of doing so, reveals a critical aspect of his own
character. Ex : Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1845), Browning’s The Ring and the
Book (1869), T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915)
592. Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1869), a verse novel cast as 12 lengthy
monologues.
593. Drâme bourgeois (bourgeois drama): A term coined by the 18th-century French
philosopher and playwright Denis Diderot to describe a type of drama that focused
on the domestic problems of middle class families.
594. Sigmund Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
595. Dream vision is a type of medieval literature in which the narrator, in a dream,
observes allegorical or actual figures whose behavior illustrates some truth of life
Ex : Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose, William Langland’s Piers Plowman
(1366–86)
596. Chaucer employed the Dream Vision form in a number of works: The Book of the
Duchess (1369) is a combined elegy and dream vision, commemorating the death of
Blanche, the Duchess of Lancaster and wife of John of Gaunt, Chaucer’s patron. The
dream in The Parliament of Fowls (c. 1375) concludes with a parliament of birds
discussing a variety of views of the nature of love. The prologue to his The Legend
of Good Women (c. 1380) contains a dream vision that operates as the framing
device of the individual stories that follow it.
597. The 14th-century dream vision poem is The Pearl, in which a lost pearl comes to
stand for a daughter who has died in infancy.
598. Dream work is Sigmund Freud’s term for the transformation of the hidden or
latent meaning of a dream into the form that is remembered and reported by the
dreamer.

Quick Points
599. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the play-within-the-play.

600. Eclogue is a PASTORAL poem, traditionally featuring shepherds engaged in
dialogue, as in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579).
601. Ecocriticism is an approach to literature from the perspective of
environmentalism. Ecocriticism focuses on nature writing. Ex : Henry David
Thoreau’s Walden (1854), Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), John
McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival
(1974), Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth (2000).
602. Martin Heidegger, who sees the connection of nature with literature as “the poetry
of dwelling” with the earth.
603. H G Wells is best known for his SCIENCE FICTION, also wrote social novels like
Tono-Bungay (1908).
604. Forster’s Howards End (1910) depicts the interaction of the English leisure class
with the commercial middle class. ‘Howard’ is the name of the house.
605. Elegy is a lyric poem meditating on the death of an individual or on the fact of
mortality in general. Ex : Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
(1750), Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1880), W. H. Auden’s “On the Death
of W. B. Yeats” (1939), Paul Monette’s tribute to a lover who died of AIDS, Love
Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog (1988), John Milton’s Lycidas (1637), Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s Adonais (1821).
606. Sidney’s An Apologie for Poetrie (1595) is a defense of literature from Puritan attack
and an early example of literary criticism in English.
607. End-stopped line is a line of verse that concludes with a pause coinciding with the
completion of a phrase or clause. Ex: Emily Dickinson’s Because I could not stop for
Death.
608. Enjambment : In verse, the continuation without pause from one line or couplet to
the next. The opposite of enjambment is the End-Stopped Line.
609. John Locke: “Reason must be our last judge and guide.”
610. Epic is a long narrative poem which focuses on a heroic figure or group, and on
events that form the cultural history of a nation or tribe. Ex : Milton’s Paradise Lost,
Beowulf , Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Marcel
611. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27), Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1816),
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1920–72) and
William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1946–58), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)
612. D. W. Griffith’s wrote Birth of a Nation (1915).
613. Epic theatre: A type of drama developed by the playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht
argued for a form of theatre in which actors and audience would be always aware
that they were enacting or watching a play. This Alienation Effect, as Brecht
termed it, attempts to produce a more thoughtful and less emotional response in
the audience.
614. Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1941) exhibits both “dramatic” and
“epic” qualities.
615. Oscar Wilde: “I can resist everything but temptation.”
616. Epigraph is a quotation used at the beginning of a text designed to illustrate its title
or designate its theme.
617. Epilogue: In drama, a final speech addressed to the audience soliciting its approval
for the play. Famous examples from Shakespeare’s plays are Puck’s appeal for
applause at the conclusion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Prospero’s epilogue
to The Tempest.

Quick Points
618. Epiphany: James Joyce used the term to describe the artistic revelation of the inner
radiance of an object or event. The best known of his epiphanies occurs in his
autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
619. David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction (1992) offers a lively account of the use of the
epiphany in modern literature.
620. Luigi Pirandello wrote Right You Are If You Think You Are (1917).
621. Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), a brilliant satire of life and letters
in 18th-century England.
622. Epistolary novel: Fiction written in the form of a series of letters. Samuel
Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1747–48), John Barth’s Letters (1979), Alice
Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990). A memorable film
based upon the epistolary idea is Max Ophuls’s Letter From An Unknown Woman
(1948).
623. Epithalamion is a poem written on the occasion of a wedding, usually celebrating
the virtue and beauty of the bride. The best known example is Edmund Spenser’s
“Epithalamion” (1595), written for his own wedding. A modern example is John
Ciardi’s “I Marry You” (1958).
624. Esemplastic is a term coined by the Romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor
Coleridge to describe the shaping power of the poetic imagination.
625. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is a well known essayist. The 19th century’s
outstanding essayists are including Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater. Modern essayists are Henry James
(The Art of Fiction-1894), D. H. Lawrence (Studies in Classic American Literature -
1923), Virginia Woolf (The Common Reader-1925), and the collected essays of T. S.
Eliot.
626. The most significant examples of the essay adapted to verse are Alexander Pope’s
Essay on Criticism (1711) and his Essay on Man (1733).
627. Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “the best that has been thought and said”.
628. The novelist Alice Walker coined the term womanism to describe a feminist “of
color.”
629. Ethos: In Rhetoric, the ethical character that a speaker projects in his efforts to
persuade an audience.
630. Euphony is a pleasing, agreeable sound, traditionally associated with lyric poetry.
The opposing term to euphony is Cacophony. ( *Euphony x Cacophony)
631. Tavern Scene occurs in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One.
632. Euphuism: A late 16th-century, highly mannered style developed by John Lyly in
his Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580).
Features of the style included samplings of alliteration, antitheses, balanced
constructions, and analogies drawn from natural history.
633. French theorist Georges Bataille wrote Literature and Evil (1973).
634. Exemplum: A tale designed to illustrate a moral lesson. The form was popular in
the MIDDLE AGES. “The Pardoner’s Tale” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a
representative example: It is a story cast in the form of a sermon on the theme of
money as the root of all evil.
635. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger provides a phenomenological description of
human existence which he calls DASEIN (being there).
636. Works on Existentialism : Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864),
Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener(1853), Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych(1884),
Franz Kafka (“Metamorphosis,” 1915; The Trial, 1925), Robert Musil (The Man

Quick Points
Without Qualities, 1930–43) , Albert Camus in his novels (The Stranger, 1942; The
Fall, 1956) and plays (Caligula, 1944), Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949),
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964), and Norman
Mailer’s American Dream (1965), Flannery O’Connor’s novel The Violent Bear It
Away (1960), and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961).
637. Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1949) provides an interesting application of
existentialism to literary criticism.
638. Exordium: In RHETORIC, the introductory part of a formal speech. The aim of the
exordium is to catch the attention of the audience.
639. Expressionism: A movement in literature and art in the early 20th century that
sought to go beyond Realism on the one hand and Impressionism on the other. For
the expressionists, realists and impressionists were too concerned with the surface
of reality and reproducing the appearance of things. Ex: Eugene O’Neill. The
Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1921), Sean O’Casey’s The Silver
Tassie(1929) and Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (1925)
640. Strindberg’s To Damascus (1898–1901) is regarded by some as the first
expressionist play.
641. Georg Kaiser, who produced 24 plays between 1917 and 1923, all in the
expressionist mode. His notable plays are From Morn to Midnight, 1912, and Gas,
1917).
642. Fable is a short Narrative in prose or verse in which the action of the characters,
usually animals, conveys a moral lesson. Aesop was the chief source of the fables of
Jean de La Fontaine, whose 17th-century collection in verse continues to represent
the standard for the form. Notable examples of the satiric fable are Chaucer’s “Nun’s
Priest’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945).
643. Fabliau is Humorous, frequently bawdy, tales in verse popular in Europe during
the MIDDLE AGES. It was originated in France. The fabliau was adapted for use by
Boccaccio in his Decameron (1350) and by Chaucer, who used the form for the
“Miller’s Tale,” the “Reeve’s Tale,” and the “Summoner’s Tale” in his Canterbury
Tales (1387–1400).
644. Arthur Miller wrote After the Fall (1964).
645. Fantasy is a form of literature characterized by highly imaginative or supernatural
events. Ex: Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
646. Farce is a type of dramatic comedy characterized by broad, visual effects, fast
moving action.
647. The term “tragic farce” was also employed by T. S. Eliot to describe Christopher
Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1590).
648. The decree was issued as a response to Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), a novel
regarded as insulting to Islam in general and to the prophet Mohammed in
particular. Living under the threat of assassination since that time, Rushdie, an
English citizen, has publicly apologized and declared himself to be a faithful Muslim.
649. Thomas Mann wrote Doktor Faustus (1947), in which the story is recast as a
commentary on the German people’s “pact” with Nazism. (Note: Christopher
Marlowe wrote Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (1588–92), in which Faustus makes a
pact for 24 years and he is dragged screaming into Hell.)
650. Feminist Works: Feminist criticism emerged in the late ’60s. Ex: Simone de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), Mary Ellmann’s Thinking about Women (1968),

Quick Points
Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex (1971),
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929)
651. First Folio: The first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623,
seven years after the playwright’s death. The book was published as a result of the
efforts of John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of the principal actors of The
King’s Men, Shakespeare’s theatrical company. The Folio included a total of 36
plays, half of which had never been published before.
652. Ben Jonson said Shakespeare as “not of an age, but for all time.”
653. Foot is a unit of METER consisting of two or more syllables, each of which is treated
as accented (stressed) or unaccented (unstressed). The most common feet in
English are: IAMB, TROCHEE, ANAPEST, DACTYL, SPONDEE, Iamb, trochee, and
spondee are two-syllable feet; dactyl and anapest are three-syllable feet.
654. Amphibrach and amphomacer are also three-syllable feet. Choriamb contains
four-syllables.
655. Foregrounding is the English translation of the Czech word aktualisace, a term
coined by Jan Mukarovsky of the Prague School, early advocates of linguistic
Structuralism.
656. Formalism An approach to literature that analyzes its internal features (its
Structure, Texture, And Imagery, for example) and minimizes or ignores its
relations to historical, social, political, or biographical factors. Ex: Henry James’s
Washington Square (1880) focuses recurrent images, structural oppositions, and
features such as FORESHADOWING, while ignoring such topics as 19th-century
class consciousness, the role of women, and the relevance of the novel to the
author’s biography.
657. Fourteener is a line of iambic verse consisting of 14 syllables (seven feet), also
known as heptameter. The form was popular in the early Tudor period (1500–60).
658. Lord Byron wrote Cain (1831).
659. Frankfurt school: The name given to a group of German intellectuals associated
with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in the 1920s
and ’30s, and later in London and New York. After World War II, the Institute was
reconstituted in Frankfurt. The prominent figures associated with the School are
the philosophers and social theorists Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and
Herbert Marcuse, the psychologist Erich Fromm, and, on the fringe of the group, the
theorist Walter Benjamin.
660. Free verse Lines of poetry written without a regular METER and usually without
RHYME. Although scattered examples of free verse appear in earlier poetry, the
great pioneer of the form was Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass (1855)
constituted a free verse manifesto.
661. German playwright Gustav Freytag has developed a description of the structure of a
five-act play in his Technique of Drama (1862). Freytag’s design features five
movements: exposition, complication, climax, reversal, and denouement.
662. Fugitive/Agrarians: The name for a group of Southern writers, many of them
faculty members of Vanderbilt University, who in the 1920s argued for a return to
an agricultural society in the South. They viewed industrialization as a destructive
force, destined to undermine and distort traditional Southern values. The group
published their views, along with poetry and criticism, in The Fugitive (1922–25)
and later in The Southern Review (1935–42). Among the early group were Allen
Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren, three of the leading exponents
of what was to become the New Criticism.

Quick Points
663. Futurism: A literary/artistic movement in early 20th-century Italy, calling for a

rejection of the past and a celebration of modern technology. The movement was
founded in 1909 by Tommaso Marinetti. The Futurists proclaimed “the beauty of
speed” and a poetics wedded to the glorification of the machine. They called for a
reform of literature, art, and society, demanding new forms and themes.
664. Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1592–93), a play depicting the monarch’s love
for a courtier, Piers Gaveston, and its tragic consequence.
665. Walt Whitman, particularly in the “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass (1855–92),
and Herman Melville, in Typee (1846) and other novels, have portrayed
homosexual relations.
666. E.M.Forster’s Maurice, a novel written in 1914 but, because of its explicit
homosexuality, not published until 1971, years after the author’s death.
667. Geneva School: A group of critics associated with the University of Geneva in the
1940s and ’50s. The leading figure of the Geneva School were Georges Poulet, Jean
Starobinski, J. Hillis Miller.
668. Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1899) is a classic ghost story in which the
reader never learns whether the “ghosts” in the story are real or the product of the
narrator’s imagination.
669. Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer (1979) uses the term to reflect on the
Holocaust in depicting Anne Frank (literally, a “ghost writer”) as an embittered
survivor of a concentration camp, now living in America.
670. Globe Theatre: An Elizabethan playhouse, the home of Shakespeare’s company,
the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later The King’s Men). The playhouse was constructed
in 1599 on the Bank side of the Thames River, just outside the London city limits. It
burned down in 1614 during a production of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII; an event
that Shakespeare might have prophesied when in The Tempest (1612) Prospero
spoke of the disappearance of “the great globe itself.”
671. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the term the gods is used 26 times.
672. In the ominous first act, Lear invokes the gods Apollo, Jupiter, and Hecate against
Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear.
673. Friedrich Nietzsche argued in his Birth of Tragedy (1871) that tragedy arose out of
the conflicting positions symbolized by the gods Apollo and Dionysus, where Apollo
represents reason, restraint, and morality, and Dionysus, represents passion,
frenzy, and amorality.
674. Gothic Novel: A type of fiction that employs mystery, terror or horror, suspense,
and the supernatural for the simple purpose of scaring the wits out of its readers.
Notable works are: Hugh Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Anne Radcliffe’s
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Jane Austen’s
Northanger Abbey (1818), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).
675. Graveyard school is a term for a group of 18th-century poets who focused on the
theme of DEATH, the pain of bereavement, and the longing for immortality. The
best known of the group were Robert Blair (“The Grave,” 1743), Edward Young
(Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, 1742–45), and Thomas Gray,
whose “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) is an acknowledged
masterpiece of the form.
676. Group Theatre: The name of a New York–based, experimental theatrical company
that flourished in the 1930s. The group was well known for its productions of plays
dealing with socially significant issues such as labor unrest and racism. Two of the

Quick Points
group’s best known productions were Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty and Awake
and Sing (both 1935).
677. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, in which the detective, Oedipus, discovers that he himself is
guilty of the death of his father and of incest with his mother.
678. Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942), in which the protagonist Meursault kills a man
but is executed not for the killing but for his indifference to society’s apparent
values.
679. Gynocriticism In feminist criticism, the emphasis on literature written by women,
as opposed to an earlier phase of feminist criticism that concentrated on the
representation of women in literature written by men. Coined by the feminist
scholar Elaine Showalter in 1978, gynocriticism is designed, in her words, to “stop
trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition and focus instead on the
newly visible world of a female culture.” Examples of formerly neglected novels
that gynocritics have helped to publicize include Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
(1899) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
680. Haiku is a type of Japanese poetry that captures the impression of a single object or
aspect of nature. The traditional haiku consists of 17 syllables, arranged in three
lines of five, seven, and five syllables, but there are numerous variations, especially
in modern poems.
681. Hamartia: In Aristotle’s Poetics, an error committed by a tragic hero that leads to
his downfall.
682. “The Mona Lisa of literature,” T. S. Eliot’s epithet for Hamlet, acutely points to the
mystery lying at the heart of each work.
683. Harlem Renaissance: Term for the flowering of African-American literature,
music, and dance that took place in the 1920s in New York’s Harlem district. The
progenitors of the movement were James Weldon Johnson, a diplomat, poet, and
author of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and W. E. B. Du Bois,
whose The Souls of Black Folk (1903) powerfully argued the case for social justice.
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is generally regarded as the
greatest single product of the Renaissance.
684. Hebraism/Hellenism: These terms were elaborated in Arnold’s Culture and
Anarchy (1869). Matthew Arnold’s characterization of the two major formative
influences in Western culture. “Hebraism” stands for the moral tradition of Judeo-
Christianity; “Hellenism” for the intellectual and aesthetic inheritance of Greek
civilization.
685. Hegemony is a word meaning predominance, used by the Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci to explain how a dominant CLASS gains and maintains its power.
686. Heptameter is a seven-FOOT metrical line, rarely used in English since the 16th
century.
687. Heroic couplet: In verse, a pair of rhyming lines in iambic pentameter. In English
poetry the form was used as early as Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400).
The master of the form was Alexander Pope.
688. Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada (1670–1), Aureng-Zebe (1675) are heroic plays.
689. Heteroglossia is a term coined by the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who saw
language as made up of an endless variety of “languages,” each one of which
imposes its own perspective on reality.
690. Holocaust Writings: W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (1997) and Austerlitz (2001),
André Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just (1961), Jerzy Kozinski’s The Painted Bird
(1965).

Quick Points
691. Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) is a comedy of humor.

692. Hyperbole is an exaggerated or extravagant expression not meant to be taken
literally. Edmond Rostand’s romantic drama Cyrano de Bergerac (1896).
693. iamb is a metrical FOOT consisting of one unstressed syllable followed by a
stressed syllable, as in the word ‘alone’.
694. William Kerrigan called the iamb is “the heartbeat of English poetry.”
695. Idyll is a poem depicting a rural scene, suggesting tranquillity and peace. Tennyson
uses the term in his multi-volumed series of poems Idylls of the King (1859–85)
based on the Arthurian Legend.
696. Romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge introduced a crucial distinction
between fancy and imagination in his Biographia Literaria (1817). He argued that
the terms described two separate poetic faculties. Fancy was a process of
association, “a mode of memory,” that reconceived the data of the senses in new
and unusual arrangements. The operation of fancy was, for Coleridge, the signature
of the “poetry of talent.” But the “poetry of genius” involved the imagination, the
faculty that transformed rather than rearranged, that “dissolves, diffuses,
dissipates, in order to recreate.
697. Imagism is a school of English and American poetry that flourished in the years
prior to and during World War I. The school originated at a meeting in a London
restaurant of the poets Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and F. S. Flint that resulted in the
formation of principles published in 1913.
698. “Implied author” was coined by the critic Wayne Booth in his The Rhetoric of
Fiction (1961) to describe the “second self” of the author, the one that exists only as
the creative presence governing a Narrative.
699. Wolfgang Iser’s The Implied Reader (1974) provides a detailed description of the
reader’s role in fiction.
700. In Myths of Modern Individualism, the critic Ian Watt focuses on four archetypal
individuals: Faust, DON JUAN, Don Quixote, and Robinson Crusoe.
701. The social evils of the factory system were explored in a number of Victorian novels
including Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), and
Charles Dickens’s memorable study of life in a textile town, Hard Times (1854).
702. in medias res (in the middle of things) A NARRATIVE convention in which a story
begins in the middle of an important action rather than at its chronological
beginning.
703. The terms inscape/instress were employed by the Victorian poet Gerard Manley
Hopkins to describe certain features of nature. Hopkins uses inscape to single out
the individuating character of a natural thing, that which distinguishes it from
everything else, its “thisness.” Instress is the force that gives a form to inscape,
enabling it to be perceived by an observer. Ex : Hopkin’s “The Windhover”
704. Intentional fallacy: According to the New Critics W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe
Beardsley, the fallacy of locating the meaning of a work of literature in the intention
of its Author. Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that, in the majority of cases, it was
neither possible nor desirable to search for the meaning in the author’s intention.
705. Interior Monologue : James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922), Manhattan Transfer
(1925) by John Dos Passos, To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf, and The
Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner.
706. Interpolation: The insertion of lines into another text by someone other than the
original AUTHOR of the TEXT. Well-known examples are the insertions into

