Literature Flashcards
1
Q
Ulysses
A
- Written by James Joyce in 1922, regarded as the greatest novel written in English in the twentieth century.
- Retelling of Homer’s Odyssey in the unlikely guise of Leopold Bloom, an aging ad salesman, and the everyday hero of Dublin Ireland on a single day in 1904.
- Celebrated for its very rich portraits of characters, astounding allusions to other literary and cultural works, and its innovations with language.
2
Q
Ernest Hemingway
A
- Born in Oak Park, Illinois, 1899, died in Idaho, 1961, by self-inflicted shotgun. Started as a reporter at 18 with Kansas City Star. Injured in WWI in Italy as an ambulance driver.
- Know for a repetitive, masculine, stripped down writing style, deceptive in its seeming simplicity, honed in Paris in the company of Gertrude Stein and others of the Lost Generation.
- Wrote numerous short stories based on his boyhood summers in upper Michigan and on his later travels throughout Europe. The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell To Arms (1929), For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940).
3
Q
The Harlem Renaissance
A
- a flourishing African-American art and literature scene in the Harlem neighborhood of NYC in the 1920s and early 1930s.
- incubated by the newly freed southern blacks after the trials of slavery and Reconstruction in the 1800s, moved North in an exodus known as the Great Migration.
- influential authors:
- W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
- James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1903)
- Nela Larsen, Passing (1929)
- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
4
Q
Paradise Lost
A
- an epic poem by John Milton written in 1667, a retelling of humankind’s fall from innocence as told in the book of Genesis
- considered a masterpiece in Western literature and an influential work of the Protestant Reformation
- written in blank verse–unrhymed iambic pentameter
5
Q
Homer
A
- The stories told in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are mainstays of Western culture and literature, having become of everyday language for over 3000 years: the Trojan Horse, Achilles’ heel, the Cyclops, the Siren’s song.
6
Q
Heart of Darkness
A
