Classics Flashcards
“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt with the stars.” Translated from the French, this statement appears in which novel of 1857, thought by contemporaries to have been offensive to public morals?
Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
In Gulliver’s Travels, the brutish human-like beings who are caringly governed by the horse-like Houyhnhnms are known by what name, which would become a term for a crass, rude, and stupid person?
Yahoos
In “The Devil’s Dictionary,” he defined “litigation” as “a machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.”
Ambrose Bierce
While serving a two-year sentence in Reading Gaol for “gross indecency,” playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde penned a letter which was both a personal correspondence and a general reflection on the universality of human suffering. Give either the title of this letter, published in 1905, or the name of Wilde’s former friend and lover to whom it was addressed.
De Profundis, Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie)
Surviving in a single medieval manuscript in the collection of the British Library, what is the oldest epic poem in Old English?
Beowulf
“He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York; from whence he had married my mother.” This sentence forms part of the opening lines of which novel of 1719?
Robinson Crusoe
America’s largest quick-service seafood restaurant is named after a villainous and charismatic cook from what 1883 novel?
Treasure Island (Long John Silver)
What real-life Pacific nation did Lemuel Gulliver visit in Gulliver’s Travels, after Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and other fictional islands?
After hitting Balnibari, Luggnagg, and Glubbdubdrib, Gulliver also stopped in at the oddly plausible nation of “Japan.”
It’s the title of Oliver Goldsmith’s title man “Of Wakefield.”
Vicar
The title character of this Edith Wharton novel is in love with Mattie Silver, his wife’s cousin.
Ethan Frome
In a popular short story from 1820, a strong and mischievous prankster known as Brom Bones is (probably) responsible for the alleged appearance in a Dutch Hudson River town of a Hessian soldier’s haunting spirit. This spirit is best known as what?
Headless Horseman
In “The Jungle Book” (not the movie) this 100-year-old python is Mowgli’s protector.
Kaa
Reel in Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” to know the land-based parts take place on this island.
Cuba
The greedy wolf Isengrim is the antagonist of this medieval fox.
Reynard
More than once this 1897 novel quotes from Deuteronomy, “The blood is the life.”
Dracula
In this 17th c. work God says the fallen angels are subject to free will and therefore the authors of their own fate.
Paradise Lost
This 1955 novel is responsible for popularizing the word “nymphet.”
Lolita
Those who value land as a possession include John Bergson in this Willa Cather novel named for western settlers.
O Pioneers
What is the name of the wealthy Baghdadian who, according to legend, discovers the rocs’ eggs and the Valley of Diamonds, is buried alive with his deceased wife, and kills the Old Man of the Sea (among numerous other adventures)?
Sinbad
In a Henry James novel “What” this girl “Knew” includes that her new stepmother and stepfather are having an affair.
Maisie (What Maisie Knew)
James Agee and Walker Evans’ book dignifying tenant farmers is ironically titled “Let Us Now Praise” these.
Famous Men (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men)
“Episodes” in this 1922 work include the Lotus Eaters and Ithaca.
Ulysses
A category of satire that criticizes with gentle laughter (as opposed to bitter condemnation) takes its name from what 1st-century Latin lyric poet—also famous for his Odes—whose influential Satires were infused with warmth and charm?
Horace
Her 1896 N.Y. Times obituary called her “the writer of probably the most widely read work of fiction ever penned”
Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
The title of a George Peele poem from 1590, written on the occasion of the retirement of Queen Elizabeth’s champion knight, Sir Henry Lee, and sung to her during Lee’s final jousting tournament, provides the title for what 1929 Ernest Hemingway novel?
A Farewell To Arms
In “Gone with the Wind”, Rhett Butler says this city named for a monarch “is the South, only intensified.”
Charleston
Ulysses & Menelaus were among those who emerged from the “womb” of this, called “tall as a mountain, ribbed with pine.”
Trojan Horse
This Dublin-born man’s pre-WWII works were mostly in English. His post-war work– primarily in French.
Samuel Beckett
What is the title character’s name in DuBose Heyward’s lyrical 1925 novel, which describes the adventures of a disabled African American street beggar (and his mistress) living among the tenements of Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina?
Porgy (of “Porgy and Bess”)
Considered a foundational piece of Western Literature, this Spanish writer released the epic novel Don Quixote in two parts between 1605 and 1615.
Miguel de Cervantes
Set in Peru, this 1928 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was written by Thornton Wilder.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The 1933 novel The Case of the Velvet Claws was the first novel by Erle Stanley Gardner and the first to feature what lawyer?
Perry Mason
What is the name used for the characters created by American illustrator Rose O’Neill in 1909, as cherub-faced baby characters in magazine illustrations and a comic strip, that became extremely popular and sought after as porcelain and later plastic dolls? Their mythology-derived name is now used for Japan’s leading mayonnaise brand, which uses the doll as its emblem.
Kewpie