Quick Points
Shakespeare’s Macbeth of lines and songs from The Witch a play by Shakespeare’s
contemporary, Thomas Middleton.
707. Intertextuality is a term associated with Post Structuralism, which rejects the idea
of a TEXT as a single, autonomous entity created by a single author. The French
critic Julia Kristeva coined the term, which she derived from the theory of
Dialogism formulated by Mikhail Bakhtin. There are two types of intertextuality:
citation and presupposition.
708. William Hazlitt - "Poetry is the language of imagination and the passions".
709. William Wordsworth - "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
recollected in tranquillity".
710. James Reeves - “Poetry is vital, fresh and surprising language".
711. James H. Smith - "Poetry is the art by which feeling is conveyed by author to
reader in metrical language".
712. John Keats - "Poetry is a friend to soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of
man".
713. P.B. Shelly - " Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and
makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar".
714. John Keats : A thing of beauty is a joy forever
715. Hopkins : Glory be to God for Dappled things
716. Robert Burns : "O my love's like a red, red rose,"
717. Robert Frost : “Miles to go before I sleep”
718. The Utopian Socialist Charles Fourier coined the word “Feminoisme” in 1837.
719. In her book A Fearful Freedom: Women’s Flight from Equality, Wendy Kaminer
identifies another conflict between forms of feminism, the conflict between what
she calls “egalitarian” and “ protectionist” feminism. In her characterisation,
egalitarian feminists focus on promoting equality between women and men, and
giving women and men equal rights.
720. Martin Luther King Jr said, “A threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere.”
721. Katha Pollitt wrote Reasonable Creatures
722. Warren Farell wrote The Myth of Male Power and Woman can’t Hear What Men
Don’t say
723. Elinor represents ‘sense’ and Marianne represents ‘sensibility’ in Jane Austen’s
Sense and Sensibility.
724. Frankenstein Unbound was written in 1973 by Aldiss Brian, and he is known as a
science fiction writer.
725. Cleanth Brooks’s analysis of Keats’s poem appears in his The Well Wrought Urn
(1947).
726. Japanese –American Writers : Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter(1953; 1979), John
Okada’s No No Boy ,Yoshiko Uchida’s Picture Bride (1987), Joy Kogawa’s Obrason
(1981), Cynthia Kadahota’s The Floating World (1989).
727. The psychology of jealousy achieved its most powerful rendering in Marcel Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27), in which the personal disintegration the
jealous lovers undergo mirrors the collapse of their society.
728. Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita (1955), Samuel Richrdson wrote Pamela and
Clarissa, Henry Fielding wrote Shamela.
729. Distinguished Jewish-American writers who have not generally focused on the
Jewish experience include J. D. Salinger, Normal Mailer, Susan Sontag, and Arthur
Miller, although Miller’s drama The Price(1968) stands as an exception. Female

Quick Points
writers include the notable short fiction writers Tillie Olsen (Tell Me a Riddle,
1967), Grace Paley (Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 1974) and Allegra
Goodman (The Family Markowitz, 1996). Other writers are, Alfred Kazin’s A Walker
in the City (1951), Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1950), and most
important from the standpoint of Jewish American experience is Irving Howe’s The
World of Our Fathers (1976).
730. Jouissance The term employed by French critic and semiotic Roland Barthes in his
The Pleasure of the Text (1973) to distinguish two responses to literature. One
response is “pleasure,” the satisfaction of having one’s basic beliefs and
expectations ratified by the text. The other is the shattering, unsettling and
disorienting experience of “jouissance.”
731. Arnold Wesker wrote The Kitchen (1954).
732. Knickerbocker group: Theterm for a group of writers living in New York in the
first half of the 19th century. The group members were Washington Irving’s History
of New York (1809), James Fenimore Cooper, the poet William Cullen Bryant, and
the playwright John Howard Payne, best remembered as the composer of the song
“Home Sweet Home.”
733. Lake Poets: The term for a group of early Romantic poets—William Wordsworth,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey—who lived in the Lake District of
Cumbria in North-western England.
734. Language Poets: A contemporary school of American poets emphasizing a number
of defamiliarization techniques, including the condensation and distortion of words,
phrases, and sentences. Among the poets associated with this movement are Ron
Silliman, Bob Perelman, and Lyn Hejinian.
735. Langue/Parole are the contrasting terms employed by the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure to distinguish language as an abstract system (langue) from
a particular speech or utterance (parole) in that language.
736. Herman Melville wrote Billy Budd (1891).
737. Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805, uses the narrative device of a tale
told by an aging minstrel.
738. Chekhov wrote The Cherry Orchard (1904)
739. Woody Allen is the author of Manhattan (1979)
740. The Liberal Imagination (1950) is the title of an important essay and book by the
distinguished critic Lionel Trilling.
741. Limerick: A form of light verse consisting of five anapestic lines rhyming a-a-b-b-a.
The vogue for the limerick was created in 1846, when the humorist Edward Lear
included examples in his Book of Nonsense.
742. In Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye traces the “history” of the basic forms of
tragedy, comedy, lyric, and epic as cyclical movements that pass through five
phases: mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic.
743. The DIAL, founded in 1840 as a vehicle for the ideas associated with
Transcendentalism. Among its earliest editors were Margaret Fuller and Ralph
Waldo Emerson.
744. English little magazine The Yellow Book (1894–97), which proclaimed the
principles of aestheticism and included among its contributors Oscar Wilde, Henry
James, and Aubrey Beardsley, whose artistic designs broke new ground in art
illustration.
745. Logocentrism: In the principles of Deconstruction, the belief in an ultimate
referral point outside of language that forms the basis of Western thought. As

Quick Points
critiqued by Jacques Derrida, who coined the term, logocentrism lies at the root of
the assumption that words “present” (in the sense of “make present”) to the
listener their referent, the object to which they refer. Derrida derives his term from
logos, a Greek word that means both “word” and “logic” or “reason.”
746. Lost Generation: A term used to describe a group of young American writers of the
1920s who experienced alienation and the loss of ideals resulting from World War I
and its aftermath.
747. Rosalind remarks in As You Like It, “Men have died from time to time, and worms
have eaten them, but not for love.”
748. In Henry VI, Part Three, Shakespeare has the villainous Gloucester (later to be
crowned Richard III) asserted that he will “set the murderous Machiavel to school.”
749. Magic Realism is a term referring to fiction that integrates realistic elements with
supernatural or fantastic experiences. The most celebrated example of magic
realism is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1971), Toni
Morrison (Beloved, 1987), Donald Barthelme (The Dead Father, 1975), Alice Walker
(The Color Purple, 1982) and William Kennedy (Quinn’s Book, 1988).
750. Malapropism An unconscious PUN, the misuse of a word sounding like the
appropriate word. The term derives from Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard
Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy The Rivals (1775).
751. Twentieth-century examples include the manifestoes of FUTURISM (1909),
IMAGISM (1915), SURREALISM (1924), and PROJECTIVISM (1950).
752. The central texts of contemporary Marxist criticism include George Lukacs’s The
Historical Novel (1963); Louis Althusser’s “Ideological State Apparatuses” in his
Lenin and Philosophy (1971); Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism
(1976), and Literary Theory (1983); and Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form
(1971) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
753. John Milton’s Comus (1634) is a masque.
754. Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale include brief masques while the The
Tempest contains a masque followed by Prospero’s famous speech that begins “Our
revels now are ended.”
755. Melodrama is a type of DRAMA that highlights suspense and romantic sentiment,
with characters who are usually either clearly good or bad. As its name implies, the
form frequently uses a musical background to underscore or heighten the
emotional tone of a scene.
756. Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958) is a memoir.
757. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes,” is a line from T. S. Eliot’s
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915).
758. “An Epistle of Dr. Arbuthnot” is a poem by Alexander Pope published in 1735. The
poem is addressed to Pope’s Friend John Abuthnot. The epistle is an apology in
which Pope defends his works against the attacks of his detractors particularly
Joseph Addison, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, John Lord Hervey. The poem has
character sketches of “Atticus” (Addison) and “Sporus” (John Hervey).
759. John Donne: “For God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love.”
760. Metaphysical Poets: Donne was the first and preeminent metaphysical poet. Later
followers included George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, Richard
Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, and Thomas Traherne.
761. Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Wit (1998), a drama about an English
professor dying of cancer after having devoted her life to the poetry of Donne.

Quick Points
762. Metatheatre: A term coined by the critic Lionel Abel to describe a dramatic form
that focuses on the “dramatic consciousness” of its characters—the consciousness,
that is, of being characters in a play. For Abel, the earliest example of the form is
Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “For the first time in the history of drama the problem of the
protagonist is that he has a playwright’s consciousness.” Other examples are Pedro
Calderón de la Barca’s Life Is a Dream (1635) and, in modern drama, Luigi
Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Jean Genet’s The Balcony
(1956), and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967). Lionel
Abel’s Metatheatre (1963) contains a full account of the term.
763. Iambic is one unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable, as in the line
quoted above.
764. Spondaic is Two stressed and no unstressed syllables.
765. Anapestic is Two unaccented syllables followed by one accented.
766. Dactylic is one accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables.
767. Trochaic One accented syllable followed by an unaccented one.
768. MONOMETER - One foot
769. DIMETER - Two feet
770. TRIMETER - Three feet
771. TETRAMETER - Four feet
772. PENTAMETER - Five feet
773. HEXAMETER - Six feet
774. HEPTAMETER - Seven feet
775. The best-known meter in English verse is iambic pentameter. Unrhymed iambic
pentameter is also known as BLANK VERSE, the meter of Shakespeare’s plays and
John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
776. SYNECDOCHE, a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole or vice versa.
777. Mime: A play with no dialogue, in which the actor or actors rely on the skilful
employment of bodily movements or facial gestures.
778. Irish-born writers produced extraordinary achievements in poetry, drama, and
fiction. William Butler Yeats (poetry), James Joyce (fiction), and John Millington
Synge and Sean O’Casey (drama).
779. In his Apologie for Poetrie (1595), Sir Philip Sidney describes POETRY as “an art of
imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word Mimesis, that is to say a
representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth; to speak metaphorically, a speaking
picture.”
780. Mimetic Desire is a Term coined by the myth critic and theorist René Girard,
asserting that certain sexual, political or social drives are not instinctive but are
imitations learned by copying another. Ex: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream or Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, exhibit mimetic desire.
781. The earliest known miracle play in French is Le jeu de Saint Nicholas (c. 1200) by
Jean Bodel.
782. “to make it new” is a phrase by Ezra Pound.
783. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species (1859).
784. The critic Denis Donoghue has expressed it, “Modernism is concerned with the
validity of one’s feelings and the practice of converting apparently external images
and events into inwardness, personal energy.”
785. Monologue is a long speech by one speaker.
786. Soliloquy: If the speaker is alone such a speech is called a Soliloquy.
787. Apostrophe: The speaker addresses someone absent or an abstract idea.

Quick Points
788. Dramatic Monologue The speech is addressed to someone present.

789. An Interior Monologue represents a character’s fleeting thoughts and
impressions, or inner speech.
790. Monometer is a line of verse consisting of one FOOT.
791. Morpheme In linguistics, the smallest meaningful unit of a language. Some words,
such as work, constitute a single morpheme; they cannot be broken down any
further. Others, such as worker, contain two morphemes, work and er, a person
who works.
792. Phoneme: A parallel term in relation to sound instead of meaning.
793. Moscow Art Theatre: A repertory theatre founded by Konstantin Stanislavski
(1863–1938) and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1897, famous for its acting
style and its association with the great Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. Its early
production of Chekhov’s The Sea Gull (1895), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry
Orchard (1904) established its pre-eminence in the performance of his plays.
794. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s description of critics’ search for Iago’s motivation in
Shakespeare’s Othello as “the motive hunting of a motiveless malignity.”
795. The Movement is the name given to a group of English poets in the 1950s who
stressed irony, restraint, self-doubt, and the celebration of ordinary life. Among its
practitioners were Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, and, most
notably, Philip Larkin.
796. Muckrakers is a term coined by Theodore Roosevelt to describe a group of
American writers in the first decade of the 20th century who exposed the corrupt
practices of certain big businesses and government officials.
797. Mummers’ Play/Mumming Play: A form of folk play performed during Christmas
time in English villages in the 16th and 17th centuries. Many of the plays feature the
folk hero of the Red Cross, St. George. The basic plot involves a fight between St.
George and the Turkish Knight, one of whom is killed.
798. “The Rake’s Progress” ( 1951) was written by W H Auden.
799. Aldous Huxley’s novel is Point Counterpoint (1928)
800. In John Osborne’s The Entertainer (1956), the fading music hall performer Archie
Rice comes to stand for post-war England, still clinging to its old glory days as it
loses its place on the world stage.
801. James Frazier, whose multi-volume The Golden Bough (1890–1915) is a collection
of myths and rituals exhibiting archetypal patterns from a wide variety of cultures.
802. Leslie Fiedler wrote Love and Death in the American Novel (1960).
803. Northrop Frye wrote A Natural Perspective (1965).
804. Naive/Sentimental: The terms were coined by the German dramatist and critic
Friedrich Schiller in his On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795–96), in which he
contrasts the literature of classical Greece with that of his own time. Schiller argues
that the Greeks lived in harmony with nature and produced a poetry that was more
natural and less tortured by the ethical doubts and idealized goals of late
18thcentury poets. He calls for a union of the naive and sentimental, exemplified for
him by his great contemporary Johann von Goethe.
805. John Keats coined the term “egotistical sublime.”
806. In Hamlet and Narcissism (1995), John Russell argues that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is
a character trapped in a narcissistic illusion generated by his ambivalence toward
his dead father. He contrasts Hamlet’s failure to move beyond narcissism to Edgar’s
successful reconciliation with his father, the earl of Gloucester, in King Lear.
807. Charles Kinbote is the narrator in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire ( 1962).

Quick Points
808. The first novel by a Native American, Sophia Alice Callahan’s Wynema, was
published in 1891.
809. N. Scott Momaday won Pulitzer Prize for his House Made of Dawn.
810. Rudyard Kipling is the youngest to win the Nobel Prize and Doris Lessing is the
oldest who won the Nobel Prize at the age of 93.
811. Native American Writers: Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony, 1977), Louise Erdrich
(Love Medicine, 1984), and James Welch (Fools Crow, 1986) in fiction. In poetry,
Simon Ortiz (From Sand Creek, 1981), Joy Harjo (In Mad Love and War, 1990), and
Sherman Alexie (The Business of Fancydancing, 1992)
812. Naturalism is a late 19th-century movement in literature and art that grew out of
the theory of Realism. The foremost spokesman of the naturalist school was Émile
Zola, who expressed these ideas in two works, The Experimental Novel(1880) and
Naturalism in the Theatre (1882). In American literature naturalism was evident in
the works of Stephen Crane (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 1893), Frank Norris (The
Octopus, 1901), Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie, 1900; An American Tragedy, 1925),
and James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan, 1932–34). In drama, naturalist classics include
Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1873), Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1902), and Eugene
O’Neill’s early plays, such as The Long Voyage Home (1917).
813. Negative Capability is a term coined by the poet John Keats to describe the poet’s
capacity to negate oneself in order to enter into and become one with his or her
subject. For Keats, this was the quality “which Shakespeare possessed so
enormously . . . capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
814. Negritude: A movement initiated in the 1930s by black writers residing in French
colonies in Africa and the West Indies. Aimé Césaire coined the term.
815. Neologism is a word or phrase recently introduced into a language or an old word
that has been given a new meaning. Ex: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939).
816. Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609). It was published in First Folio in 1623.
817. New Apocalypse Movement: An overblown name for a group of British poets in
the 1940s, whose poems, essays, and stories reflected their intense subjectivity and
ornate language. Their work appeared in three anthologies, The New Apocalypse
(1940), The White Horseman(1941), and The Cross and the Sickle (1941), edited
by two of its leading members, J.T . Hendry and Henry Treece.
818. New Criticism: It arose in the 1920s and ’30s. New Criticism can be said to have
begun with the publication in 1924 of I. A. Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism
and the same author’s Practical Criticism (1929). The term New Criticism was
coined by the American critic John Crowe Ransom in a book of that title published
in 1941. The basic principle of New Criticism was to locate the meaning of a literary
work not in the intention of the author nor in the experience of the reader, but in
“the text itself,” the internal relations of language that constitute a “poem.” The New
Critics tended to employ the term poem to describe any type of literature, perhaps
a reflection of their greater success in analyzing poems than fiction or drama. The
principles of New Criticism were challenged by the BEAT and Projectivism
movements and by Myth Criticism in the ’50s,
819. In England, William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) is a classic New
Critical text and a striking example of the “close reading” technique advanced by
Richards.
820. New Formalism: A movement in American poetry of the 1980s to revive
traditional formal verse. A reaction to the dominance of Free Verse in

Quick Points
contemporary poetry, the New Formalists called for a return to traditional

craftsmanship and the cultivation of a wider poetic audience. Among its
practitioners are Dana Gioia, Molly Peacock, Charles Martin, and Timothy Steele.
821. New Humanism : An American critical movement in the first three decades of the
20th century that set itself against the dominance of scientific thought and modern
skepticism. The leading figures of New Humanism were Irving Babbit (The New
Laokoon, 1910) and Paul Elmer More (The Demon of the Absolute, 1928). The
movement was overshadowed in the 1930s by the New Criticism and the Marxist
Criticism of the period.
822. “nouveau roman” means ‘new novel’.
823. Newspeak is a term coined by George Orwell in his anti-Utopian novel 1984
(1949).
824. The New Yorker: A weekly magazine distinguished by the quality of its fiction,
essays, reviews, and, not least, cartoons. Founded in 1925 by its first editor, Harold
Ross.
825. New York intellectuals : A general term for the writers and critics associated with
the monthly journal Partisan Review from the 1930s through the 1960s. Notable
figures are Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Harold Rosenberg, Dwight
McDonald, and Philip Rahv.
826. New York School: In the 1950s, a group of poets based in New York City who opted
for a more informal and unpretentious poetic style than that of their
contemporaries. Among the group’s prominent practitioners were Frank O’Hara,
Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, John Ashbery .
827. In his two novels, The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), Kafka creates ironic
parables of human life in which simple existence is guilt.
828. Samuel Beckett wrote the plays (Waiting for Godot, 1952; Endgame, 1957) and
novels (Malone Dies, 1951; The Unnameable, 1953).
829. No : A highly ritualized form of Japanese theatre, whose fixed repertory of plays has
remained unchanged for 400 years. No¯ plays incorporate music, dance, and poetry
in austerely beautiful presentations that aim not at representing reality, but at
creating a mood through visual and verbal imagery. The Irish poet William Butler
Yeats adapted the No¯ form in a number of short plays, including At the Hawk’s Well
(1916) and Fighting the Waves (1929).
830. French Novelists : Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Stendahl, and Émile Zola
831. Russian Novelists : Aleksandr Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and
Leo Tolstoy
832. England (British)Novelists : Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, William Makepeace
Thackeray, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy
833. American Novelists: James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman
Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James.
834. 20th century Novelists: James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann,
Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and D. H. Lawrence.
835. Novel of Ideas: A novel in which the focus is less on character and action than on
philosophical questions that are debated and discussed at length. Ex: Fyodor
Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic
Mountain (1924).
836. Novel Of Manners: A type of novel in which the social conventions of a given
society—its speech, habits, and values—play significant roles. The main focus of the
form is summarized in the title of Anthony Trollope’s novel of manners The Way We

Quick Points
Live Now (1875). As a novelist of manners, Trollope followed in the tradition of Jane
Austen, Honoré de Balzac, and William Makepeace Thackeray.
837. Novella: A term for a story that is longer than a short story and shorter than a
novel. Distinguished 20th-century examples of the form include Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice (1912), Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1902), and Ernest
Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
838. Novy Mir (“Our World”) An important literary journal from 1925 to the breakup
of the Soviet Union, continuing today in contemporary Russia.
839. Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion” contains 24 stanzas for each hour of the day, 365
long lines for the days of the year, and 68 short lines for the sum of the months (12),
weeks (52), and seasons (4) of the year.
840. Objective Correlative: A term coined by T. S. Eliot to describe an author’s need to
represent a character’s internal emotion as an objective person or thing. Eliot used
the term in an essay called “Hamlet and His Problems,” in which he maintained that
Hamlet’s inner turmoil was objectified in the play in the person of Gertrude,
Hamlet’s mother.
841. T. S. Eliot’s essay “Hamlet and His Problems” is included in his The Sacred Wood
(1920).
842. Objectivism: A movement among American poets that began in 1931 as a further
development of imagism.
843. Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” written in response
to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, is an example of occasional verse.
844. The Occult: In literature, the term occult refers to the presence of magical,
mysterious, or supernatural influences in a literary work.
845. Blake wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1791).
846. Octave is a poetic stanza containing eight lines.
847. Ode: A lyric poem of any length that addresses a person or treats a theme in a
dignified, serious manner. In English poetry there are three types of odes: the
Pindaric, the Horatian, and the irregular. The Pindaric ode is named after the Greek
poet Pindar (fifth century B.C.), whose poems, written to commemorate athletic
victories, were sung by a chorus. The Horatian odes, after the Roman poet Horace
(65–6 B.C.), are more personal and reflective. Both types employed regular stanzaic
and metrical patterns. The irregular ode, associated with the 17th-century English
poet Abraham Cowley, broke with the tradition of regular stanzas, permitting
variation. Ex: Ben Jonson’s “Ode to Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Morrison”
(Pindaric), John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Horatian), and William
Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (irregular).
848. Oedipal Complex: The theory advanced by Sigmund Freud that very young
children experience an intense love for the parent of the opposite sex and a
consequent hatred and fear of the other parent, whom they view as a rival. If this
emotion is not resolved in childhood, it becomes a determining factor in later adult
life. To illustrate his theory, Freud chose Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the tragedy of a
man who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. For Freud the
universal appeal of the Oedipus story confirmed the universality of its underlying
theme. Subsequently, in an early example of Psychoanalytical Criticism, Freud
suggested that Shakespeare’s Hamlet illustrated the presence of the Oedipal conflict
in its main character—and implicitly in its author. Freud’s observation was
developed into a full-length study (Hamlet and Oedipus, 1949) by his disciple
Ernest Jones. Ex: D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913)

