Subtest #1 Flashcards
Ancient Literature
Storytelling, Nature & God, Themes of Epic Quest
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Ancient Literature: Story of King Gilgamesh (half human/half god)
Homer’s Epic Poems
Ancient Literature: The Illiad/The Odyssey (greek gods & wars)
Aesop’s Fables
Ancient Literature: The Ant & the Grasshopper/ Androcles & The Lion
(teach lessons about life and animals act like people)
Virgil’s Epic
Ancient Literature (Roman Empire): The Aeneid
Georgics
Eclogues
Horace Lyric Poetry
Ancient Literature:
Odes -addressed every aspect of Roman life
Epodes-instructed public in moral behavior
Ovids
Ancient Literature:
Metamorphoses-long series of tales about the gods as well as human beings whose bodies are transformed into flowers, rocks, trees and animals.
Medieval & Renaissance Literature
Fall of the Roman period.
Much literature continued to be produced in Latin, Anglo-Saxon or Old English.
The Divine Comedy
Medieval Literature (Epic Allegory)
By Dante Alighieri
Three parts (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) follows his progress upward through the levels or “circles” of the dead.
The Summoning of Everyman (Everyman)
Medieval Literature/Middle Ages (Morality Play)
Portrays Gods accounting of the good and evil deeds in the life of Everyman.
Beowulf
Medieval Literature
Oldest Epic in Old English
Story of a warrior who turns into a king, wins three epic battles over Grendel (troll)
Canterbury Tales
Medieval Literature (Cycle of Stories)
By Geoffrey Chaucer
The Knight’s Tale
The Miller’s Tale
The Wife of Bath’s Tale
Drama in the Middle Ages
Mystery & Morality plays written to teach Christian stories and values through the use of allegory and symbolism.
William Shakespeare
As You Like It
Othello
Hamlet
Romeo and Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2
Julius Caesar
King Lear
Shakespeares’s Sonnets
Elizabethan’s View (Dramas)
Hierarchy was necessary balance, everything in the universe has a specific place and rank.
Jacobean Drama
Dark in mood, questioned the stability of the social order
Metaphysical Poets
John Donne (The Flea)
George Herbert
Andrew Marvell
“Don Quixote”
Medieval/Renaissance Literature
By Miguel De Cervantes
About a man who reads novels about chivalry which leads him to set out on his own knightly quests.
Paradise Lost
Medieval/Renaissance Lit. (Poem)
By John Milton
Theme of mankind’s fall from grace and God’s banishment of Satan from heaven.
The Neoclassical Period
Age of Restoration or Enlightenment
“age of making the world be more rational”
Believed in the ability to remake the world on a more rational basis, mocked the supremacy of the Catholic Church
Jonathan Swift
Neoclassical Period
A Tale of a Tub
Gulliver’s Travels
Daniel Defoe
Neoclassical Period
Robinson Crusoe
Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)
Neoclassical Period
Tartuffe
The Misanthrope
The Imaginary Invalid
The Romantic Period
Found inspiration in the beauty of nature, focused on individual imagination. Writers examined their own feelings and emotions.
Mostly lyric poetry but novels also arrived
Samuel Taylor Coleridge/ William Wordsworth
The Romantic Period (Lyrical Ballads)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Great Romantic Poets
Percy Bysshe Shelley (Ozymandias)
John Keats (Ode on a Grecian Urn/ Ode to a Nightingale)
George Gordon
Lord Byron (Don Juan)
Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility/ Pride and Prejudice)
Mary Shelley
The Romantic Period (Gothic Horror Novel)
Frankenstein
Victorian Period
Further development in the English novel. Bridged the gap from Romanticism to Modernism in England.
By Charles Dickens:
David Copperfield
Great Expectations
Sentimental Education
The Magic Mountain
Oliver Twist
Bildungsromans
(Written by Charles Dickens)
Novels that describe the development of a young person from childhood to maturity
Victorian Detective Stories/Novels
Sherlock Holmes
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Dracula
Symbolism Poetic Movement
Movement in France emerged as a reaction against the Parnassian school of poets.
Emphasized metrical form and restricted emotion. Focused on moods and transient sensations with logical descriptions.
Charles Baudelaire
(The Flowers of Evil)
Arthur Rimbaud
(Illuminations)
(The Drunken Boat)
Paul Verlaine
Stephane Mallarme
Modernism Literature
Arose as a feeling of disillusionment with modern culture and society, urge to reject past forms and experiment with new ones.
