Literature Flashcards
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen (1813)
Set in England in the early 19th century, Pride and Prejudice tells the story of the Bennets of Longbourn, five unmarried daughters after the rich and eligible Mr. Bingley of Netherfield and his status-conscious friend, Mr. Darcy of Pemberley, have moved into their neighborhood. While Bingley takes an immediate liking to the eldest Bennet daughter, Jane, Darcy has difficulty adapting to local society and repeatedly clashes with the second-eldest Bennet daughter, Elizabeth Bennet.
Moby Dick
Herman Melville (1851)
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
A sailor called Ishmael narrates the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale which on a previous voyage destroyed Ahab’s ship and severed his leg at the knee. Other charaacters include the mates: Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask and their respective harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo, and Ahab’s harpooner Fedallah
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
Story told by Nick Carraway set in the fictional town of West Egg concerning the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and obsession for the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan.
1984
George Orwell (1948)
The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (or Ingsoc in the government’s invented language, Newspeak) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite, that persecutes individualism and independent thinking as “thoughtcrime”.
The tyranny is epitomised by Big Brother, the Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality but who may not even exist. The Party “seeks power entirely for its own sake. It is not interested in the good of others; it is interested solely in power.”[4] The protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith, is a member of theOuter Party, who works for the Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue in Newspeak), which is responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism.
Other terms and concepts introduced by the book are doublethink, Room 101, telescreen, 2 + 2 = 5, and memory hole. Other characters are Julia, Winston’s lover, O’Brien, who entraps Winston, and Emmanuel Goldstein, the counter-revolutionary leader of the Brotherhood, and author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. He is the symbolic Enemy of the State—the national nemesis who ideologically unites the people of Oceania with the Party, especially during the Two Minutes Hate.
The Scarlett Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance
Set in Puritan Boston during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter, Pearl, through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity in spite of the prodding by Reverend John Wilson, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale, and the physician Roger Chillingworth.
Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her cash. Raskolnikov, in attempts to defend his actions, argues that with the pawnbroker’s money he can perform good deeds to counterbalance the crime, while ridding the world of a vermin. He also commits the murder to test a theory of his that dictates some people are naturally capable of such actions, and even have the right to perform them. Several times throughout the novel, Raskolnikov compares himself with Napoleon Bonaparte and shares his belief that murder is permissible in pursuit of a higher purpose.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte (1847)
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography published under the pen name Currer Bell
Primarily of the bildungsroman genre, Jane Eyre follows the emotions and experiences of its title character, including her growth to adulthood, her love for Mr. Rochester, the byronic master of fictitious Thornfield Hall and encounter with Bertha Mason, the violently insane first wife of Edward Rochester who is locked in the attic.
The novel goes through five distinct stages: Jane’s childhood at Gateshead Hall, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins; her education at Lowood School, where she acquires friends and role models but also suffers privations and oppression; her time as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester; her time with the Rivers family, during which her earnest but cold clergyman cousin, St. John Rivers, proposes to her; and the finale with her reunion with, and marriage to, her beloved Rochester.
Candide
Voltaire (1759)
Candide, ou l’Optimisme
It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism (or simply “optimism”) by his mentor, Professor Pangloss. The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide’s slow, painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world, such as such as the Seven Years’ War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Voltaire concludes with Candide, if not rejecting optimism outright, advocating a deeply practical precept, “we must cultivate our garden”, in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, “all is for the best” in the “best of all possible worlds”.
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott (1868)
The novel follows the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—detailing their passage from childhood to womanhood, and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)
It follows the lives of two women, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, amid their friends and family.
Billy Budd
Herman Melville (1891 published posthumously in 1926)
Billy Budd, Sailor
The plot follows foundling Billy Budd, a seaman impressed into service aboard HMS Indomitable in the year 1797. His openness and natural charisma that makes him popular with the crew but arouses the antagonism of the ship’s Master-at-arms, John Claggart. This leads Claggart to falsely charge Billy with conspiracy to mutiny. Captain Vere summons Claggart and Billy to his cabin and while Claggart makes his case, Billy, strikes and kills Claggart. Vere, following the law, condemns Billy to be hanged.
To Kill A Mockingbird
Harper Lee (1960)
A story set during three years (1933–35) in the fictional “tired old town” of Maycomb, Alabama. It focuses on six-year-old Jean Louise Finch (Scout), who lives with her older brother, Jem, and their widowed father, Atticus Finch, a middle-aged lawyer. Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Dill, who visits Maycomb to stay with his aunt each summer. The three children are terrified of, and fascinated by, their neighbor, the reclusive Arthur “Boo” Radley. Judge Taylor appoints Atticus to defend Tom Robinson, a black man who has been accused of raping a young white woman, Mayella Ewell.
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy (1865)
War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events surrounding the 1812 French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families: the Bolkonsky family, the Rostov family, the Bezukhov family and the Drubetskoy family.
Les Miserables
Victor Hugo (1862)
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck (1939)
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway (1929)
A first-person account of American Frederic Henry, serving as a Lieutenant (“Tenente”) in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The title is taken from a poem by 16th-century English dramatist George Peele. A Farewell to Arms is about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations.
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens (1959)
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad (1902)
The Call of the Wild
Jack London (1903)
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway (1940)
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy (1877)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
Pilgrim’s Progress
John Bunyan (1678)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain (1884)