Quick Points
849. Onomatopoeia: A word whose sound hints at its meaning, such as bang, zap, and
hiss. The term is also used to describe a group of words in which sound and sense
reinforce each other.
850. Organic Form is a term originally employed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in
defending Shakespeare from neoclassical critics’ charges of formal flaws in his
plays. Coleridge argues that Shakespeare’s works exhibit “organic” rather than
“mechanic” form.
851. Edward Said wrote Orientalism (1978).
852. Ottava Rima: An eight-line stanza (octave) with an a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c rhyme scheme.
In its original Italian version each line consists of 11 syllables. As adapted into
English, it is written in iambic pentameter. The 16th-century poet Sir Thomas
Wyatt was the first poet to employ the form in English. In the 19th century, Lord
Byron used it with great success in his Don Juan (1819–24). Among modern poems
employing the stanza, one of the best known is William Butler Yeats’s “Among
School Children.”
853. Oxford Movement: A 19th-century reform movement within the Anglican Church
(the Church of England). Alarmed by the degree to which skepticism and
materialism had emerged in English religious life, leaders of the movement, who
included John Henry Newman, John Keble, E. B. Pusey, and R. H. Froude, advocated
a return to the Catholic rituals of the middle ages.
854. Oxymoron: A contradictory term, such as Milton’s “darkness visible,” employed to
highlight an ambiguous condition.
855. Palindrome: A word, group of words, or sentence that reads the same backward
and forward. Among famous examples: “Madam, I’m Adam” and the complaint,
falsely attributed to Napoleon, “Able was I ere I saw Elba.”
856. Pamphleteers : Sir Thomas More and William Tyndale, Robert Greene’s Greene’s
Groatsworth of Wit (1592),
857. Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), a classic plea for freedom of the press.
858. In Jonathan Swift’s satirical masterpiece A Modest Proposal for Preventing the
Children of the Poor People in Ireland from Becoming a Burthen to Their Parents or
Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick (1729), he suggests that poor
Irish children should be killed and sold as food.
859. Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis (1776–83) was a series of 16 pamphlets, the
first of which included the famous opening line, “These are times that try men’s
souls.”
860. Pantoum: A poetic form made up of QUATRAINS, in which the second and fourth
lines of one stanza are repeated as the first and third lines in the next stanza. In the
final stanza the second and fourth lines repeat the first and third lines of the first
stanza. The form was adopted by 19th-century French poets from Malaysian
poetry.
861. Parable is a tale designed to teach a moral lesson.
862. In The Well Wrought Urn (1947), Brooks discusses the importance of paradox in a
series of poems from John Donne’s “The Canonization” to William Butler Yeats’s
“Among School Children.”
863. Parataxis: In Rhetoric, clauses or phrases arranged in coordinate rather than
subordinate constructions.
864. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) is a parody of the popular Gothic Novels of
her day.
865. Umberto Eco wrote The Name of the Rose (1983)

Quick Points
866. David Lodge wrote Nice Work (1988)

867. Pastoral: Originally a literary form idealizing the lives of shepherds (the Latin for
shepherd is pastor), more recently used to describe celebrations of innocent
country or small town life. Examples include Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calendar
(1590), Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590), and Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599).
868. William Empson wrote Some Versions of Pastoral (1935)
869. J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is often regarded as an “urban”
pastoral, a contradiction justified here by the young hero’s attempt to wrest
innocence and honesty from the jaws of corrupt experience.
870. Pathetic Fallacy: A term coined by the art critic John Ruskin in his Modern Painters
(1856) to describe the poetic attribution of human feelings to natural objects, such
as trees and mountains.
871. Peripeteia: In drama or narrative, a reversal in fortune, either, as in comedy, the
move from bad to good, or in tragedy from good to bad or, occasionally, from bad to
worse.
872. Personification: A figure of speech in which human qualities are attributed to an
inanimate or abstract entity. Personification is a common feature of POETRY from
Virgil (“the tears of things”) to Emily Dickinson (“Because I could not stop for
Death/He kindly stopped for me”) to popular songs (“April played the fiddle”).
873. Personification is an essential component of allegory.
874. Jacques Derrida coined the term “phallogocentrism.”
875. Toril Moi wrote Sexual/Textual Politics in 1985.
876. Phenomenology is a philosophical method that describes objects as they are
registered in the consciousness of an observer. The founder of phenomenology is
Edmund Husserl, who described its aim as a description of what is given in
experience.
877. Philistine: A boorish, uncultivated person. Matthew Arnold used the term in his
Culture and Anarchy (1869) to describe the prosperous middle class that had come
to power in industrialized Europe.
878. Phoneme In linguistics, the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes one word
from another. A phoneme is always seen in relation to other phonemes. Thus the b
in big and the p in pig are phonemes.
879. Picaresque is a term for a form of narrative that recounts the adventures of a
pícaro(Spanish for “rogue”). Ex : Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man(1857),
Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth (1944), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Saul
Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953), and Thomas Mann’s The Adventures
of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954).
880. Plagiarism is the act of representing as one’s own the writing of another person.
881. Poetaster In ELIZABETHAN drama, a disparaging term for an inferior poet. Ben
Jonson’s The Poetaster (1600) was a satiric attack directed at two rival playwrights,
John Marston and Thomas Dekker.
882. Symbolist Poets : Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine
883. Poetic Diction refers to the choice of words used in a literary work. Poetic diction
refers to the special use of language in POETRY, its order, arrangement, and, in
some cases, vocabulary.
884. Poetic Justice The doctrine that a literary work ought to end with the good
characters rewarded and the evil ones punished. The term was coined by Thomas
Rymer, a disciple of NEOCLASSICISM, who dismissed Shakespeare’s Othello as “a
Bloody Farce, without salt or savor.”

Quick Points
885. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) was banned in the United States until a court decision
in 1933 for having pornographic content in the book.
886. Frantz Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks in 1950 and The Wretched of the Earth
in 1961.
887. Postcolonial Literature : Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart,1958), Wole Soyinka
(A Dance of the Forests,1960), and Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children,1981). Well-
known postcolonial critics include Gayatri Spivak (In Other Worlds,1987), Henry
Louis Gates (The Signifying Monkey,1980), and Kwame Appiah (In My Father’s
House, 1992).
888. Gabriel García Márquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970)
889. Vladimir Nabokov wrote Pale Fire (1962)
890. Derrida’s essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
was written in 1966.
891. Julia Kristeva coined the term INTERTEXTUALITY.
892. C. S. Lewis referred to mid-Tudor poetry as the “Drab Age.”
893. Practical Criticism is associated with the critic I. A. Richards, whose Practical
Criticism (1929) had a profound impact on the teaching of literature in the United
States and Britain from the 1930s to the 1960s.
894. Prague School : Term for a group of linguists at Charles University in Prague from
1926 to 1948 who laid the groundwork for French Structuralism. A key figure in the
group was the linguist Roman Jakobson, who emigrated to Prague from Moscow,
bringing with him the ideas of Russian Formalism.The Prague School extended the
work of the Formalists by integrating it with the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de
Saussure, whose theory of the SIGN was to have a profound impact on
Structuralism.Another important theorist of the Prague School was Jan
Mukarovsky, who developed the concept of Foregrounding, the use of self-
referential language within a text.
895. Joseph Conrad wrote preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897).
896. Pre-Raphaelites A group of English artists who in 1848 founded a movement
protesting the conventional academic art of the time. The pre-Raphaelites called for
a simpler, less sophisticated form of painting than that which followed in the wake
of the Renaissance painter Raphael (1483–1520).In literature the movement is
associated with the POETRY of Christina and Dante Rossetti, A.C. Swinburne, and
William Morris. Their poetry strove to capture the sensuous religious character of
pre-Raphaelite painting. A typical pre-Raphaelite poem is Dante Rossetti’s “The
Blessed Damozel” (1850), with its combination of sensuous detail, religious feeling,
and dreamlike mood.
897. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote The House of the Dead (1861).
898. Lord Byron’s narrative poem The Prisoner of Chillon (1816), cast as a dramatic
monologue delivered by Francis Bonjonist, a 16th-century French satirist.
899. Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1847), whose chief character, Amy Dorrit, works for
years in a desperate effort to free her father from the Marshalsea debtors’ prison.
900. Robert Burns wrote I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!(1932)
901. Problem Plays: A form of drama that raises controversial social questions. Henrik
Ibsen focused on social problems in A Doll’s House (women’s rights), An Enemy of
the People (the moral individual in an immoral society), and Ghosts (religious
hypocrisy and venereal disease). Ex : George Bernard Shaw (Mrs. Warren’s
Profession , 1893), Lillian Hellman (The Children’s Hour, 1934), and Arthur Miller

Quick Points
(All My Sons, 1947), All’s Well That Ends Well (1602), Troilus and Cressida (1602),
and Measure for Measure (1604).
902. Projectivism is a term for a movement among American poets triggered by the
poet Charles Olson in his essay “Projective Verse” (1950).
903. Prosody : In literature, the study of the metrical characteristics of verse, such as
Meter, Rhyme, and Rhythm.
904. Pun : A play on words, usually for comic effect, but sometimes for a serious
purpose. Jonathan Culler’s On Puns: The Foundation of Letters (1988) argues for the
pun as a central feature of literary language.
905. Puritanism A religious reform movement beginning in mid-16th-century England
that went on to play a major role in the shaping of American literature. The original
Puritans focused on the reform of practices and services of the Church of England.
906. Quatrain : A four-line stanza of verse, generally exhibiting a rhyme scheme. The
traditional Ballad was usually composed in quatrains, in which the second and
fourth lines rhyme.
907. Quintain : A five-line stanza of verse
908. Tom Stoppard wrote The Dog It Was That Died (1982)
909. H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds , Time Machine etc
910. Readerly/Writerly (Lisible/Scriptible) : Contrasting terms used by the French
theorist Roland Barthes to describe a fundamental distinction between two types of
text. The readerly (lisible) text is the conventional narrative with a beginning,
middle and end, a fi nished product that leaves the reader in the position of a
passive consumer. The writerly (scriptible) text, on the other hand, is process
rather than product, an open, pluralist, linguistic experience which the reader is
asked not to consume but to co-produce. Roland Barthes explains his use of the
term in his S/Z (1970).
911. Stanley Fish wrote Is There A Text in This Class? (1980)
912. A significant contribution to realist criticism is Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1953), a
study of “the literary treatment of reality.” Auerbach sees realism rooted in two
distinct traditions, the classical and the biblical.
913. The most important American naturalist writers were Stephen Crane (Maggie: A
Girl of the Streets,1896), Harold Frederic (The Damnation of Theron Ware,1896),
Frank Norris (McTeague,1899), and Jack London (The Call of the Wild,1903).
914. Reception theory is associated with Hans Robert Jauss, who formulated his theory
in 1967, at which time he focused on readers in the collective sense.
915. T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets explores the relation of time to eternity.
916. Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets chided Donne and the other metaphysicals
for employing “heterogeneous ideas . . . yoked by violence together.”
917. Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama Wit (1999), in which a Donne
scholar discovers on her deathbed the limitations of his poetry and her life.
918. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1589) was an early influential example of
revenge tragedy. Other works include Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy
(1607), John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599), and George Chapman’s The
Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois (1610), Shakespeare’s Hamlet
919. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the idea of revenge presents the hero with a moral
confl ict he must resolve before acting on his revenge.
920. Connecticut Wits : John Trumbull, the author of a satirical mock epic M’Fingal
(1776), heavily indebted in its form to Pope’s poems. The most accomplished poet
of the period was Philip Freneau, “the poet of the American Revolution,” who wrote

Quick Points
sharp, satirical attacks on the British army. Historically important was the poetry of
Phillis Wheatley (Poems on Various Subjects,1773), a black slave who mastered the
conventions of neoclassical poetry.
921. Rhyme Royal A seven-line stanza rhyming a-b-a-b-b-c-c in iambic pentameter.
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (1370) is in rhyme royal.
922. Rococo : The term refers to an elegant, witty, graceful prose and verse style that
framed certain ideas associated with the Enlightenment,an era that celebrated free
thought. Among works that qualify as rococo are Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the
Lock (1712–14), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and Tobias Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker
(1771).
923. roman à clef (novel with a key) A French term for a novel in which actual,
sometimes well-known people or institutions are presented with fictional names.
924. roman à thèse (thesis novel) A French term for a novel that advocates a specifi c
position on a social or moral question. Ex: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
(1939), an indictment of the treatment of migrant laborers in the 1930s, and
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), a protest
against the inhumanity of Soviet concentration camps.
925. Romance : A type of narrative featuring adventures in exotic places, love stories,
and/or the celebration of simple rustic life. In Northrop Frye’s words, “the romance
is nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfillment dream. . . .”
Ex: Shakespeare’s Pericles(1607), Cymbeline(1609), The Winter’s Tale(1610), and The
Tempest (1613), Cervantes’s Don Quixote(1605, 1615).
926. Romanticism revived the romance in verse form.
927. Verse Romances : John Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” (1820), Alfred, Lord
Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859), and William Morris’s Earthly Paradise (1868–
70).
928. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance (1851).
929. Hawthorne declares, “When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be
observed that he wishes to proclaim a certain latitude. . . which he would not have
felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a novel.”
930. A central tenet of Romanticism was the belief in nature as a source of poetic
inspiration.
931. John Updike wrote In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996).
932. The best example for modern saint play is T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral
(1935), a verse rendering of the assassination of Saint Thomas à Becket.
933. Sapphics Verse stanzas of four lines, of which the first three have 11 syllables and
the fourth, fi ve syllables.
934. Satire A type of literature that aims to ridicule folly or vice in a society, an
institution, or an individual. Satire uses laughter as a weapon against any target
that the satirist considers silly, stupid, or vicious. Ex: John Dryden (MacFlecknoe),
Alexander Pope (The Dunciad), and Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels), Lord Byron
(Don Juan), George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949)
935. George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) aimed at totalitarian
governments.
936. Scansion: A method of describing a poem by analyzing the METER and RHYME of
its lines. The most common form of scansion divides a metrical FOOT into stressed
and unstressed syllables. A stress is indicted by a virgule (/) or dash (-) and an
unstressed syllable by a breve (˘) or x. Scansion also attends to a pause or caesura

Quick Points
within a line, indicated by a double vertical line (||) and to its rhyme scheme,
indicated by small letters a, b, c, and so on.
937. Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899), in which Jim’s decision to save himself from a sinking
ship ironically illustrates the “survival of the fittest.”
938. Science Fiction A type of fiction based on future possibilities, derived from
scientific discoveries. Ex: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Jules Verne’s Voyage
to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), H. G.
Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men on
the Moon (1901), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), C. S. Lewis’ Out of the
Silent Planet (1938), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), William Gibson’s
Necromancer (1984), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), George Lucas’s Star Wars
(1977)
939. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in which a man-made monster suggests the
possibility of scientific discovery going too far, taking on a God-like power that
leads to disaster.
940. The term science fiction was popularized in America by Hugo Gernsback, the editor
of Amazing Stories,the first magazine devoted to science fiction.
941. Scrutiny An influential literary journal published in England from 1932 to 1953.
Its editor was the powerful critic F. R. Leavis, and it numbered among its
contributors T. S. Eliot.
942. écriture féminine means “feminine writing”.
943. Semiotics/Semiology is the study of SIGNS.
944. The American philosopher Charles Peirce coined the term semiotics in 1867;
semiology is the coinage of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
945. T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) contains an allusion
to Polonius as “full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse.”
946. Sestet: A poem or stanza of six lines. The term is also used to describe the final six
lines of a Petrarchan SONNET, in which the sestet offers a response to the
proposition in the fi rst eight lines.
947. Sewanee Review Periodical published since 1892 by the University of the South in
Sewanee, Tennessee. Since the early 1940s, the Reviewhas been noted for the
quality of the essays, criticism, and fiction. During those years, it was closely
identified with the NEW CRITICISM particularly the Southern writers Robert Penn
Warren, Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks.
948. Signifier/Signified According to the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the two
component parts of a linguistic SIGN. The signifier is the sound of a word or, in
writing, the marks on a page. The signified is its concept or meaning. Ex : signifier is
‘cat’ andsignified is “the mental images of a four-legged animal”
( Signifier = Sound/ Signified = Meaning)
949. Henry Louis Gates wrote The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American
Criticism (1988).
950. Simile A comparison between two dissimilar things, usually connected by the
words like or as. Ex : “My love is like a red, red rose” is a simile; “My love is a red
rose” is a metaphor.
951. Skeltonics is an irregular verse form used by the early Tudor poet John Skelton.
952. Harold Bloom wrote The Western Canon (1994).
953. Slave Narratives : Nineteenth-century, autobiographical accounts by escaped
slaves. The best known of these accounts is Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass (1845). Douglass’s eloquent description of his experiences amounted to a

Quick Points
damning indictment of slavery. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(1861) and Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869), are authentic, moving
representations of slave life.
954. Henry Louis Gates’s Figures in Black (1987) contains a subtle and perceptive
analysis of slave literature.
955. The most powerful fictional account of the lives of slaves is Toni Morrison’s Beloved
(1987).
956. Soliloquy In drama, a monologue in which a character appears to be thinking out
loud, thereby communicating to the audience his inner thoughts and feelings.
957. William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” (1794)
958. “The Gravedigger’s Song” is in Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
959. Sonnet is a 14-line lyric poem usually written, for sonnets in English, in iambic
pentameter.
960. Celebrated 20th-century sonnets include Thomas Hardy’s “Hap,” William Butler
Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” and Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night.”
961. Robert Penn Warren wrote All the King’s Men (1946).
962. Spenserian stanza A stanza consisting of nine lines, the first eight of which are 10-
syllable iambic pentameters, while the last line contains an 11th syllable. The
rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-b-c-c. This is the stanza of Edmund Spenser’s The
Faerie Queene (1590–96) and of a number of other major English poems including
Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), John Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes”
(1820), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais (1821).
963. Sprung Rhythm It is a distinctive variation of normal meter, in which any number
of stressed syllables may occur without intervening unstressed syllables. The term
was coined by victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ex : Hopkin’s “The Wreck of
the Deutschland”
964. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1948), which begins and ends with directions
for a melody played upon a flute.
965. Stanza: In verse, the basic division of a poem. COUPLET (2 lines) , SESTET (6 lines),
TERCET (3 lines) , SEPTET (7 lines), QUATRAIN (4 lines) , OCTET (8 lines) ,
QUINTAIN (5 lines) , and NONET (9 lines)
966. Stichomythia In DRAMA, a dialogue in which two characters respond to each
other in rapid, hostile repartee. The effect is that of a verbal duel. Ex : Oedipus and
Tiresias in Oedipus Rex, Don Armado and Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost:
967. T. S. Eliot analyzed Shakespeare’s debt to Seneca in a well-known essay
“Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca.”
968. Latin term fabula means “story” ( Fabula= Story)
969. Russian term sjuzet means “plot” ( Sjuzet = Plot)
970. The story of Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins with the murder of Hamlet’s father by
Claudius, but the plot consists of the events as they unfold in the play.
971. Saussure employed two important terms to distinguish particular uses of a
language from the overall language system: langue and parole.
972. Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) A German literary movement in the 1770s.
A reaction to the prevailing 18th-century Neoclassicism, this movement of young
writers strove to achieve an emotional intensity and freedom from the restrictions
of neoclassical conventions. The movement, led by Johann Herder, Friedrich
Schiller, and Johann Goethe, looked to Shakespeare as their model of a natural
genius. Among the major works of the movement were Goethe’s Götz von

Quick Points
Berlichingen (1773), Schiller’s The Robbers (1781), and the play that gave the
movement its name, Friedrich Klinger’s Confusion or Storm and Stress (1776).
973. Dr. Samuel Johnson’s response to the death of Cordelia in King Lear—“I was so
shocked by Cordelia’s death that I know not whether I ever endured to read again
the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor”
974. Michael Ondaatje wrote The English Patient (1992)
975. Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948)
976. Surrealism An artistic and literary movement that stressed the importance of the
UNCONSCIOUS in artistic creativity. The French poet and critic André Breton
founded the movement in 1924, after breaking away from Dada.
977. Breton defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism by means of which we
propose to express either verbally, or in writing, or in some other fashion, what
really goes on in the mind. Dictation by the mind unhampered by conscious control
and having no aesthetic or moral goals.”
978. Sweetness And Light A phrase, popularized by the poet and critic Matthew Arnold
in his Culture and Anarchy (1869), to describe the aim of high culture. For Arnold,
the purpose of culture and literature was to emphasize the life of the spirit
(“sweetness”) and the mind (“light”) against the chief enemy of culture.
979. Syllepsis In RHETORIC,the use of a word that appears to be in the same relation to
two or more other words, but turns out not to be.
980. Synecdoche A figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole or the whole
for the part. Examples include hearts or hands for people, as in “We need brave
hearts and steady hands.”
981. Tel Quel (As Is) : A literary journal, begun in Paris in 1960. The theorist Julia
Kristeva was particularly associated with the journal, in whose pages she first
articulated her concept of Intertextuality.
982. Tenor/Vehicle Two terms coined by the critic I. A. Richards to describe the two
constituents of a METAPHOR. Tenoris Richards’s term for the subject to which the
metaphor applies; vehicle,the figure that illustrates the idea. In John Donne’s “No
man is an island,” man is the tenor, island the vehicle.
983. Tetralogy : Four NOVELS or PLAYS focusing on the same characters. Ex:
Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays and Richard III.
984. “There is no outside-the-text.”, is a famous phrase of Jacques Derrida.
985. In his novel Pale Fire (1962), Vladimir Nabokov satirizes the language and some of
the assumptions of textual criticism.
986. Theater of Cruelty was coined in the 1920s by the French dramatist Antonin
Artaud.
987. theatrum mundi means “theatre of the world”
988. Thick Description The term used by the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz to
describe the anthropologist’s goal, that is, to probe a particular practice in a society
in order to uncover the layers of meaning that underlie the practice.
989. Threnody A lament spoken or sung on the occasion of a funeral. The concluding 15
lines of Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle” is a threnody, celebrating the
fusion of beauty (the phoenix) and fidelity (the turtle dove).
990. Martin Amis wrote Time’s Arrow (1991).
991. topos (topic) In rhetoric,both the material that makes up an argument and the
form these arguments might take. The term is derived from the Greek word for
place. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle lists 28 valid and 10 invalid examples of topoi.

Quick Points
992. Touchstone: A term for a method developed by the 19th-century poet and critic
Matthew Arnold “for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality. . .”
Arnold argues (in The Study of Poetry, 1880) that certain lines or passages written
by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and John Milton constitute infallible criteria for
judging the value of lines placed alongside them.
993. Aristotle defines tragedy as “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete in
itself, and of a certain magnitude. . . in the form of action, not narrative, through pity
and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.”
994. A. C. Bradley wrote Shakespearean Tragedy (1904)
995. Samuel Becket : “There’s nothing funnier than unhappiness.”
996. Transactional Theory A theoretical approach to literature that emphasizes the
interaction of the reader and the text. The critic Louise Rosenblatt first put forth the
theory in Literature as Exploration (1938).
997. Transcendentalism An American literary and philosophical movement that
developed in New England in the 1830s and ’40s. Based upon some of the ideas of
the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and a variety of other sources,
transcendentalism emphasized individual intuition as a central means of
understanding reality.
998. As the leading transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote in his essay Nature
(1836), nature “is the apparition of God. . . the organ through which the universal
spirit speaks to the individual and strives to lead the individual back to it.”
999. Immanuel Kant wrote Critique of Pure Reason (1788)
1000. Transcendental Club: The Dial,a quarterly journal that served as a vehicle of
transcendentalist thought. Among the members of the club were Margaret Fuller,
the first editor of The Dial;the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne; Bronson Alcott, the
father of Louisa May Alcott; and Henry David Thoreau, whose Walden (1854).
1001. Graham Greene’s Lawless Roads (1939), is a description of Mexico in the 1930s.
1002. Trimeter A line of verse consisting of three feet.
1003. Trochee A metrical FOOTof one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed
syllable.
1004. Trope : In rhetoric,a term for figurative language that changes the meaning of
words. The theorist and critic Kenneth Burke has argued that there are four
“master tropes,” METAPHOR, METONYMY, SYNECDOCHE,and IRONY,which help to
shape all of human thought.
1005. Two Cultures A phrase coined in 1959 by the English novelist and scientist C. P.
Snow to dramatize the gap in knowledge that exists between scientists and
humanists.
1006. Ultraism (Ultraismo) A literary movement founded in 1919 by a group of Spanish
poets who argued for a “pure” poetry free from the constraints of logic or
traditional form. The ultraists employed FREE VERSE and favored unusual
disconnected images. In the 1920s, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges
introduced the movement to South America.
1007. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung moved Freud’s concept of a personal unconscious
in a striking direction by positing the existence of a “collective unconscious”.
1008. Sigmund Freud’s An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940), Carl Jung’s The Structure and
Dynamics of the Psyche (1960), and Jacques Lacan’s Écrits (1977) are three basic
texts on the unconscious.
1009. Time, place, and action are called The Unities

Quick Points
1010. University Wits : A term used to describe a group of Oxford and Cambridge
graduates who descended on London at the height of the Elizabethan age. The
greatest of the wits was Christopher Marlowe, whose “mighty line” established
blank verse as the standard form in Elizabethan drama. Others included John Lyly,
George Peele, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Lodge, Samuel Daniel, and Robert Greene.
1011. Greene is the author of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1592), a pamphlet in which he
warns his fellow university men of the appearance of an “upstart crow, beautified
with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, supposes he
is well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you. . . [who] is in his own
conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.” Greene’s remark represents the fi rst
reference to Shakespeare as a London playwright.
1012. Utopia A generic term for a work that describes an ideal community or state. The
term itself derives from St. Thomas More’s Utopia(1516), but the form dates back to
Plato’s Republic(fourth century B.C.). Ex : Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun
(1623), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward
(1887), William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1891), and H. G. Wells’s A Modern
Utopia (1905),Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984
(1949), Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among The Ruins (1953), and Ursula K. LeGuin’s The
Dispossessed (1974).
1013. Bram Stoke wrote Dracula (1931) is a classic example of gothic fiction.
1014. Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë
to Lessing (1977) is a challenging feminist reading, particularly of Jane Eyre.
1015. Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948)
1016. willing suspension of disbelief : A phrase coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in
his Biographia Literaria (1817).
1017. Women’s Writing (Écriture Féminine) In Feminist Criticism, an argument that
the female body plays an important role in a woman’s use of language, particularly
in a literary context. It was derived from the Psychoanalytical Criticism of Jacques
Lacan.
1018. Herman Melville wrote Bartleby the Scriviner (1853)
1019. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote Mary Barton (1848)
1020. French word ‘écriture’ for “Writing”
1021. Yale critics : A group of critics, associated with Deconstruction in the 1970s and
’80s, who were on the faculty of Yale University. The group included J. Hillis Miller,
Geoffrey Hartman, and Paul De Man, the latter regarded as the leading exponent of
deconstruction in the United States.
1022. Yellow Journalism : A general term for newspapers and magazines that
emphasize scandal and lurid stories.
1023. Zeugma : A figure of speech in which one word governs a series of succeeding
words or phrases. Examples include Shakespeare’s “Give them thy fingers, me thy
lips to kiss” and Alexander Pope’s “Who could not win the mistress, wooed the
maid.” In the first example the verb give governs the two phrases that follow; in the
second, the pronoun whogoverns the following phrases.
1024. Novels of Manners : Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), Jane Austen’s
Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814),
Emma(1816) and Persuation (1818), William Makepeace Thackery’sVanity Fair: A
Novel without a Hero (1848), Evylyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1937) etc
1025. Johann Gutenberg developed raised and movable type for printing presses in 1450.
In 1476, a man named William Caxton built the first printing press in England.

Quick Points
1026. Comedy of Manners :Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, William Wycherly’s
The Country Wife (1675), William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), Oliver
Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773), Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals
(1775) and The School for Scandal(1777)
1027. Irving Wardle based the term “Comedy of Menace” on the subtitle of The Lunatic
View : A Comedy of Menace by David Campton.
1028. Caedmon was the first Old English Christian poet. His story is known from
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People,which tells how Caedmon, an
illiterate herdsman, retired from company one night in shame because he could
not comply with the demand made of each guest to sing. Then in a dream a
stranger appeared commanding him to sing of “the beginning of things,” and the
herdsman found himself uttering “verses which he had never heard.”
1029. William Caxton, the first English printer, was responsible for the first two folio
editions of The Canterbury Tales which were published in 1478 and 1483.
1030. John Urry produced the first edition of the complete works of Chaucer in a Latin
font, published posthumously in 1721.
1031. The Legend of Good Women is a poem in the form of a dream vision by Geoffrey
Chaucer.
1032. The Battle of Maldonis, an Old English heroic poem describing a historical skirmish
between East Saxons and Viking (mainly Norwegian) raiders in 991.
1033. John Dryden used the beast epic as the framework of the poem The Hind and the
Panther (1687).
1034. William Langland’s long alliterative poem Piers Plowman begins with a vision of the
world seen from the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire.
1035. Boccaccio’s Testide became “The Knight’s Tale”in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
1036. An allegory is a story in which the actions of fictional characters serve as symbols
that represent moral or spiritual meanings.
1037. The Romance of the Rose, a classic example of courtly poetry written by two
Frenchmen, especially influenced Chaucer’s writing when he composed The Book of
the Duchess.
1038. The Romance of the Rose was a long thirteenth-century poem. It contained a dream-
vision allegory in which a young man fell in love with a rosebud, which symbolized
a lady. The second half of the poem, written by Jean de Meun of France, touched on
many subjects, including history, religion, sex, love, and women. In it, the old
woman told the young man how to succeed in love. Chaucer borrowed heavily from
this work when he created the Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales. He, however,
made his woman funny and outspoken.
1039. The Book of the Duchess opened with a man sitting under a tree reading a tragic
story by Ovid. He fell asleep and dreamed he was in woods where the emperor was
leading a hunt. He came upon a sad knight dressed in black who told the poet that
he played a game of chess with Fortune and lost his queen. The knight told of how
he fell in love with a beautiful woman and how they lived happily for many years.
The dreamer did not understand and asked where she was now. They continued
back and forth, with the knight getting more and more frustrated that the dreamer
did not understand the woman had died.
1040. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Book of the Duchess,around 1370, English was his
chosen language.
1041. Chaucer used English as his language to write The Book of the Duchess.

Quick Points
1042. Instead of using the standard four-stress line used in The Romance of the Rose,
Chaucer introduced a five-stress line—iambic pentameter—which was later used
by William Shakespeare and John Milton.
1043. Boccaccio’s most famous work was The Decameron, which means “Ten Days’ Work.”
1044. Chaucer wrote The House of Fame sometime between 1374 and 1382. It was
divided into three books. The lady of TheHouse of Famecould give immortality,or
enduring fame, to any man she chose.
1045. In 1380, Chaucer wrote the poem The Parliament of Fowls, which poked fun at the
House of Commons. Instead of using the four-stress couplet, Chaucer created the
seven-line stanza, whichhad five stresses to the line. The rhyming pattern was
known as Rime Royal.
1046. Chaucerwas the first poet to be buried in Westminster Abbey.
1047. Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women, which was dedicated to Anne of Bohemia,
King Richard’s wife.
1048. The woman in Chaucer’s The House of Fame had been unfaithful to her husband, but
Chaucer made a point of creating very faithful women in The Legend of Good
Women.
1049. In The Legend of Good Women,Chaucer painted men as wicked, unreliable, and
unfaithful. The only man who was really trustworthy was none other than the
character of Geoffrey.
1050. Astrology was considered an important science during the Middle Ages, and
Chaucer was knowledgeable in it. Troilus and Criseyde was based on the rare
astrological phenomenon of Jupiter and Saturn in the sign of Cancer.
1051. Chaucer took two minor characters from Homer’s Iliad—Troilus and Criseyde—and
created his own work.
1052. Chaucer’s tale Troilus and Criseyde was a love story. Troilus, the son of the Trojan
king, Priam, fell in love with Criseyde during the Trojan War. When he was rejected,
it was as if the world had stopped spinning on its axis. Criseyde’s father had joined
the Greeks and was considered a traitor. The two lovers, however, with some help,
managed to spend three years together in perfect harmony in Troy. When prisoners
were exchanged, Criseyde was forced to go to her father’s side, but she swore to
love Troilus forever. She further swore to return within ten days, but on the way to
her see her father, she fell in love with her Greek escort, Diomede, and gave him the
pin Troilus had given her. The devastated Troilus was killed in battle by Achilles,
and Criseyde was set up as the unfaithful woman.
1053. The Book of the Duchess is an elegiac poem, it commemorates and mourns the
death of Blanche, duchess of Lancaster.
1054. Black Knight is a central character in Chaucer’s elegiac Book of the Duchess.
1055. The Book of the Duchess : The poem is spoken by a first-person narrator and
divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the lovesick narrator,
describing his pain and sleeplessness. His insomnia leads him to read from a book
of tales. The second part of the poem tells the story he chose to read, the tragedy of
King Seys and Queen Alcyone. The third part recounts a dream he has after finally
falling asleep. In this dream he meets a strange grieving Black Knight who
eventually reveals the cause of his sorrow: his wife’s death.
1056. The unnamed Canon in “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” by Chaucer practices
alchemy for the sole purpose of making money by cheating other people.

Quick Points
THE CANTERBURY TALES
1057. The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer’s longest work, extending to 17,000 lines of verse
and prose.
1058. The story opens with a generalPrologue that describes the meeting of 31
pilgrims at the taBarD Inn in southWark, a suburb of London on the south
side of the river Thames.
1059. The characters in The Canterbury Tales were on a 60-mile, four-day trip to
Canterbury Cathedral, to the shrine of Thomas Becket.
1060. The host, Harry Bailey, told the travelers that they were to compete by telling
stories. The prize was a supper at the Tabard Inn, to be paid for by all of the other
travelers.
1061. The general prologue, the beginning of the book, introduced all of the pilgrims
except the Canon and the Yeoman.
1062. The characters and their tales were arranged as follows: Knight, Miller, Reeve
(Estate Manager), Cook, Man of Law, Wife of Bath, Friar, Summoner; Clerk,
Merchant; Squire, Franklin (landowner), Physician, Pardoner; Shipman, Prioress,
Sir Thopas, Melbee, Monk, Nun’s Priest; Second Nun, Canon’s Yeoman; Manciple
(Business Manager), and Parson.
1063. Chaucer started the tales with a knight who was honorable and courteous to all,
courageous in war, and who understood the religious significance of a pilgrimage.
His son the Squire was a courtly lover who knew how to sing, dance, and joust. He
was dressed in the latest fashion. His hair was “curled as if taken from a press” and
he “blazed like a spring meadow to the sight.” Next, readers met the Prioress,
Madame Eglantine, who spoke Frenchwith a perfect accent and was a perfect lady.
Chaucer obviously loved this character, who had several little dogs. She was tender-
hearted and had a small red mouth, a straight nose, blue eyes, and the high
forehead that all the ladies desired to have. In her innocent heart, the church and
the world existed comfortably side by side. The Miller had his bagpipes; the Monk
had his hunting dogs; and the Wife of Bath wore a shady hat.
1064. The Knight’s Tale is the longest tale in The Canterbury Tales.
1065. The Prioress Tale is the shortest tale in The Canterbury Tales.
1066. “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” was an example of a beast fable, in which animals behaved
like human beings.
1067. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer described the Friar as corrupt and hypocritical.
1068. The knight, among all the characters, was the noblest of the pilgrims.
1069. “The Monk’s Tale” expressed Chaucer’s scorn fordisrespectful and unruly
commoners.
1070. The Pardoner was painted as the most evil of the pilgrims because he used the
church and sacred objects for personal profit.
1071. The clergy on the whole were supposed to be closer to God, but often the contrary
was true.
1072. Priests were underpaid, so they were quick to sell their services. Offerings were
expected for everyservice they performed, even for Communion. They also took
bribes.
1073. Franklin’s message about marriage is “Love creates success”.
1074. Bonita M. Cox wrote in an essay on Chaucer, “He entertains, he informs, he
instructs, and he makes us laugh—but in the final analysis he remains mysterious.”

Quick Points
1075. The most famous of these is “The Wife of Bath’s tale,” which engenders a debate on
marriage that is joined by the Clerk, the Merchant and the Franklin.
1076. John Dryden who exclaimed on Chaucer that “here is God’s plenty.”
1077. “The Knight’s Tale” belongs to the genre of chivalric romance.
1078. “The miller’s tale,” a bawdy fabliau, narrates the attempts of two men, a student
named Nicholas and a clerk named Absalom, to seduce Alison, the wife of a
naive old carpenter. One of them, Nicholas, is successful. Absalom ends up kissing
her behind and being farted on by Nicholas.
1079. “The Pardoner’s tale,” in which three young rioters go out in search of Death,
intending to kill him and thus put a stop to his ravages. They are distracted from
their mission, however, when they find a large quantity of gold lying unattended in
a field. They selfishly plot against each other to keep from having to divide the gold
three ways, and, as a result, they all end up dead.
1080. In “The shipman’s tale,” a merchant’s wife borrows money from a corrupt monk
(John the Monk). The monk, who poses as a family friend, borrows the sum
from the merchant and then gives it to the man’s wife (who is unaware of the
money’s source) in exchange for sexual favors. When the monk tells the merchant
he has repaid the loan by giving the money to his wife, she is unable to deny
receiving it, but claims to have believed it was a gift.
1081. “The tale of melibee,” which relates the debate that takes place between
Melibee and his wife, Prudence, over how he should respond to the men who
broke into his house and attacked his family.
1082. “The manciple’s tale” is a story derived from ovid’s Metamorphoses.
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1083. John Dryden who is actually credited with the introduction of poetic diction. In his
translation of Virgil, Dryden employed dignified diction.
1084. Alexander Pope applied artificial diction in his translation of Homer .
1085. Pope used the term poetic diction" in the preface to his translation of the Iliad to
mark the difference between the vocabulary of prose and poetry .
1086. Neo-classical writers are chiefly associated with the concept of poetic diction.
1087. William Wordsworth challenged the artificial diction, which was the hall-mark of
the eighteenth century writers.
1088. Biographia Literaria is the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
1089. Dr Johnson expressed his keen dislike for Milton's Lycidas on the ground that much
in it was unnatural or away from common experience.
1090. Richard Steele wrote these plays : Lying Lover , Tender Husband and The Conscious
lovers.
1091. Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World is a series of imaginary letters from a
philosophical Chinaman, writing letters home from London, giving Goldsmith the
opportunity of expressing his own mind upon the society and literature of the day .
1092. Oliver Goldsmith published his essays in The Bee .
1093. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s main plays are: The Rivals, The School for Scandal, The
Critic, The Duenna, St. Patrick's Day, The Scheming Lieutenant etc.
1094. Sheridan has been justly called a dramatic star of the first magnitude.
1095. The sentimental comedy was basically a reaction against the comedy of humours.
1096. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne – the four wheels of the English novel.
1097. Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, in 1709 as the son of a small book
seller .
1098. Samuel Johnson started two magazines : The Rambler and The Idler.

Quick Points
1099. In 1749 Dr Johnson began the Dictionary of the English language and completed it
in 8 years.
1100. Life of Johnson is the biography of the great critic by James Boswell.
1101. Hume was the great historian and philosopher of England during the 18th century.
His works are A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays, Moral and Political and The
History of England, in six volumes.
1102. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1777) in 6 volumes was written by
Edward Gibbon.
1103. Burke was a famous Irish orator, historian, scholar and political writer. His
philosophic writings are A Vindication of Natural Society, and The Origin of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.
1104. The Rambler and The Idler followed the tradition of The Spectator.
1105. Boccaccio wrote Decameron, a world famous collection of love stories in prose.
1106. Lyly's Euphues, Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde and Sidney's Arcadia, could be
collectively categorised as Romances.
1107. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was a forerunner in using stream of
consciousness method which is practised by 20th century novelists.
1108. Samuel Richardson was the first of the great novelists of the 18th century. His
important works are Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Glandison.
1109. Pamela is the first English novel written by Richardson in the form of letters. It
consists of a series of familiar letters from a young beautiful girl to her parents. So it
is an epistolary novel. It has a sub-title Virtue Rewarded. The story is very simple.
Pamela, a virtuous maid servant resists the attempts of seduction by the son of her
late land lady . Finally , a proposal of marriage comes from his and it is accepted.
Pamela is part of a trilogy along with Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison.
1110. Gothic novels are characterised by horror and mystery.
1111. Pantomime is acting without speech, using only posture, gesture, bodily movement
and exaggerated facial expression to mimic a character's actions.
1112. First Indo - Anglian writer of verse and prose is Henry Derozio.
1113. Derozio's most ambitious work is The Fakir of Jungheera
1114. H. Derozio is considered to be the Keats in Indian literature.
1115. Yeats greeted Man Mohan Ghose's 'Songs of Life and Death' as one of the most
lovely works in the world .
1116. Tagore’s 'Gitanjali' is a sequence of 103 lyrics translated from selected lyrics in his
own Bengali works. The term 'Gitanjali' rendered as 'song of offerings' by Tagore.
He wrote Gitanjali in 1912.
1117. Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913.
1118. Gitanjali Songs are mainly poems of Bhakti.
1119. Tagore was awarded Nobel Prize for his poetic collection 'Gitanjali'
1120. Gitanjali contains a sequence of 103 lyrics.
1121. W.B.Yeats introduced Tagore's work to English audiences.
1122. Tagore dedicated the English version of Gitanjali to Rothenstein.
1123. The Prestigious work of Aurobindo is 'Savitri' an epic poem in 12 Cantos.
1124. The Golden threshold', The Bird of Time, The Broken wing, The Feather of the
Dawn are Sarojini Naidu’s poetic works.
1125. 'Coromandel Fishers' is a Folk song taken from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini
Naidu.
1126. 'My story' is the autobiography of Kamala Das.
1127. Madhavikutty is the pen name of Kamala Das.

Quick Points
1128. Frankenstein Unbound was written in 1973 by Aldiss Brian, and he is known as a
science fiction writer.
1129. Pope called Francis Bacon, “ The Wisest and meanest of mankind”.
1130. In C .Day Lewis’s translation The Aeneid opens with : “ Arms and the man I sing, who
forc’d by fate,/ And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,/Expelll’d and exil’d, left the
Trojan shore/Long Labours, both by sea and land he bore.”
1131. Robinson Crusoe is based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk.
1132. Sir Walter Scott called Henry Fielding ‘The Father of the English Novel’.
1133. The plot of Tom Jones-considered by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to be one of “
the three most perfect plots ever planned”.
1134. Jane Austen is called as “ Lady Shakespeare” by Macauley.
1135. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
1136. Longfellow wrote The Song of Hiawatha(1855)
1137. The story of Bleak House by Charles Dickens focuses on the lives of three children-
Esther Summerson, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone. The novel has twin narrative-
One told by Esther Summerson and the other by an anonymous third person.
1138. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte opens with Jane, aged ten, seated by scarlet curtains,
gazing out onto a wild and sombre winter’s afternoon.
1139. Charlotte Bronte’s pseudonym was Currer Bell.
1140. In the opening pages of Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte raises spectres, Lear’s mad
ravings on the moor, salivating dogs, dripping blood and an impassable snow
storm, to evoke the atmospheric tumult- or “wuthering”-that will haunt the pages of
her only novel.
1141. Emily Bronte published Wuthering Heights under the pseudonym ‘Ellis Bell’.
1142. Daniel Deronda is the last novel by George Eliot.
1143. Nietzschecalled Dostoyevsky ‘the only psychologist from whom I have anything to
learn”. ( On Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot)
1144. Pierre is the central character in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
1145. Gandhi read Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You and profoundly influenced
by its ideas , especially Tolstoy’s pacifist doctrine of non-resistance to evil.
1146. Gandhi referred to Tolstoy as “ the sage of Yasnaya Polyana”.
1147. “ Three are subjects and subjects, and this one seemed particularly ro bristle”, -
wrote Henry James in his preface to The Wings of the Dove.
1148. “The Gilded Age” is a term coined by Mark Twain.
1149. The Heart of Darkness was published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine , one of
Britain’s most prestigious literary journals.
1150. Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929.
1151. Naraissus and Goldmund is the sixth novel by Herman Hesse.
1152. Howards End by E.M.Forster opens abruptly with a series of letters from Helen, the
more impulsive of the Schlegel sisters, to her sister Margaret, declaring her love for
the Wilcoxes, Paul Wilcox in particular.
1153. Virginia Woolf referred to The Waves as autobiography.
1154. Ruth Prawar Jhabvala won Booker Prize for her novel Heat and Dust (1975) in
1975. She became British citizen in 1948. She has written almost 13 novels : To
Whom She Will (1955), The Nature of Passion (1956), Esmond in India (1958), The
Householder(1960), Get Ready for Battle (1962), A Backward Place (1965), A New
Dominion (1972), Heat and Dust (1975), Autobiography of a Princess (1975), In
Search of Love and Beauty (1983), Poet and Dancer (1993), Shards of Memory
(1995)

Quick Points
1155. Ruth Prawar Jhabvala wrote short stories : “Like Birds, Like Fishes and Other
Stories “(1963), “A Stronger Climate” (1968), “An Experience of India’ (1971)
1156. To Whom She Will (1955) is a comic novel by Ruth Prawar Jhabvala. Jhabvala
presents the social and individuals she had seen in Delhi during the first years of
her stay in India. These individuals and groups are represented in the novel by the
Rai Bahadur, Vazir Dayal Mathar, and Suri among the men; and among the women ,
Rai Bahadur Mathar’s three daughters Radha, Mira, and Tara, then Prema, Mrs.Ram
Prasad Khanna and Mrs.Anand.
1157. Heat and Dust (1975) is a love story by Jhabvala. In this story, Olivia is married to
an English officer , Douglas Rivers . She falls in love with the local Nawab, a minor
Indian Prince. She becomes pregnant, has an abortion and abandons her husband.
Fifty years later her step-grand daughter , the narrator travels to India to
investigate the enigma of the family scandal.
1158. Abenteuerroman (G ‘adventure novel’) A form of fiction related to the picaresque
novel in which the hero conventionally undergoes a series of testing and episodic
adventures, often involving travel to colourful and exotic locations. Ex : Thomas
Dekker’s Old Fortunatus(1600), Thomas Mann’s Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix
Krull (1922)
1159. Abjection : A psychoanalytic concept developed by Julia Kristeva in Powers of
Horror (1980) to explain the formation and maintenance of subjectivity.
1160. Lacan coined the term ‘mirror stage”.
1161. The term ‘abolitionist’ refers to the 18th and 19th c. black British, African-
American, and white European and American men and women who campaigned
for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and North America. Abolitionist
literature comprises the writings of former slaves and abolitionists such as
Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and
Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl(1863), and Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s best-selling sentimental novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin(1852).
1162. Horace appears to have been the first to insist on a five-act structure. Ibsen (1828–
1906) cut the number of acts to four. Dramatists like Chekhov (1860–1904) and
Pirandello (1867–1936) also used four.
1163. T. W. Baldwin gives an illuminating account of Elizabethan methods in
Shakespeare’s Five-Act Structure (1947).
1164. J. Greimas used the term “actant” to describe the paired roles he argued as
common to all stories: subject/object, sender/ receiver, helper/opponent.
1165. David Daiches wrote A Study of Literature for Readers and Critics (1948).
1166. Arthur Murphy wrote plays : The Apprentice(1756), The Upholsterer (1758), The
Citizen (1761) and What We Must All Come To (1764).
1167. The term ‘age of reason’ was derived from the title of Thomas Paine’s 1794
pamphlet The Age of Reason, which attacked institutionalized religion.
1168. In The Tempest by Shakespeare, Caliban uses the word in this sense: ‘Be not afeard.
The isle is full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not’ (III,
ii, 148–9).
1169. Alexandrine : In French prosody a line of twelve syllables and known as
tétramètre.
1170. German term ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ ( Alienation Effect or A-Effect), Brecht’s term
for a key principle of his dramatic theory of epic theatre, sometimes abbreviated to
A-effect. The theory dictated that both audience and actors ought to maintain a

Quick Points
critical detachment from the play rather than submitting to the staged illusion or
easy emotional identification with character and situation.
1171. Homer is the presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
1172. Aeschylus, the first of classical Athens’s great dramatists, raised the emerging art of
tragedy to great heights of poetry and theatrical power. According to the
philosopher Flavius Philostratus, Aeschylus was known as the “Father of Tragedy.”
Aristotle says in his Poetics, Aeschylus “reduced the chorus’ role and made the plot
the leading actor.”
1173. Aristotle made reference of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King in his Poetics and he
regarded this play as a masterpiece of construction.
1174. Aristophanes is the greatest representative of ancient Greek comedy.
1175. The Roman poet Virgil, best known for his national epic, the Aeneid. His fame rests
chiefly upon the Aeneid, which tells the story of Rome’s legendary founder and
proclaims the Roman mission to civilize the world under divine guidance. Virgil’s
earliest certain work is the Eclogues, a collection of 10 pastoral poems.
1176. Murasaki Shikibu is the name that has been given to the court lady who was the
author of the Genji monogatari(The Tale of Genji), generally considered the
greatest work of Japanese literature and thought to be the world’s oldest full
novel. The Tale of Genji captures the image of a unique society of ultrarefined and
elegant aristocrats, whose indispensable accomplishments were skill in poetry,
music, calligraphy, and courtship. Much of it is concerned with the loves of Prince
Genji and the different women in his life, all of whom are exquisitely delineated.
1177. Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral
philosopher, and political thinker who is best known for the monumental epic
poem The Divine Comedy.
1178. The Divine Comedy consists of 100 cantos, which are grouped together into three
sections, or canticles, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. There are 33 cantos in
each canticle and one additional canto, contained in the Inferno,which serves as an
introduction to the entire poem. The poem’s rhyme scheme is the terza rima
(aba,bcb,cdc, etc.). etc.). The poem’s plot can be summarized as follows: a man,
generally assumed to be Dante himself, is miraculously enabled to undertake a
journey that leads him to visit the souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. He has two
guides: Virgil, who leads him through the Infernoand Purgatorio, and Beatrice, who
introduces him to Paradiso. Through these fictional encounters taking place from
Good Friday evening in 1300 through Easter Sunday and slightly beyond, Dante
learns of the exile that is awaiting him (which had, of course, already occurred at
the time of the writing). The exile of an individual becomes a microcosm of the
problems of a country, and it also becomes representative of the Fall of Man.
1179. Petrarch, an Italian poet and humanist, was regarded as the greatest scholar of his
age. His poems addressed to Laura, an idealized beloved, contributed to the
Renaissance flowering of lyric poetry.
1180. Luís de Camões is Portugal’s great national poet. He is the author of the epic poem
Os Lusíadas(1572; TheLusiads), which describes Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the
sea route to India.
1181. French writer Michel de Montaigne coined the word “essays” in his Essais. The
Essays are the record of Montaigne’s thoughts, presented not in artificially
organized stages but as they occurred and reoccurred to him in different shapes
throughout his thinking and writing activity.

Quick Points
1182. Miguel de Cervantes was a Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known as
the creator of Don Quixote(1605, 1615), he is the most important and celebrated
figure in Spanish literature. Thomas Shelton’s English translation of the first part of
Don Quixote appeared in 1612.
1183. Edmund Spenser was an English poet whose long allegorical poem The Faerie
Queene is one of the greatest in the English language. His first important published
work, The Shepheardes Calender (1579 or 1580), can be called the first work of the
English literary Renaissance. Spenser’s Calender consists of 12 eclogues, one
named after each month of the year. This Calender was dedicated to Robert Dudley,
earl of Leicester.The Faerie Queene consists of six books and a fragment (known as
the “Mutabilitie Cantos”). As a setting Spenser invented the land of Faerie and its
queen, Gloriana. To express himself he invented what is now known as the
Spenserian stanza: a nine-line stanza, the first eight of five stresses and the last of
six, whose rhyme pattern is ababbcbcc. Amoretti , a sonnet sequence and
Epithalamion, a marriage ode celebrating his marriage were published in 1595.
1184. The first three books of The Faerie Queene were published in London in 1590 and
Books IV, V, and VI of The Faerie Queene appeared in 1596.
1185. Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts, both performed by the
end of 1587; published 1590).
1186. Marlowe had translated Ovid’s Amores (The Loves) and the first book of Lucan’s
Pharsalia from the Latin.
1187. Dido, Queen of Carthage was the joint work of Marlowe and Thomas Nashe
published in 1594.
1188. Doctor Faustus—Marlowe’s most famous play, in which he tells the story of the
doctor-turned-necromancer Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for
knowledge and power for twenty-four long years.
1189. Christopher Marlowe’s last play may have been The Jew of Malta.
1190. Ben Jonson told that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time.”
1191. John Donne, the leading English poet of the Metaphysical school, wrote
Anniversaries (1611-12).
1192. John Donne begins his love poem“The Canonization” with the line “For Godsake
hold your tongue, and let me love,” plunging the reader into the midst of an
encounter between the speaker and an unidentified listener.
1193. John Milton is best known for Paradise Lost, widely regarded as the greatest epic
poem in English. He wrote poems in Latin, Italian, and English. Among the most
important of these are the companion poems L’Allegro and II Penseroso, both
published later in Poems (1645); Milton’s first published poem in English, On
Shakespeare, composed in 1630 and published anonymously in the Second
Folio(1632) of Shakespeare’s plays; and On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity. He also
wrote the masque Comus andthe elegy Lycidas. His best-known prose is in the
pamphlets Areopagitica (1644), on freedom of the press, and Of Education (1644).
Paradise Lost, considered the greatest epic poem in English was first published in
10 books in 1667 and then in 12 books in 1674, at a length of almost 11,000 lines.
Paradise Regained (1671) is a shorter epic in which Christ overcomes Satan the
tempter. It unfolds as a series of debates—an ongoing dialectic—in which Jesus
analyzes and refutes Satan’s arguments. Milton’s third great long poem, Samson
Agonistes (1671), is a dramatic poem in which the Old Testament figure conquers
self-pity and despair to become God’s champion.

Quick Points
1194. Aphra Behn, an English dramatist, fiction writer, and poet, was the first
Englishwoman known to earn her living by writing. Behn’s early works were
tragicomedies in verse. In 1670 her first play, The Forc’d Marriage, was produced,
and The Amorous Prince followed a year later. Her sole tragedy, Abdelazer, was
staged in 1676. However, she turned increasingly to light comedy and farce over
the course of the 1670s. Many of these witty and vivacious comedies, notably The
Rover (two parts, produced 1677 and 1681), were commercially successful. The
Rover depicts the adventures of a small group of English Cavaliers in Madrid and
Naples during the exile of the future Charles II. The Emperor of the Moon, first
performed in 1687, presaged the harlequinade, a form of comic theatre that
evolved into the English pantomime.
1195. Aphra Behn’s short novel Oroonoko (1688) tells the story of an enslaved African
prince whom Behn claimed to have known in South America. Its engagement with
the themes of slavery, race, and gender, as well as its influence on the development
of the English novel, helped to make it, by the turn of the 21st century, her best-
known work. Behn’s other fiction includes the multipart epistolary novel Love-
Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87) and The Fair Jilt (1688).
1196. Bash÷ is the supreme Japanese haiku poet. He greatly enriched the 17-syllable
haiku form and made it an accepted medium of artistic expression.
1197. Daniel Defoe was an English novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist. He remains best
known as the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719–22) and Moll Flanders (1722). In
1701, in reply to attacks on the “foreign” king, Defoe published his vigorous and
witty poem The True-Born Englishman. Defoe’s most remarkable achievement was
his periodical, the Review. At first a weekly, it became a thriceweekly publication in
1705. He wrote The Family Instructor (1715). He published Moll Flanders, A Journal
of the Plague Year, and Colonel Jack in 1722. Defoe’s animated and informative Tour
Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, based in large part on his visits to
Scotland, especially at the time of the Act of Union in 1707.
1198. Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish author known for his Gulliver’s Travels (1726), A
Tale of a Tub (1704) and A Modest Proposal (1729). Journal to Stella, a series of
letters written between his arrival in England in 1710 and 1713. He published an
impressive poem Verses on the Death of Doctor Swift. A Modest Proposal remains
perhaps the best known. It is a grimly ironic letter of advice in which a public-
spirited citizen suggests that Ireland’s overpopulation and dire economic
conditions could be alleviated if the babies of poor Irish parents were sold as edible
delicacies to be eaten by the rich.
1199. Voltaire’s pseudonym was François-Marie Arouet.
1200. Voltaire’s Candide (1759), is a satire on philosophical optimism. In it, the youth
Candide, disciple of Doctor Pangloss (himself a disciple of the philosophical
optimism of Leibniz), saw and suffered such misfortune that he was unable to
believe that this was “the best of all possible worlds.” Having retired with his
companions to the shores of the Propontis, he discovered that the secret of
happiness was “to cultivate one’s garden,” a practical philosophy excluding
excessive idealism and nebulous metaphysics.
1201. Henry Fielding was a novelist and playwright who is considered one of the
founders of the English novel. He began his literary career as a playwright who
wrote satirical plays often targeting political corruption of the times. The passage in
1737 of the Licensing Act, by which all new plays had to be approved and licensed
by the Lord Chamberlain before production, ended this work. He probably wrote

Quick Points
Shamela (1741), a burlesque of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela that he never

claimed. He also wrote Amelia (1751)
1202. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews also satirizes Pamela, with Joseph, Pamela’s virtuous
footman brother, resisting the attempts of a highborn lady to seduce him. The
parodic intention soon becomes secondary, and the novel develops into a
masterpiece of sustained irony and social criticism. At its centre is Parson Adams,
one of the great comic figures of literature. Fielding explains in his preface that he is
writing “a comic Epic-Poem in Prose.”
1203. Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling(1749) opens with a country
gentleman, Squire Allworthy, discovering a baby boy tucked between the sheets of
his bed, whom he adopts and names Tom Jones. Tom grows into a dashing, hot
blooded young man who falls in love with Squire Western’s beautiful daughter
Sophia. But, beacause of gaping chasm between their social stations, their love is
doomed.When Tom is thrown out of home and Sophia feels her overbearing father,
they both end up on the road. The story unfolds across the English countryside, in
alehouses and inns, as Yom and Sophia alternately pursue and flee from each other
on the way to London, where Tom eventually finds Sophia and discovers his true
identity.
1204. Samuel Johnson, an English critic, biographer, essayist, poet, and lexicographer, is
regarded as one of the greatest figures of 18th-century life and letters. Johnson was
the son of a poor bookseller. Johnson began his long association with The
Gentleman’s Magazine, often considered the first modern magazine, with a wide
range of poetry and prose. His Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of
Macbeth (1745), intended as a preliminary sample of his work, was his first
significant Shakespeare criticism, which remains his greatest work of literary
criticism. The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), his most impressive poem as well as
the first work published with his name, and the long fiction Rasselas (originally
published as The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale), which he wrote in 1759, during the
evenings of a single week, in order to be able to pay for the funeral of his mother.
His many essays appeared in the periodicals The Rambler (1750–52), The Literary
Magazine (from 1756), and The Universal Chronicle(in a series known as The
Idler,1758–60), among others. His subsequent works include A Journey to the
Western Islands of Scotland (1775), based on travels with Boswell and Prefaces,
Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets (conventionally known
as The Lives of the Poets). His A Dictionary of the English Language, which was
eventually published in two volumes in 1755.
1205. Boswell wrote biography of Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.(1791).
1206. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman,
theatre director, critic, and amateur artist. He is considered the greatest German
literary figure of the modern era.
1207. Robert Burns, considered the national poet of Scotland, wrote lyrics and songs in
the Scottish dialect of English.
1208. William Wordsworth was an English poet whose Lyrical Ballads (1798), written
with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His poem The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind is
an autobiographical poem. The second edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in
1800.
1209. The Scottish novelist, poet, historian, and biographer Sir Walter Scott is often
considered both the inventor and the greatest practitioner of the historical novel.
His first published work, The Chase, and William and Helen (1796), was a

Quick Points
translation of two ballads by the German Romantic balladeer G.A. Bürger. His other
works include , The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), The Lady of the Lake (1810), Rob
Roy (1817) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818), The Bride of Lammermoor and A
Legend of Montrose (both 1819), Kenilworth (1821), Redgauntlet (1824) and The
Talisman (1825). He wrote a novel called Waverley, A story of the Jacobite rebellion
of 1745, it reinterpreted and presented with living force the manners and loyalties
of a vanished Scottish Highland society. Waverley novels are Waverley, Guy
Mannering (1815) and The Antiquary (1816), a sort of trilogy. In 1827 Scott’s
authorship of the Waverley novels was finally made public.
1210. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, composed during the autumn and
winter of 1797–98. For this, his most famous poem, he drew upon the ballad form.
The main narrative, infused with supernatural elements, tells how a sailor who has
committed a crime against the life principle by slaying an albatross suffers from
torments, physical and mental, in which the nature of his crime is made known to
him.
1211. Coleridge’s play Osorio, written many years before, was also produced at Drury
Lane with the title Remorse in January 1813.
1212. Coleridge wrote Biographia Literaria (1817)
1213. Jane Austen’s earliest writings is evident in Lady Susan, a short novel-in-letters
written about 1793–94 (and not published until 1871).
1214. Jane Austen began Sanditon, a robust and selfmocking satire on health resorts and
invalidism. This novel remained unfinished owing to Austen’s declining health.
1215. In Greece Byron began Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage, which he continued in Athens.
In March 1810 he sailed for Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), visited the site
of Troy, and swam the Hellespont (present-day Dardanelles) in imitation of
Leander.
1216. In March 1812, the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were published by
John Murray, and Byron “woke to find himself famous.” The poem describes the
travels and reflections of a young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and
revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands. Besides furnishing a travelogue of
Byron’s own wanderings through the Mediterranean, the first two cantos express
the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the
post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. In Geneva he wrote the third canto of
Childe Harold(1816), which, perhaps predictably, follows Harold from Belgium up
the Rhine River into Switzerland. In May he arrived in Rome, gathering impressions
that he recorded in a fourth canto of Childe Harold (1818).
1217. Byron also wrote Beppo, a poem in ottava rima that satirically contrasts Italian with
English manners.
1218. Byron’s Don Juan, a satire in the form of a picaresque verse tale. The first two
cantos of Don Juan were begun in 1818 and published in July 1819. Byron
transformed the legendary libertine Don Juan into an unsophisticated, innocent
young man who, though he delightedly succumbs to the beautiful women who
pursue him, remains a rational norm against which to view the absurdities and
irrationalities of the world. Don Juan consists of 16 cantos and 17th was unfinished.
1219. Queen Mab is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s first major poem—a nine-canto mixture of
blank verse and lyric measures that attacks the evils of the past and present
(commerce, war, the eating of meat, the church, monarchy, and marriage) but ends
with resplendent hopes for humanity when freed from these vices. Shelley
composed the poems “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc”. In March

Quick Points
1817 Shelley wrote his twelve-canto romance epic Laon and Cythna; or, The
Revolution of the Golden City and his wife and writer Mary Shelley finished
Frankenstein. In early 1818–19 Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound and outlined
The Cenci, a tragedy on the Elizabethan model based on a case of incestuous rape
and patricide in sixteenth-century Rome. He completed this drama during the
summer of 1819. His play Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama.
1220. Shelley’s essay A Defence of Poetry (published 1840) eloquently declares that the
poet creates humane values and imagines the forms that shape the social order:
thus each mind recreates its own private universe, and “Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the World.”
1221. Shelley drowned on July 8, 1822, when his boat sank during the stormy return
voyage to Lerici. After her husband’s death, Mary Shelley returned to England and
devoted herself to publicizing Shelley’s writings and educating their only surviving
child, Percy Florence Shelley. She published her late husband’s Posthumous Poems
(1824) and also edited his Poetical Works (1839), with long and invaluable notes,
and his prose works. Her Journalis a rich source of Shelley biography, and her
letters are an indispensable adjunct.
1222. John Keats’ first mature poem is the sonnet On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer
(1816), which was inspired by his excited reading of George Chapman’s classic
17th-century translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
1223. Keats’s first book, Poems, was published in March 1817.
1224. In 1817 Keats began work on Endymion, his first long poem, which appeared in
1818. This work is divided into four 1,000-line sections, and its verse is composed
in loose rhymed couplets. The poem narrates a version of the Greek legend of the
moon goddess Diana’s (or Cynthia’s) love for Endymion, a mortal shepherd, but
Keats put the emphasis on Endymion’s love for Diana rather than on hers for him.
1225. It was during the year 1819 that all Keats’ greatest poetry was written—Lamia, The
Eve of St. Agnes, the great odes (On Indolence,On a Grecian Urn,To Psyche,To a
Nightingale,On Melancholy, and To Autumn), and the two versions of Hyperion.
1226. In the Ode to a Nightingale a visionary happiness in communing with the
nightingale and its song is contrasted with the dead weight of human grief and
sickness, and the transience of youth and beauty—strongly brought home to Keats
in recent months by the death of one of his brothers.
1227. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to
know”, is a line from John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn.
1228. “ A thing of Beauty is a joy forever” – Keat’s Endymion.
1229. ALEKSANDR PUSHKIN , Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer.
1230. Victor Hugo was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, and the most important of the
French Romantic writers. His famous novels are Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and
Les Misérables (1862). With his verse drama Cromwell (1827), though immensely
long and almost impossible to stage, he emerged as an important figure in
Romanticism.His verse tragedy is Hernan.
1231. The American novelist and short-story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was a master of
the allegorical and symbolic tale. H e is best known for The Scarlet Letter (1850)
and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). His first novel, Fanshawe, which he
published at his own expense in 1825. His first signed book, Twice-Told Tales, was
published in 1837. His new short-story collection, Mosses from an Old Manse,
appeared in 1846.

Quick Points
1232. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne tells the story of two lovers kept apart by the
ironies of fate, their own mingled strengths and weaknesses, and the Puritan
community’s interpretation of moral law, until at last death unites them under a
single headstone.
1233. The House of the Seven Gables by Hawthorne (1851), the story of the Pyncheon
family, who for generations had lived under a curse until it was removed at last by
love.
1234. Poe’s The Raven (1845) contains a number of best known poems.
1235. Poe then became editor of the Broadway Journal, a short-lived weekly, in which he
republished most of his short stories, in 1845.
1236. Charles Dickens is generally considered the greatest British novelist of the Victorian
period. Pickwick Papers was his first appeared novel. He undertook to edit a
monthly magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, in which he serialized his second novel,
Oliver Twist (1837–39).
1237. Robert Browning was perhaps the greatest English poet of the Victorian age, noted
for his mastery of the dramatic monologue. His first published work, Pauline: A
Fragment of a Confession (1833, anonymous), although formally a dramatic
monologue. In 1835 he published Paracelsus and in 1840 Sordello, both poems
dealing with men of great ability striving to reconcile the demands of their own
personalities with those of the world.
1238. After Strafford (1837), Robert Browning published seven more plays in verse,
including Pippa Passes (1841), A Blot in the ’Scutcheon (produced in 1843), and
Luria(1846) between 1841 and 1846, in a series of pamphlets under the general
title of Bells and Pomegranates.
1239. Browning observed his play Strafford, “Action in Character, rather than Character in
Action.”
1240. Men and Women (1855) was a collection of 51 poems By Robert Browning. He also
wrote the great monologues such as Fra Lippo Lippi, How It Strikes a Contemporary,
and Bishop Blougram’s Apology. In 1868–69 he published his greatest work, The
Ring and the Book, based on the proceedings in a murder trial in Rome in 1698.
1241. Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist best known for Jane Eyre (1847), a strong
narrative of a woman in conflict with her natural desires and social condition. Her
works are : The Professor: A Tale, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, Shirley: A Tale,
Villette. Her first novel, The Professor, which is based on her experiences in
Brussels, was published posthumously in 1857.
1242. Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden (1854), “Civil Disobedience” (1849).
1243. Emily Brontë was an English novelist best known for Wuthering Heights (1847).
1244. Walt Whitman was an American poet, journalist, and essayist whose verse
collection Leaves of Grass. In 1846 he became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
1245. Leaves of Grass was warmly praised by the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson,
who wrote to Whitman on receiving the poems that it was “the most extraordinary
piece of wit and wisdom” America had yet contributed.
1246. Whitman wrote an elegy on President Abraham Lincoln in “When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom’d”.
1247. The fourth edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1867.
1248. The American novelist, short-story writer, and poet Herman Melville is best known
for his novels of the sea, including his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851). His other
works : Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849), White-Jacket
(1850), Pierre (1852), The Confidence-Man (1857), Billy Budd (1924)

Quick Points
1249. Moby Dick was published in London in October 1851. Captain Ahab pursues the
white whale, Moby Dick, which finally kills him. At that level, it is an intense,
superbly authentic narrative of whaling. In the perverted grandeur of Captain Ahab
and in the beauties and terrors of the voyage of the Pequod, however, Melville
dramatized his deeper concerns: the equivocal defeats and triumphs of the human
spirit and its fusion of creative and murderous urges.
1250. Billy Budd was Herman Melvilles’s last work.’
1251. George Eliot’s pseudonym was Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans.Her major works are :
Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Romola(1862–63),Silas
Marner(1861), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (8 parts, 1871–72), Daniel
Deronda(8 parts, 1876)
1252. T S Eliot is associated with “ The Criterion” ( journal)
1253. Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot’s first long novel, she described as “a country
story—full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay.”
1254. Daniel Deronda (8 parts, 1876) is built on the contrast between Mirah Cohen, a poor
Jewish girl, and the upper class Gwendolen Harleth, who marries for money and
regrets it. The hero, Daniel, after discovering that he is Jewish, marries Mirah and
departs for Palestine to establish a home for his nation. The best part of Daniel
Deronda is the keen analysis of Gwendolen’s character, which seems to many critics
the peak of George Eliot’s achievement.
1255. Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist and short-story writer.
His works : The House of the Dead(1961-62), The Idiot(1969), Crime and Punishment
(1966), Notes from the Underground (1964), The Possessed (1972), The Brothers
Karamazov (1979-80)
1256. Crime and Punishment describes a young intellectual who is willing to gamble on
ideas and decides to solve all his problems at a stroke by murdering an old
pawnbroker woman.
1257. Gustave Flaubert is best known for his Madame Bovary (1857), a realistic portrayal
of bourgeois life.
1258. Henrik Ibsen was a major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century. His major
works : A Doll’s House (1879), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler(1890),
The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), When We Dead Awaken (1899).
1259. Leo Tolstoy is a Russian writer. He served in the army, which included service in
the Crimean War (1853–56). His major works are My Confession, Anna Karenina,
War and Peace.
1260. Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina (1875–77) begins with “All happy families resemble
each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
1261. Lewis Carroll’s pseudonym was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He is well known for
his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-
Glass(1871).
1262. Mark Twain’s pseudonym was Samuel Clemens. His first book was The Celebrated
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867). He is well known for
his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872),
and Life on the Mississippi (1883), and for his adventure stories of boyhood,
especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1885).
1263. Émile Zola, a French critic and political activist, was also the most prominent
French novelist of the late 19th century. Two early novels are Thérèse Raquin
(1867), a grisly tale of murder and its aftermath, and Madeleine Férat (1868).

Quick Points
1264. Honoré de Balzac wrote The Human Comedy.

1265. Henry James was an American novelist. James began his long expatriation in the
1870s, heralded by publication of the novel Roderick Hudson (1875), the story of an
American sculptor’s struggle by the banks of the Tiber between his art and his
passions; Transatlantic Sketches, his first collection of travel writings.
1266. Henry James’ works : The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), The
Princess Casamassima (1886), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew
(1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The
Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowl (1904), The American Scene (1907).
1267. August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist,and short-story writer who
combined psychology and Naturalism in a new kind of European drama that
evolved into Expressionist drama. He published his first novel, The Red Room
(1879), a satirical account of abuses and frauds in Stockholm society. He wrote, The
Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and The Creditors (1888). His last play, The Great
Highway, a symbolic presentation of his own life, appeared in 1909.
1268. Oscar Wilde was an Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his
only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic plays. He was a
spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England, which
advocated art for art’s sake. His The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in
Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890. A Woman of No Importance was produced in 1893.
He also wrote An Ideal Husband.
1269. George Bernard Shaw was an Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist
propagandist and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. His fiction
failed utterly. The semiautobiographical and aptly titled Immaturity (1879;
published 1930) repelled every publisher in London. In his first play, Widowers’
Houses (performed 1892), he emphasized social and economic issues instead of
romance, adopting the ironic comedic tone that would characterize all his work. He
described his first plays as “unpleasant”. His major works are : Arms and the Man
(performed 1894) , Candida (performed 1897) , You Never Can Tell (performed
1899), John Bull’s Other Island (performed 1904) , Man and Superman (performed
1905) , Major Barbara (performed 1905), and The Doctor’s Dilemma (performed
1906), Pygmalion (performed 1913), Saint Joan (performed 1923)
1270. George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 and he refused
the award.
1271. In 1888, Anton Chekhov published his first work in a leading literary review,
Severny vestnik(“Northern Herald”). His Wood Demon(1888–89) is a long-winded
four-act play. His other works include Uncle Vanya,The Bear,The Proposal,The
Seagull.
1272. Anton Chekov’s The Seagull is a study of the clash between the older and younger
generations as it affects two actresses and two writers.
1273. Chekhov’s two last plays—Tri sestry (1901; Three Sisters) and Vishnyovy sad (1904;
The Cherry Orchard)—were both written for the Moscow Art Theatre.
1274. William Butler Yeats was one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th
century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
1275. Luigi Pirandello was an Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer who
won the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. With his invention of the “theatre within
the theatre” in the play Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), he became an
important innovator in modern drama.

Quick Points
1276. Marcel Proust was a French novelist and his novel In Search of Lost Time,a seven-
volume novel based on Proust’s life told psychologically and allegorically. His other
novels are : The Captive, The Fugitive, Time Regained
1277. Marcel Proust’s autobiographical novel is Jean Santeuil.
1278. “My Butterfly: An Elegy” is written by Robert Frost. His other popular poems are ,
Mending Wall, The Death of the Hired Man, Home Burial, and After Apple-Picking.
1279. Thomas Mann was a German novelist and essayist whose early novels—
Buddenbrooks (1900), Der Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), and Der
Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain)—earned him the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1929.
1280. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf blamed women’s absence from
history not on their lack of brains and talent but on their poverty.
1281. In the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, appearing in his first critical
volume, The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot asserts that tradition, as used by the poet, is
not a mere repetition of the work of the immediate past; rather, it comprises the
whole of European literature from Homer to the present. The poet writing in
English may therefore make his own tradition by using materials from any past
period, in any language.
1282. T S Eliot won the Nobel Prize for his Four Quartets in 1948.
1283. T S Eliot was an editor to his quarterly review The Criterion (1922–39).
1284. Eugene O’Neill was a foremost American dramatist of the 20th century and the
winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His first full-length play, Beyond
the Horizon,was produced on Broadway, Feb. 2, 1920. His most-distinguished short
plays include the four early sea plays, Bound East for Cardiff,In the Zone ,The Long
Voyage Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees, which were written between 1913
and 1917. His long plays : The Emperor Jones(1920), The Hairy Ape(1922), Desire
Under the Elms (1924), The Great God Brown (1926), Strange Interlude (1928),
Mourning Becomes Electra(1931), and The Iceman Cometh (1946). Ah,
Wilderness!(1933) was his only comedy.
1285. “Poem Without a Hero” is a poem by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.
“ Novel withoout a Hero “ is the subtitle of Vanity Fair.
1286. William Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was
awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. His first novel was Soldiers’ Pay
(1926). Other novels include : Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I
Lay Dying (1930), Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
1287. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian-born American novelist and critic.
He is well known for his work Lolita (1955).
1288. Ernest Hemingway, an American novelist and shortstory writer, was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
1289. The American novelist John Steinbeck is best known for The Grapes of Wrath
(1939), which summed up the bitterness of the Great Depression decade and
aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory farm workers. He
received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1962. Steinbeck’s first novel, Cup of Gold
(1929), was followed by The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown
(1933).
1290. Fredric Jameson called Post Modernism the “cultural logic of late capitalism.”
1291. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is a war novel.
1292. Aristotle’s terms:
a) Mimesis: imitation, representation

Quick Points
b) Catharsis: purgation, purification

c) Peripeteia: reversal
d) Anagnorisis: recognition, identification
e) Hamartia: tragic flow, miscalculation
f) Mythos: plot
g) Ethos: character
h) Dianoia: thought
i) Lexis: diction, speech
j) Melos: melody
k) Opsis: spectacle
1293. Adam and Dinah are the characters in Adam Bede by George Eliot ( Pen name : Mary
Ann Evans)
1294. A Marriage Proposal is a one-act play (farce) by Anton Chekhov, written in 1888 –
89 and first performed in 1890. Natalia, Stephan Stepanovitch Chubukov, Ivan-
are the characters.
1295. A Tale of a Tub is a satire by Jonathan Swift. It is a prose parody which divided into
sections of “digression” and “a tale” of three brothers (Peter, Martin and Jack).
1296. ‘Marriage Bed’ episode appears in Moby Dick.
1297. Clara Durrant and Florida are the characters of Jacob’s Room.
1298. Thomas Merton wrote No Man is an Island.
1299. Donne compares two lovers who are separated to the two legs of a compass in “A
Valediction: A Forbidden Mourning”.
1300. Ben Jonson commented that, “Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging”.
1301. Joseph Brodsky wrote a poem named, Elegy for John Donne.
1302. Donne published his Songs and Sonnets in 1633.
1303. Leigh Hunt published Keats’ O Solitude in his magazine, The Examiner.
1304. Poems is the first volume of Keats’ verses.
1305. Hunt published the essay Three Young Poets, regarding Shelley, Keats and Reynolds.
1306. Endymion, which Keats dedicated to Thomas Chatterton, is a work he termed, ‘A
Trial of My Powers and Imagination’.
1307. John Gibson Lockhart, who worked at Blackwoods Magazine, coined the defamatory
term, “The Cockney School”.
1308. In 1819, Keats wrote The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Hyperion,
Lamia and Otho (play)
1309. Shelly wrote an elegy, Adonais, on the death of Keats.
1310. Jonathan Swift wrote his own epitaph beginning with the words: “Here is the body
of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Sacred Theology…”
1311. Jude the Obscure (1895) is the last complete novel of Thomas Hardy. Jude Fawley is
the hero who dreams of becoming a scholar. He marries Sue Bridehead.
1312. Krapp’s Last Tap is a one-act play by Samuel Beckett. The play begins with Krapp’s
69th birthday.
1313. The story of Madame Bovary begins and ends with Charles Bovary. Emma is the
protagonist and Charles is her son.
1314. Major Barabara is a three-act play, written by George Bernard Shaw.
1315. Man and Superman is a four-act play by Shaw. It was published in 1903. This play is
based on the Don Juan theme, a part of the act, Don Juan in Hell (Act 3, Scene 2)
appears in the play.
1316. Fanny Price is the main character in Mansfield Park.

Quick Points
1317. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is also called ‘The Great American Novel’.
1318. Samuel Langhorne Clemens is known by his penname – Mark Twain.
1319. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by George Eliot. It is her seventh
novel. Dorothea Brooke is the protagonist. She marries Edmund Casaubon and
helps him in writing his great research project, ‘The Key to All Mythologies’.
1320. Virginia Woolf described Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for
grown-up people”.
1321. Moby Dick: The whale is a novel by Hermann Melville, first published in 1851. The
story tells the adventures of Ishmael and his voyage on the whaleship ‘Pequod’,
commanded by Captain Ahab.
1322. Moby Dick begins with the line, “Call me Ishmael”.
1323. Ishmael, in the beginning, sets out from Manhattan island.
1324. Rachel rescues Ishmael at the end of Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
1325. Moby Dick is the main antagonist of the novel.
1326. Mrs. Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf that is about a day in the life of Clarissa
Dalloway. Woolf has used the stream of consciousness technique in this novel.
1327. Murphy (1938) is a prose fiction by the Irish author Samuel Beckett.
1328. Norma: A Politician’s Love is a drama by Henrik Ibsen.
1329. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen has Gothic elements. Northanger Abbey is an
estate in the novel. Catherine Morland is the protagonist who is fond of reading
gothic novels, among which Ann Radcliff’s Mysteries of Udolpho is a favourite.
1330. Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1928. It is a semi-
autobiographical novel. It tells the story of Orlando, who is born in England, during
the reign of Elizabeth I. Orlando writes The Oak Tree in the novel. King Charles II is
mentioned in the novel.
1331. Ovid was a Roman poet, best known for his Metamorphosis. Metamorphosis consists
of 15 books of mythological narratives written in the epic meter. His works :
a) Amores (Love Affairs)
b) Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) – 3 books
c) Medea – Ovid’s last tragedy.
d) Remedia Amoris (Cure of Love)
e) Metamorphosis means ‘transformation’.
f) Fasti (The Festivals) – 6 books.
1332. Persuation is Jane Austen’s last completed novel.
a) Both Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were bound up in one volume and
published together.
b) It s set in a fashionable city called Bath.
c) Anne Eliot is the protagonist.
1333. Pride and Prejudice centers on Elizabeth Bannet.
The novel begins with the line: “It is truth universally acknowledged that a
single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
The title of the novel was taken from a passage in Fanny Burney’s popular
novel Cecilia (1782).
1334. Romola is a historical novel by George Eliot. It is her fourth novel.
1335. Samuel Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature.
a) Beckett published his work Proust in 1931.
b) His first novel is Dream of Fair to Midding Woman.
c) The novel Murphy (1938) begins with the line, “The sun shone,
having no alternative, on the nothing new.”

Quick Points
1336. The term “ Theatre of Absurd” was coined by Martin Esslin. He used the term as a
title to his book.
1337. Beckett’s Molloy (1951), Malone Meurt (1951), Malone Dies and L’innommable
(1953, The Unnammable) are referred to as a trilogy.
1338. The final phrase of The Unnammable is: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
1339. John MacGowran was the first actor to do a one-man show based on the works of
Beckett.
1340. Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1811 under the pseudonym ‘A Lady’.
a) First draft of the novel was written in the form of letters (epistolary form).
b) It was earlier titled as Elinor and Marianne.
c) Barton Cottage appears (is mentioned) in the novel.
d) Elinor Dashwood is nineteen years old when the novel begins.
1341. Tess of D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy was originally titled “Daughter of
D’Urberville”.
It is subtitled as ‘A Pure Woman’.
The ancient grove in the novel is called “The Chaste”, to where Alec rides
with Tess.
Alec rapes Tess and is referred to as ‘the seducer’.
The child born as a result of this rape is named ‘sorrow’. But it does not
survive for long.
Tess’ parting words are, “I am ready”.
1342. Anya, Varya, Yasha,and Dunyasha are the characters in The Cherry Orchard.
1343. The Doctor’s Dilemma is a play by Shaw, written in 1906. It tells the story of Sir
Colenso Ridgeon who has developed a new cure for Tuberculosis. He can treat only
ten patients at a time.
1344. Pope first published The Duncaid in 1728 in three books.
1345. Licensing Act - 1737.
1346. Henry James’ novel, The Europeans: A Sketch was published in 1878.
1347. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley
Warner.
Albert Bigelow Paine is Mark Twain’s biographer.
The title ‘Gilded Age’ was taken from Shakespeare’s King John (1595).
1348. Hans Castorp is the protagonist in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924).
Viaticum Scene occurs in this work.
1349. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) subtitled The Life and Death of a Man of
Character, is a tragic novel by Thomas Hardy. Michael Henchand is its protagonist.
1350. The Naturalist Theatre Movement was a reaction to melodrama, the Victorian
theatre tradition of the time.
1351. The Poor Man and The Lady (1867) is the first novel of Thomas Hardy, but it is not
published.
1352. The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic narrative poem written by Alexander Pope. It
was first published in 1712 in two cantos and the revised edition consisting of five
cantos was published in 1714. Belinda is compared to the sun. She threatens to kill
Baron with a bodkin (a sharp hairpin).
1353. Nick Dormer in The Tragic Muse by Henry James wants to pursue a career in
painting instead of the family’s traditional role in British Politics.
1354. Oroonoko is a short work of prose fiction by Aphra Behn. Its subtitle is The Royal
Slave.

Quick Points
1355. Orhan Pamuk is the Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in
2006. His Works: The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, My Name is Red,
Snow, The Museum of Innocence.
1356. Fyodor Dostoyevsky declared Anna Karenina “flawless as a work of art”.
1357. Hayavadana (1972), a play by Girish Karnad was based on a theme drawn from
Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads and employed in the folk theatre form of
Yakshagana.
1358. Thomas Hardy took the title for his novel ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ from
Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Act II, Scene V).
1359. Virginia Woolf’s essay, A Room of One’s Own (1929) contains the famous dictum, “A
Woman must have money and a room of her own, if she is to write fiction.” Between
the Acts is Woolf’s last work. Her only drama is Freshwater: A Comedy.
1360. Waiting for Godot was subtitled, “A Tragicomedy in Two Acts”. The play opens with
Estragon struggling to remove a boot.
1361. Walt Whitman is called the father of free verse.
1362. When We Dead Awaken is the last play written by the Norwegian dramatist, Henrik
Ibsen. It was published in 1899.
1363. Jerusalem was the last poem written by William Blake.
1364. Wordsworth’s The Prelude is a semi-autobiographical poem.
1365. Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is called as the “Manifesto of English Romantic
Criticism.
1366. Shelley wrote A Defence of Poetry (1821) in response to his friend Thomas Love
Peacock’s article The Four Ages of Poetry (1820).
1367. The title of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ by Ernest Hemingway is taken from a poem by
George Peele (16th century poet).
1368. E. M. Forster borrowed the title to his book ‘A Passage to India’ from Walt
Whitman’s poem of the same name in published in the collection, Leaves of Grass.
The story of the novel A Passage to India is set in a fictional town of Chandrapore,
(based on the Bankipur), in Bihar.
1369. Following William Wordsworth’s death in 1850, and Samuel Roger’s refusal to take
up the responsibility, Tennyson was made the Poet Laureate.
1370. Shelley regarded “Adonais” as the “least imperfect” of his works.
1371. T. S. Eliot described Tennyson as “the saddest of all English poets”.
1372. George Orwell’s Animal Farm was subtitled as “A Fairy Tale”.
1373. The Anthills of Savannah is a 1987 novel by Chinua Achebe, and was chosen as a
finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize for fiction.
1374. John Dryden introduced ‘Alexandrine’ and ‘triplet’ into the form. Alexander Pope
was highly influenced by Dryden. Dryden was the first official Poet Laureate. He
was made so in 1670.
1375. August Strindberg is considered the ‘father of modern Swedish Literature’ and his
The Red Room has been described as the first modern Swedish novel.
1376. Naturalism in the Theatre (1881) was written by Emile Zola.
1377. In the essay On Psychic Murder (1887); Strindberg referred to the psychological
theories of the Nancy School, which advocated the use of hypnosis.
1378. The Intimate Theatre was founded by August Strindberg in 1907. He had the
intention of using the theatre for staging his plays and his plays only. He also had
the intention of using the theatre mainly to stage Chamber Plays.
1379. Strindberg wrote four Chamber Plays: Thunder in the Air, The Burned Site, The
GhostSonata, and The Pelican.

Quick Points
1380. Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988 for her novel, Beloved. The
story of Beloved begins with an introduction to the ghost: “124 was spiteful. Full of a
baby’s venom.
1381. Ben Jonson popularized the Comedy of Humours.
1382. Ben Jonson co-authored the play The Isle of Dogs with Thomas Nashe and it was
published in the year 1597.
1383. Ben Jonson was made England’s Poet Laureate in 1616.
1384. Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace and Sir John Suckling were known as “the Sons of
Ben” or “the Tribe of Ben”.
1385. Bertolt Brecht’s Jungle: Decline of a Family is his third play.
1386. Brecht propounded Epic Theatre. It imposed that a play should not cause the
spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her,
but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action
on the stage.
1387. Brecht’s most important principle called ‘verfremdungseffekt (translated as
“defamiliarisation effect”, “enstrangement effect”). * Alienation Effect
1388. Baal (1918 – 23) is Brecht’s first play and Trumpets and Drums (1955) is his last
play.
1389. Voltaire’s Candide (1759) subtitled, “All for the Best”or “The Optimist” (1762) is a
picaresque novel. It consists of 30 episodic chapters and the tale begins in the castle
of the Baron Thunder-ten-Tronkh in West Phalia.
1390. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a play by Tennessee Williams. This brought him the Pulitzer
Prize for drama in 1955. The play is set in the “Plantation Home in the Mississippi
Delta”. Brick and Margaret are the main characters.
1391. Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre, using a penname Currer Bell. The subtitle is Jane
Eyre: An Autobiography
1392. George Peele remembers Marlowe as “Marley, the Muses’ Darling”.
1393. E. M. Forster described D. H. Lawrence as “The greatest imaginative novelist of our
generation”.
1394. The White Peacock (1910) is the first published novel of D. H. Lawrence. His
Rainbow (1915) was alleged of obscenity. Lawrence had a lifelong interest towards
painting.
1395. Daniel Defoe wrote Roxana: The Fortune Mistress.
1396. Defoe is known to have used at least 198 pen names.
1397. Dead Souls is a novel by a Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. It was published in 1842.
Chichikov is the main character in this novel. Gogol himself saw it as an “epic poem
in prose”.
1398. Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. He was born in St. Lucia,
West Indies. He wrote a Homeric Epic poem “Omeros” in 1990.
1399. “Don Juan” is a satirical poem written by Lord Byron. It is dedicated with some
scorn to Robert Southey. It was written in Iambic pentameter. It is divided into
seventeen cantos, with the seventeenth one being left unfinished.
1400. Doris Lessing’s five novels are collectively called: Canopus in Argos: Archives
(1979 – 1983)
The Grass is Singing (1950)
Children of Violence (1952-60)
The Golden Notebook (1962)
The Good Terrorist (1985)
Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.

Quick Points
She explores the Sufi theme in Canopus in Argos.

1401. E M Forster didnot complete his seventh novel Arctic Summer. E. M. Forster’s
novels: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) The Longest Journey (1907) A Room with
a View (1908) Howards End (1910) A Passage to India (1924) Maurice (1971)
1402. Spencer’s “Amoretti” contains 88 sonnets.
1403. Eugene O’ Neille wrote only one well known comedy – Ah,Wildernes. He won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1920 for his play Beyond the Horizon.
1404. George Orwell is the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair.
1405. Good Morning, Midnight is a 1939 modernist novel by Jean Rhys. The novel’s title is
taken from Emily Dickinson’s poem with the same title.
1406. Harold Pinter’s early plays were called “Comedy of Menace” by David Campton. Old
Times is a play by Harold Pinter.
1407. Hard Times is a novel by Charles Dickens.
1408. Chinua Achebe criticised Heart of Darkness in his 1975 lecture, “An Image of Africa:
Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”.
1409. “Battle Royal Scene” is seen in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952).
1410. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
1411. Cup of Gold (1929) is John Steinback’s first novel.
1412. Joseph Andrew is defined by Fielding as “comic epic poem in prose”. It consists of 4
books.
1413. Lolita written by Vladimir Nabakovis described as an “erotic novel”.
1414. In Canto III of Don Juan, Byron expresses his detestation for poets such as William
Wordsworth and Coleridge.
1415. In Lord Jim written by Joseph Conrad, Jim acquires the title ‘Tuan’ (lord) while
living on the island. ‘Patna’ is the name of the ship.
1416. In search of Lost Time is a novel by the French writer Marcel Proust. It consists of 7
volumes. Graham Greene called Proust, “the greatest novelist of the twentieth
century”.
1417. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) in response
to Edmund Burke’s Conservative Critique of the French Revolution Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790).
1418. Rousseau argues in Emile (1762) that women should be educated for the pleasure
of men.
1419. Mary Wollstonecraft’s first novel is Mary: A Fiction (1788)
1420. Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht is a play which takes place over
a course of twelve years.
1421. The title of Richard Wright’s Native Son was borrowed from Nelson Algren’s first
novel Somebody in Boots.
1422. Chinua Achebe borrowed the line No Longer at Ease for the title of his novel, from T.
S. Eliot’s poem, The Journey of the Magi.
1423. ‘Nostromo’ is an Italian term for ‘shipmate’ or ‘boatswain’.
1424. Nostromo’s real name is Giovanni Battista Fidanza.
1425. Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind consists of five cantos written in terza rima.
1426. Epistolary novels were extremely popular during the 18th century.
1427. Toni Morrison’s trilogy consists of: Paradise, Beloved, and Jazz.
1428. Toni Morrison’s Paradise begins with the well known sentence: “They shoot the
white girl first.”
1429. Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in1973. He became the
first Australian to win the prize.

Quick Points
1430. Shelley wrote his verse drama, The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts, in 1819.
1431. Prometheus Unbound is a four act lyrical drama by Percy Bysshe Shelley which was
published in the year 1820.
1432. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has an unnamed Black man as its protagonist.
1433. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of his grief in the poem Threnody, when his son died of
scarlet fever.
1434. Richard Wright’s Novels: Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Native Son, The Outsider
1435. Riders in the Chariot is written by Patrick White.
1436. Riders to the Sea is a play written by John Millington Synge.
1437. X’anadu is mentioned both in Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot and Kubla Khan
by S T Coleridge.
1438. Dymock Poets: Edwrd Thomas, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound.
1439. “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” – This line taken from Robert Frost’s poem
The Lesson for Today is engraved on his tomb.
1440. Robert Frost’s Plays: A Way Out: A One Act Play (1929) , The Cows in the Corn: A One
Act Irish Play in Rhyme (1929), A Masque of Reason (1945), A Masque of Mercy
(1947)
1441. Robison Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe which tells us the story of Crusoe who sets
sail from the Queen’s Dock in Hull on a sea voyage. The term ‘Robinsonade’ was
coined to describe the genre of stories similar to Robinson Crusoe.
1442. Daniel Defoe’s Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724) has a story of an unnamed
‘fallen woman’.
1443. Clarissa: The History of a Young Lady (1748) is written by Samuel Richardson.
Richardson was a printer. He was a rival of Henry Fielding.His Pamela is regarded
as the first English novel. Henry Fielding wrote Shamela as an anti – novel to
Pamela. Pamela and Clarissa are epistolary novels.
1444. Terry Eagleton describes Seamus Heaney as “an enlightened cosmopolitan liberal”
1445. Battle of Books is written by Jonathan Swift
1446. Battle of Angels is written by Tennesse Williams.
1447. Arrow of God is written by Chinua Achebe
1448. Arrow of Gold (1919) is written by Joseph Conrad.
1449. The protagonist of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party is a pianist.
1450. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye opens with prologue relating a paragraph-long ‘Dick
and Jane’ tale. Claudia MacTeer is the narrator of The Bluest Eye.
1451. The Caretaker is a play in three acts by Harold Pinter.
1452. Ben and Gus are the main characters of Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter.
1453. The Glass Menagerie by Tennesse Williams is a memory play. Tom, the narrator and
protagonist recollects the memories of his mother Amanda and his sister Laura. The
play is a reworking of one of William’s short stories, Portrait of a Girl in Glass
(1943).
1454. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing is the story of a writer Anna Wulf, the four
notebooks in which she keeps the record of her life, and her attempt to tie them all
together in a fifth, gold-coloured notebook. The book is named Free Women.
1455. Tom Joad is the protagonist of The Grapes of Wrath.
1456. Women in Love is a sequel to The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence.
1457. Patrick Reilly calls The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad as “a terrorist text as well as a
text book of terrorism”.
1458. Eclogue is a short pastoral poem that is in the form of a dialogue or soliloquy.
1459. Jake Barnes is the protagonist in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun also Rises.

Quick Points
1460. Patrick White borrowed the title The Tree of Man from A.E. Housman’s poetry cycle,
A Shropshire Lad, lines of which are quoted in the text. The story of The Tree of Man
revolves around the Parker family.
1461. Okonkwo, the protagonist of Chinua Achebe’s novel The Things Fall Apart, commits
suicide by hanging himself at the end of the novel. The critics call this novel a
modern Greek tragedy.
1462. Nathaniel Hawthorne borrowed the title for his collection of short stories, Twice-
Told Tales from Shakespeare’s The Life and Death of King John (Act 3, Scene 4).
1463. William Makepeace Thackeray borrowed the title for his novel Vanity Fair from
John Bunyan’s allegorical story The Pilgrim’s Progress. Vanity Fair is a novel without
a hero.
1464. Victory: An Island Tale is a psychological tale by Joseph Conrad. It was published in
1915.
1465. W. H. Auden wrote a verse drama The Dance of Death (1933).
1466. Wallace Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems in 1955.
1467. Antoinette Cosway is the protagonist of the novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1939) by the
Dominica-born author Jean Rhys. This novel is divided into 3 parts.
1468. Wole Soyinka became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1986.
1469. Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel by J. M. Coetzee.
1470. Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett.
1471. Waiting for the Mahatma is a novel by R. K. Narayan.
1472. Thomas Hardy borrowed the title to his novel Far From the Madding Crowd, from
Thomas Gray’s poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751).
1473. Digging is the first poem in Heaney’s maiden collection of verse, “Death of a
Naturalist”.
1474. Seamus Heaney’d The Tollund Man presents a complex statement of the renewal
of communal violence in Ulster.
1475. Casualty is a poem written by Seamus Heaney in memory of his dear friend who
was killed in the curfew in Ireland in the wake of Bloody Sunday.
1476. Aaron's Rod is a novel by D.H.*Lawrence published in 1922. In the novel Aaron
Sisson, amateur flautist,forsakeshiswife and his job as check weighman at a colliery
for a life of flute playing, quest, and adventure in bohemianand upper-class society.
1477. Aaron the Moor is a character in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, lover and
accomplice of Tamora.
1478. Abbey Theatre is associated with W B Yeats. He was an Irish poet.
1479. Epic Theatre is associated with Bertolt Brecht.
1480. The Play boy of the Western Worl by J M Synge.
1481. Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924),and The Plough and the
Stars (1926) – These are the works by O'Casey.
1482. The Abbot is a novel by Sir Walter Scott, published in 1820. It is a sequel to The
Monastery.
1483. 15th century is regarded as an “alliterative revival”.
1484. Peter Ackroyd’s first novel,The Great Fire of London (1982)
1485. The recipient of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Optimist's Daughter is
Eudora Welty.

Quick Points
1486. The first major, self conscious literary movement of African American writers that
resulted in part from a massive migration of young talented writers to northern
American cities is known as the Harlem Renaissance.
1487. Calligraphy: The art of beautiful handwriting
1488. The recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Thomas and
Beulah is Rita Dove.
1489. The recipients of the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Our Town Thornton
Wilder.
1490. Aaron's Rod, a novel by D. H. Lawrence, published in 1922.
1491. The Sphinx : In Greek mythology the sphinx was a creature with the face of a
woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of a bird.
1492. Gothic fiction often features a tone that is grim, gloomy, and foreboding.
1493. If Shakespeare’s Hamletcan be categorized as “the tragedy of thought,” Poe’s “The
Fall of the House of Usher” can be regarded as “the disintegration of the artistic
mind.”
1494. Poe’s “The Black Cat” represents, even for such a past master of the macabre, a rare
form of descent into Dante’s Inferno.A tale narrated by a condemned murderer who
is to die on the morrow, it tells of a double murder, as well as chronicling the
destruction of a man’s soul.
1495. Simile : Simile is a comparison between two distinctly different things explicitly
indicated by the words 'like' or 'as'. A simple example is Robert Burns': "O
my love's like a red, red rose"
1496. Metaphor is an implied or stated comparison between two unconnected
subjects, without the use of "like" or "as".
1497. Personification' in verse means to describe inanimate objects in terms of
people and animals, as if the inanimate objects had minds or feelings as in
following line by T.S. Eliot from his The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window pane.”
1498. 'Alliteration' is the repetition of initial letters or consonants in a line of
poetry, or in closely adjacent lines:
Soft, soft wind, from out the sweet south sliding
Wolf thy silver cloud webs thwart the summer sea
1499. 'Onomatopoeia', sometimes called echoism, is the formation and use of words
to imitate sounds.
1500. In 1992, Michael Ondaatje became the first Canadian to win the Booker
Prize for The English Patient.
1501. Margaret Atwood won the Booker in 2000 for The Blind Assassin.
1502. Yann Martel won it in 2002 for Life of Pi.
1503. Alistair MacLeod won the 2001 IMPAC Award for No Great Mischief and Rawi
Hage won it in 2008 for De Niro's Game.
1504. Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and in
1998 her novel Larry's Party won the Orange Prize.

Quick Points
1505. Lawrence Hill's Book of Negroes won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers'
Prize Overall Best Book Award.
1506. Alice Munro became the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in
2013. Munro also received the Man Booker International Prize in 2009
1507. Michael Ondaatje : Born on 12 September 1943 - Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist
and poet - He won the Booker Prize for his novel The English Patient (1992), which
was adapted as the 1996 film of the same name – Novels : 1976: Coming Through
Slaughter , 1987: In the Skin of a Lion, 1992: The English Patient, 2000: Anil's Ghost,
2007: Divisadero, 2011: The Cat's Table
1508. Coming Through Slaughter : Novel by Michael Ondaatje, published by House of
Anansi in 1976 -> The novel is a fictionalised version of the life of the New
Orleans jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden. It covers the last months of Bolden's sanity in
1907, as his music becomes more radical and his behaviour more erratic. A
secondary character in the story is the photographer E. J. Bellocq. Both these
historical figures are portrayed in ways that draw on their actual lives, but which
depart from the facts in order to explore the novel's central theme – the
relationship between creativity and self-destruction -> The novel draws on the
style of jazz - Buddy Bolden, a barber, publisher of The Cricket
1509. À thing of beauty is a joy for ever' - Keats
1510. `Beauty is truth,truth beauty' - Keats
1511. `The child is the father of man' - Wordsworth
1512. Ì came,I saw,I conquered' - Julius Caesar
1513. `Cowards die many times before their death' The valiant never taste of death but
once' - -Shakespeare
1514. Òh East is East,and west is West, and never the twain shall meet. Till Earth and Sky
stand presently at God's great judgement seat.' - Rudyard Kipling
1515. `Paths of glory lead but to the grave.' - Gray
1516. `But be not afraid of greatness; same are born great, some achieve greatness and
some have greatness thrust upon them.' - Shakespeare
1517. `Knowledge is power.' - Hobbes
1518. Ì know nothing except the fact of my ignorence.- ' Socrates
1519. `Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.' - Wordsworth
1520. `Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.' - Dr.Samuel Johnson
1521. `Reading maketh a full man, his prayer is answered.' - Francis Bacon
1522. `Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.' - George Menedith
1523. `The more Things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.' - Bernard
Shaw
1524. Òur sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.' - Shelly
1525. `Tis strang but true; for truth is always strang.' - Byron
1526. `God is in His heaven,all's right with the world.' - Browning
1527. `For men many come and men may go, but I go on for ever.' - Tennyson
1528. `Brevity is the soul of with.' - Shakespeare

Quick Points
1529. `Variety is the very spice of life.' - William Cowper

1530. `Jealousy,the jaundice of the soul.' - Shakespeare
1531. Àll animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.' - Orwell
1532. `Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.' - Richard Lovelace
1533. `Man is by nature a political animal.' - Aristotle
1534. `Where wealth accumulates, men decay.' - Goldsmith
1535. `Frailty, thy name is woman.' - Shakespeare
1536. `Whom gods love, die young.' - Byron
1537. ‘This man had kept a school……’ Who is referred to here by W B Yeats? Patrick
Henry Pearse
1538. Ted Hughes was honoured with the Poet Laureateship in the year 1984
1539. The poem The Thought fox is taken from the collection Hawk in the Rain
1540. The opening lines of Journey of the Magi are a quotation from Lancelot Andrewes's
1622 Nativity sermon
1541. ‘The black sailed ship’ metaphorically alludes to death
1542. Name the theatre found by W. B Yeats? Abbey Theatre
1543. The prototype of modern Angry Young Man in the play Look Back in Anger? Jimmy
Porter
1544. Name the German dramatist most associated with epic theatre? Bertolt Brecht
1545. The term avant-garde literally means Advance-guard
1546. The anthology New Lines was edited by Robert Conquest
1547. Virginia Wolf belongs to the famous----------- group. Bloomsbury Group
1548. The serving hatch in the play by Harold Pinter is alluded to by the term---- Dumb
Waiter
1549. An example of oxymoron in Easter 1916. - Terrible Beauty
1550. That Woman’s days were spent… .” who is the woman referred to here
1551. by Yeats in the poem Easter 1916? Countess Markieviz
1552. ‘He had done most bitter wrong’—To whom was the wrong done? Maud Gonne
1553. Birthday Letters was the verse memoir for Plath written by Ted Hughes.
1554. Harold Pinter’s plays are typical examples of comedy of menace
1555. In Dumb Waiter Ben and Gus quarrel over the phrase Lighting the kettle
1556. In Easter 1916 Yeats commemorates Uprising in Dublin on 24 April 1916.
1557. Marchbanks is a character from G B Shaw’s play Candida
1558. Name one of the processes in reading according to Virginia Woolf? Reading as
closely as possible
1559. Expressionism originated in Germany
1560. Name the character mentioned as the mistress of Jimmy Porter. Madeline
1561. The essay ‘How should One Read a Book’ appears in The Common Reader: Second
Series ( Virginia Woolf)
1562. The Magi are the three wise men from the east who travelled to----- Bethalhem
1563. The winged horse mentioned in the poem ‘Easter 1916’ - Pegasus
1564. The autobiographical novel “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is
1565. being written by___James Augustine Joyce
1566. The rhythm used by Auden in ‘The Unknown Citizen’ resembles Hopkins’ Sprung
Rhythm
1567. Who coined the word ‘Theatre of the Absurd’? Martin Eslin
1568. 34.The movement started as a reaction against realism – Expressionism

Quick Points
1569. Who among the ones you have studied is known as ‘animal poet’? Ted Hughes
1570. According to Woolf the best way to understand a novel is to write what we have
read.
1571. Stream of Consciousness” is a phrase used by William James in his Principles and
Psychology
1572. In Dumb Waiter Ben and Gus wait for the orders of----- Wilson
1573. “Phedre” is a dramatic tragedy written by David Garrick
1574. Who is considered as the ‘ moral compass’ in the play “Look Back in Anger” -
Helena Charles
1575. Name Joyce’s only collection of short stories - The Dubliners
1576. The short story “Araby” is narrated by a boy
1577. Who wrote the screen play Karel Reisz’ Adaptation of “ The French Lieutenant’s
Woman” Harold Pinter
1578. The short story “The Rocking-Horse Winner” appeared in Harper’s Bazaar
1579. The narrative technique usually employed by James Joyce____. stream of
consciousness
1580. Theme of Look Back in Anger is lost childhood
1581. We find Ben in “The Dumb Waiter” as dominant and superior
1582. The haired murderers in the play “The Dumb Waiter” - Ben and Gus
1583. Pinter’s “The Dumb Waiter” resembles Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”
1584. The early stories in Joyce’s “Dubliners” have children as protagonists
1585. Which 20th century novelist made extensive use of Epiphany? James Joyce
1586. Virginia Woolf was the daughter of an eminent critic and scholar. Who
1587. was he? Leslie Stephen
1588. Who has been called the leader of Angry Young Men?John
1589. Osborne
1590. Yeats was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923
1591. The most famous play of Angry Young Men Movement - Look Back in Anger
1592. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” occurs in his Ariel Poems
1593. Surrealism is associated with Andre Breton
1594. Imagism - Ezra Pound
1595. “The Cry”, painting by Edward Munch is an example of Expressionism
1596. A narrator who is outside the story is Hetrodiegetic
1597. Term ideology was coined by Destutt de Tracy
1598. David Hume was a German Scientist
1599. Twentieth century literary criticism attempted to keep away from Discuss on
value
1600. Positivism laid stress on use of Natural sciences
1601. Father of modern linguistics Saussure
1602. Narrative is an act of Communication
1603. Wimsatt and Robert Pen Warren belong to a group called New Critics
1604. ‘Death of the Author’ is written by Roland Barthes
1605. J.M. Coetzee’s Foe is a retelling of Robinson Crusoe
1606. Mary Shelly’s Fankenstein is about the quest of a Scientist
1607. Who wrote Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys
1608. Study of narrative is known as Narratology
1609. The essay ‘Narrative Construction of Reality’ was written by Jerome Bruner

Quick Points
1610. The idea of mimesis was first introduced by Plato and Aristotle
1611. According to Aristotle Catharsis is the effect of mimesis
1612. Mimesis is the direct representation of reality.
1613. Indirect representation or re-presentation of reality is known as Diegesis
1614. Saleem Sinai is a character in Midnight’s Children
1615. Who prepared the two main modes of thinking Logico Scientific of the narrative -
Jerome Bruner
1616. Dorothy wordsworth is William Wordsworth’s Sister
1617. Narrative theory focuses on author, text and Reader
1618. The concept of implied author was first formulated by Wayne C Booth
1619. “Minute on Education”, formulated by Thomas Babington Macaulay came out in
1835
1620. Name an Orientalist who praised Sanskrit for its wonderful structure. - William
Jones
1621. The term used by Salman Rushdie for the method of nativising English, making it
1622. indigenous. – Chutnification
1623. The discipline of criticism resists colonial culture through the promotion of native
culture including language. – Nativism
1624. In which poem does Derek Walcott subscribe to the idea of bilingualism? “A Far
Cry from Africa”
1625. ‘What is history’ is written by E.H. Carr
1626. Aristotle stressed on the Aesthetic value of literary texts
1627. ‘The Rhetoric of fiction’ was written by Wayne C. Booth
1628. As I lay dying is an example of multiple narrative.
1629. Fabula and Sjuzet are introduced in literary narratives by Russian formalist
1630. Who studied and analysed the plot structures of folktales? Vladimir Propp
1631. Who is the French critic who argued that literary narratives consist of signs?
Roland Barthes
1632. According to Gerard Genette narration in all literary narrative include :
Historic,Recit and Narrating
1633. The image of new country dreamt by Francis Bacon - New Atlantic
1634. The human rights philosopher who argued that the victims of atrocity and
opposition tell their stories in the form of testimonies and autobiographies. - Julia
Kristeva
1635. Who is the founder of deconstruction? Jacques Derrida
1636. Epigraphs, prefaces, forwards, etc. that have some connection to the main narrative
is known as - Para text
1637. Reader is a construction and it is implied is the work known as implied reader.
1638. Foe is a novel by J.M. Coetzee
1639. Waste land is a best example for intertextuality.
1640. W.H. Auden has an architextual connection with satires of Alexander Pope.
1641. Who among the following outlined the four periods of the development of Indian
Philosophy - Dr. S. Radhakrishnan
1642. Linguistics competence is a notion proposed by Chomsky
1643. According to J. Derrida Text is a gas
1644. Who proposed seven standards of Textuality de Beangrande and Dressler
1645. Language of literature is Delphic
1646. Theory of functional style is perhaps one of the greatest contribution of prague
school.

Quick Points
1647. Course in General Linguistics was written by Saussure

1648. Exponent of reader response theory Stanley Fish
1649. Of ‘Grammatology’ is written by Derrida ( Translated by : Gayatri Spivak )
1650. Todorov proposed the name narratology to the study of narratives.
1651. Hermaneutic codes informs our interpretation of narrative.
1652. New critics argued that Meaning is inside the text
1653. A text that can be read in form of several different texts is called Multimodal
1654. The word difference was coined by Derrida
1655. Criticism which seeks a synthesis between the psychological criticism and
sociological criticism - Ontological criticism
1656. The Golden Bough was written by - James Frazer
1657. Louis Althusser is a French Philosopher
1658. The study of signs is called Semiotics
1659. Who coined the word netspeak to denote the language used in internet
communication? David Crystal
1660. Who is the author of A House for Mr. Biswas? V S Naipaul
1661. Who wrote Things fall Apart? Chinua Achebe
1662. Train to Pakistan is a famous novel by Kushwant Singh based on Partition
1663. Who wrote Summer in Calcutta ? Kamla Das
1664. Achebe belongs to Nigeria
1665. The poem which lends the title of Things fall Apart by Achebe is Second Coming
1666. An Area of Darkness by V S Naipaul is a Travelogue
1667. Voss is a novel by Patrick White, the Australian novelist.
1668. The Stone Angel is a novel written by Margaret Lawrence, a native Neepawa in
Africa
1669. Mukta Dhara is a play by Tagore
1670. The term “Gitanjali” of the poem of the same name by Tagore means Song offerings
1671. Who wrote the introduction to Gitanjali ? WB Yeats
1672. Rabindra Nath Tagore the first Indian to get Nobel Prize was awarded Nobel Prize
1673. in for literature.
1674. Douglas Steward who wrote many verse plays like Kelly, Shipwreck, The Golden
1675. Lover and Fischer’s Ghost originally belonged to New Zealand
1676. Who wrote the book The Western Canon? Harold Bloom
1677. Literary Theory: An Introduction is a book written by Terry Eagleton
1678. Who wrote the book The Common Pursuit? F.R Leavis
1679. “Of the standard of Taste” is an essay by David Hume
1680. The term canon originaly meaning a measuring rod, is of Greek origin
1681. The famous book on culture wars in USA, Illiberal Education : The politics of Sex and
1682. Race on Campus is written by Dinesh D’souza
1683. Who made a distinction between implied reader and actual reader? Wolf Gang Iser
1684. Who translated Rubaiyat of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam into English? Edward
Fitzgerald
1685. Who wrote the book Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992)? Henry Louis
Gates
1686. Who spoke about the concept of value in literature? Frank Kermode
1687. The word for copying another person’s ideas, words, or work and using as if they
are yours is called Plagiarism
1688. “Piers Plowman” is a poem by William Langland
1689. Aestheticism means intended for Pleasure

Quick Points
1690. My story is a fictional autobiography of Kamala Das

1691. Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is of Nirad Chaudhri
1692. Who wrote the famous essay “What is an Author?” 1969? Michel Foucault
1693. What does the idea of “catharsis” by Aristotle mean? Purgation of pity and fear
1694. Who wrote the essay “From work to Text”? Roland Barthes
1695. The comparison between two different things by using like or as as in “O my love’s
1696. like a red red rose” is called a Simile
1697. The comparison between two different things by not using like or as as in “O my
1698. love’s a red red rose” is called a Metaphor
1699. Who used the word social construction for the first time in the book The Social
Construction of Reality ? Peter Berger& Tomas Luckman
1700. A brand of criticism that argues that writing in English continues colonialism is
called Nativism
1701. Whose book is Imaginary Home lands? Salman Rushdie
1702. Who is the only writer who has won the Booker of Booker prize? Rushdie
1703. What is the subtitle of The Fragile Absolute by Slavoj Zizek?. Why is the Christian
Legacy worth fighting for?
1704. Zizek’s favourite philosopher who influences his works most is Jacques lacan
1705. Who is called “the French Freud”? Jacques Lacan.
1706. Jacques lacan’s formulation of the concept of psycho‐sexual development has the
following three stages of symbolic, imagination and the Mirror stage
1707. “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious” is a celebrated essay by Jacques
lacan
1708. Ferdinand de Saussure who played an important part in the development of
structuralism is a Swiss linguist.
1709. Course in General linguistics published in 1975 is written by Saussure
1710. The figure of speech in which a part of something is used to signify the whole as in
“ten hands” for “ten workers” is called Synecdoche
1711. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human sciences” is an essay by
Jacques Derrida
1712. Who coined the new word “difference” to mean “to differ” and “to defer” at the
same
1713. time? Derrida
1714. Who is the proponent of affective stylistics? Stanley Fish
1715. Who says that all “reading is …….misreading”? Harold Bloom
1716. Which critical school has its ideal the establishment of an authentic text? Textual
criticism
1717. James Thorpe wrote the text Principles of Textual Criticism .
1718. Who wrote the famous essay “The Death of the Author”? Roland Barthes
1719. Whose book is The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis? Jacques Lacan
1720. “The Philosophy of Composition” is by Edgar Allan Poe
1721. Which critic made a revaluation of Metaphysical poets and praised them for
blending states of mind and feeling T S Eliot
1722. Frank Lentricchia wrote After the New Criticism(1980)
1723. Shelley wrote Defence of poetry
1724. The title of the book The Well Wrought Urn (1947) by Cleanth Brooks is taken from
the poem by John Donne. The Canonization
1725. The term is suggestive of carefully worked out images that were elaborated over a
number of lines. Well wrought

Quick Points
1726. According to Freud all human behavior is motivated by or Sexual energy. Libido
1727. Oedipus Complex is a hypothesis developed by Freud
1728. Ernest Jones Hamlet and Oedipus originally published in 1910in the first full scale
study of major work Psychoanalytic
1729. Hamlet is a Tragedy
1730. Which critic spoke about four kinds of meaning? IA Richards
1731. Who defined a good work as one which successfully communicates a valuable
experience? IA Richards
1732. Gusto is a concept of the Romantic critic Hazlitt
1733. “Horizon of expectation “ is a term used in the reception theory of Hans Robert
Gauss
1734. Ecriture the French word is used for Writing
1735. Writing Degree Zero is a book written by Roland Barthes
1736. Textual criticism: Textual criticism (sometimes still referred to as "lower
criticism") refers to the examination of the text itself to identify its provenance or to
trace its history. It takes as its basis the fact that errors inevitably crept into texts as
generations of scribes reproduced each other's manuscripts.
1737. Narrative criticism: Narrative criticism is one of a number of modern forms of
criticism based in contemporary literary theory and practice - in this case, from
narratology. In common with other literary approaches (and in contrast to
historical forms of criticism), narrative criticism treats the text as a unit, and
focuses on narrative structure and composition, plot development, themes and
motifs, characters and characterization.
1738. ‘Transition Poets’: James Thompson, Thomas Grey, William Collins and William
Blake.
1739. “Writerly books” and “Readerly books” are a distinction made by Roland Barthes
1740. Who made a distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed texts? Umberto Eco
1741.
1742. The book The New Criticism 1941 is written by John Crowe Ranson
1743. Which group of critics relied on “explication” or “close reading”? Structuralist
1744. Who wrote the book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)? William Empson
1745. According to Allan Tate the meaning of good poetry is its Tension
1746. Rene Wellek, American critic and Austin warren coauthored the book Theory of
Literature in 1949
1747. Who used the phrase “the heresy of paraphrase”? Cleanth Brooks
1748. Who wrote the works Practical criticism (1929) and Principles of Literacy Criticism
(1924) I A Richards
1749. Which important writer other than George Eliot and Henry James according to FR
Leavis formed The Great Tradition in English novel? Joseph Conrad
1750. Multiple meaning and plurisignation are alternative terms for the word Ambiguity
1751. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) by Albert Camus is an important work on
Existentialism
1752. Who criticizes William Empson’s theory of ambiguity in “William Empson,
Contemporary criticism and poetic diction”? Elder Olson
1753. The idea of “depth psychology” an important antecedent of archetypal criticism is of
C G Jung
1754. Allan Tate’s “Tension in poetry” appears in the book “On the limits of poetry”
1755. Archetype denotes recurrent narrative designs, patterns of action, character types,
themes

Quick Points
1756. and images which are identifiable in literature, myths, dreams and even social
rituals.
1757. The slogan of the cultural movement launched by clack students in Paris in 1932 is
Negritude
1758. Who wrote Second Sex, an important work of feminism? Simon De Bouveur
1759. Why I am not a Hindu is a work by Kanjah Illaiah
1760. WEB Du Bois’s idea that black people could never see oneself through their eyes but
only through the eyes of the white is called Double consciousness
1761. WEB Du Bois argued that the view that blacks were biologically inferior is not
scientific in his book The souls of the Black Folk
1762. Dirk Hoerder brilliant argues the European Renaissance understood as exclusively
European phenomena was in fact a mixture of cultural contributions in his book
Cultures in contact
1763. Who coined the word Gynocriticism? Elaine Showalter
1764. The suffragette movement is connected with Feminism
1765. Which is Mary Wollstonecraft’s work on feminism A vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792)
1766. Who wrote the essay “The Black Arts Movement” of 1968? Larry Neal
1767. Black Arts Movement represents a number of Afro‐Americans whose work shaped
the social and political turbulence of the 1960s
1768. Who founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School in 1965 at Harlem? Imamu
Amiri Baraka
1769. Imamu Amiri Baraka was born as Le Roi Jones
1770. Baraka’s play, Dutchman is often considered an exemplary product of the Black
Arts Movement
1771. “I have a Dream” is a famous speech by Martin Luther King
1772. Id, egoand Super ego are the bi partition of the human psyche made by Freud
1773. Which feminist critic spoke about the need of a room for a woman to become a
writer? Virginia Wolf
1774. Donna Harraway’s notion of the “creature of the post – gender world” is called
Cyborg
1775. The term the French writer Halen Cixious used for feminine writing which is
typically
1776. feminine in style, language, tome and feeling is called Ecriture Feminine
1777. Who coined the term subaltern? Gayathri Spivak
1778. Who classified the feminist authors into three main types : Femine phase 1840 –
1880, Feminist phase 1890 ‐ 1920s and the female phase. Elaine Showalter
1779. Sudras in Ancient India is a book written by RS Sharma
1780. “Who was Sudras?”, book authored by DR BR Ambedakar was dedicated to Jyothi
Rao Phule
1781. Who edited the first volume of Subaltern Studies? Ranajith Guhe
1782. Towards Dalit Aesthetics is a book by Saram Kumar Limbalai
1783. Myth literature and African world is a book by Wole Soyinka
1784. Who is the author of History of Sexuality? Foucault
1785. Who is the author of Coming Out? Jeffrey Week
1786. Who wrote the book Orientalism? Edward Said
1787. Who wrote the book The Wretched of the Earth? Franz Fanon
1788. The subtitle of the book The Empire Writes Back by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths
and Hellen Tiffin is ? Theory and practice in post colonial literatures

Quick Points
1789. Who wrote the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
1790. Who wrote the book The Location of Culture? Homi J Bhabha
1791. Interventions is an international journal of Post Colonial studies
1792. The books Culture and Society (1958) and the Uses of Literacy (1958) which
inaugurated movement are written by Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart
respectively. Cultural studies
1793. Mythologies a precursor of modern cultural studies is written by Roland Barthes
1794. Who used the term “cultural materialism” for the first time? Raymond Williams
1795. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield the British cultural materialists jointly wrote
the book Political Shakespeare(1985). Its subtitle is_ New Essays in cultural
Materialism
1796. Clifford Geertz, the new historicist used the term for the close analysis or “reading”
of a particular social production or event to recover its meanings. Thick
descriptions
1797. Who described new historicism as “a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts
and textuality of history? Louis Montrose
1798. Representations is the term used by new historicists to suggest verbal formations
which are the “Ideological products” or “cultural constructs” of a specific area.
1799. The book The New Historicism, a collection of essays by new historicists, Louis
Montrose, Stephen Green Blatt and others is edited by H Aram Veeser
1800. Who used the term “ecocriticism” for the first time in 1978? William Rueckert
1801. An early ecocritical work The country and the City (1973) is written by Raymond
Williams
1802. The book Romantic Ecology (1991) is written by the British critic Jonathan Bate
1803. Who wrote the book Silent Spring (1962) on toxic effects of residue of chemicals?
Rachel Carson
1804. Anthropocentrism is a term used for placing human beings at the centre of
everything and its opposite is ecocentrism.
1805. Who coined the term “Literary ecology” in 1972? Joseph Meeker
1806. Who wrote the essay “nature” which argued that all human actions are irrational
1807. because they try to change or alter the course of nature? JS Mill
1808. Who wrote The Population Bomb (1972) one of the most popular environmentalist
books ever written? Paul Ehrlich
1809. Ecofeminists argue that patriarchal societies’ values and beliefs have resulted in
the oppression of both women and nature.
1810. Vandana Shiva’s book_ an important ecofeminist book saw ancient India as
possessing a more environment friendly culture. Staying Alive
1811. The main charge of cultural Materialists against New Historicists is that their
readings are Non political
1812. A term that regularly occurs in New Historicists books is Circulation
1813. Cultural Poetics is an alternative term for Cultural Materialism
1814. Who wrote The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984) which is an
analysis of various aspects of post modernism? Jean–Francois Lyotard
1815. Who put forward the proposition that all literary texts have gaps or lacunae, which
is an important concept in reader‐response theory? Wolfgang Iser
1816. In post colonialism the condition of being the subject of cross‐breeding is called
Hybridity
1817. Who made a controversy by famously saying that the Gulf war did not take place
Jean Baudrillard

Quick Points
1818. Simulation and simulacra are Jean Budrillard’s notions

1819. The term “Social realism” is connected with Marxist Criticism
1820. Hungarian Marxist Critic Georg Lukacs developed a theory known as seeing literary
works as reflections of a kind of system that was gradually unfolding Reflection
1821. Which Marxist playwright is connected with the epic theatre? Bertolt Brecht
1822. Who of the following figures is not associated with Frankfurt School of Marxist
aesthetics founded in 1923? Bertolt Brecht
1823. Whose definition is “Art is the negative knowledge of the actual world”? Theodore
Adorno
1824. Who wrote the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Porduction”?
Walter Benjamin
1825. Which Marxist critic developed the theory of homologies? Lucien Goldman
1826. The first English Marxist Critic of note was who wrote Illusion and Reality is
Christopher Caudwell
1827. Cyberpunk is a subspecies of Science fiction
1828. Fiction dealing with fiction is called Metafiction
1829. Grand narrative/metanarrative is a concept of Lyotard
1830. King Alfred the Great (b. 847/848, d. 899) is often considered the ‘father of
English prose’ because it was during the last decade of his reign that he provided
the impetus for the Anglo-Saxons to turn to the vernacular as the vehicle for legal,
ecclesiastical, medical, historical, philosophical, and theological writings.
1831. J. G. Ballard - The Wind from Nowhere, 1962
1832. The Australian poet Alec Hope, in a remarkable essay upon Marlowe, ascribes to
Tamburlaine “a thoroughgoing morality of power, aesthetics of power and logic of
power.”
1833. In 1959 M. L. Rosenthal first used the term "confessional" in a review of
Robert Lowell's Life Studies entitled "Poetry as Confession
1834. Dasein literally means “being there”
1835. Drâme Bourgeois(Bourgeois Drama): A term coined by the 18th-century French
philosopher and playwright Denis Diderot to describe a type of drama that focused
on the domestic problems of middle class families.
1836. Lyotard introduced the term Grand-narrative in his book “The Post Modern
Condition”
1837. Gynocriticism: Elaine Showalter (Elaine Showalter coined the term Gynocriticism
to signify the study of women represented in literature by female writers,
portraying the feminine viewpoint.)
1838. Historiographic: Linda Hutcheon coined the term to refer to works that
fictionalize actual historical events or figures.
1839. New Historicism:Stephen Greenblatt in his book “Renaissance self Fashioning:
From More to Shakespeare”
1840. Poioumenon: Alastair Fowler coined the term to refer to a specific type of
metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation.

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1. Globe and the Rose theatres associated with William Shakespeare.

Brutus: Peace! Count the clock.

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56. Treatise on the Astrolabe is Chaucer's prose work.

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156. Tennyson called Milton "the mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies".

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263. Hyperbole is an exaggerated statement for the sake of emphasis.

301. Twelfth Night opens with the speech of Duke.

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In every cry of every man

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599. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the play-within-the-play.

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663. Futurism: A literary/artistic movement in early 20th-century Italy, calling for a

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691. Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) is a comedy of humor.

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788. Dramatic Monologue The speech is addressed to someone present.

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contemporary poetry, the New Formalists called for a return to traditional

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866. David Lodge wrote Nice Work (1988)

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