Writers of Modernism Literature
T.S. Eliot
(The Waste Land)
(Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
William Butler Yeats
(The Second Coming)
(Among School Children)
Dystopian Fiction/Poetry
Modernism Literature
George Orwell
(1984)
Aldous Huxley
(Brave New World)
Yevgeny Zamyatin
(We)
Postmodernism Literature
Presented fragmented view of reality that drew on parody, irony, black humor and cultural exhaustion.
Created their own versions of reality to compete with or replace the reality of everyday experience.
Young Adult Literature
(Problem Novels/Coming of Age Fiction)
Feature adolescent characters who are trying to negotiate the problems and emotions of leaving childhood for the adult world.
Focus on protagonists inner struggles with coming of age
Short (150 pages or less) with focus on a main characters thoughts and actions in a plot over a brief period of time.
Examples of Young Adult Literature
S.E. Hinton
(The Outsiders)
Shakespeare’s
(Romeo & Juliet)
Jack London
(The Call of the Wild)
J.D. Salinger
(The Catcher in the Rye)
Lois Lowry
(The Giver)
American Literature Writers
Washington Irving
(Rip Van Winkle/ The Legend of Sleepy Hollow)
James Fenimore Cooper
(The Last of the Mochicans)
Edgar Allan Poe-Gothic Literature
(Annabel Lee/ The Raven/ The Murders in the Rue Morgue/ The Telltale Heart)
Transcendentalism Movement (American Lit)
(New England) members believed people have knowledge about themselves and the world. Favored imagination and intuition over logic.
Transcendentalism Writers (American Lit)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(“Self-Reliance”/ “Nature”- original relation to the universe)
Henry David Thoreau
(“Walden”- lived by a simpler life close to nature)
John Greenleaf Whittier
(The Slave Ship)
Walt Whitman
(Leaves of Grass)
(Crossing Brooklyn Ferry)
Herman Melville
(Moby Dick)
Mark Twain
(The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
Regional Novelists (American Lit)
Kate Chopin
(The Awakening)
Stephen Crane
(The Red Badge of Courage)
Robert Frost
(Mending Wall)
(Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening)
Other American Lit Novelists (Prose)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
(The Great Gatsby)
Ernest Hemingway (flat minimalist style)
William Faulkner (stream of consciousness)
(The Sound and the Fury)
Arthur Miller
The Death of a Salesman (Play)
Absurdist Fiction (Lit Genre)
Novel or play that presents humanity as meaningless and without purpose
Allegory (Lit Genre)
Fictional narrative that contains a second symbolic meaning in addition to its story.
Characters represent human qualities such as virtues, vices or abstract concepts (such as death).
Ballad (Lit Genre)
A songlike poem that tells a story and often has repeated line(s).
Ex. “What are the bugles blowin’ for?”
“To turn you out, to turn you out”
Epic (Lit Genre)
Long narrative poetic work in formal or elevated style.
Features heroic lead character who must undertake a journey or great trial to overcome a foe.
Ex.) The Illiad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid
Epistolary Novel (Lit Genre)
Written in the form of letters, diaries, journal entries.
Ex) Clarrisa, Dracula, The Color Purple
Essay (Lit genre)
Prose work written in the first person expressing strong opinions about some topic or life experience.
Fable (Lit genre)
Provides moral lessons
Features animals w/ human characteristics
Ex. Aesop’s Fables- The Tortoise and the Hare
Farce (Lit Genre)
Comic play that employs stock situations and characters and exaggerated emotions
Legend (Lit Genre)
Collective experience of a nation, ethnic group, culture.
Characters that are not historical but existed at some time in the past.
Ex) Story of King Arthur and the Sword
Lyric Poem (Lit Genre)
addresses the reader directly and expresses the poet’s feelings and perceptions.
Myth (Lit Genre)
the ancient story that presents the exploits of gods or heroes to explain some aspect of life or nature.
Parody (Lit genre)
Imitation of an author’s style or of a genre in order to make fun of it and mock its conventions.
Elegy (Poem)
A poem in a solemn or melancholic tone that mourns the death of a person or group.
Haiku (Poem)
Japanese poetic form
Three lines (5, 7, 5)
Includes seasonal word or image as part of a comparison of two things.
Limerick (Poem)
Funny comic 5 line poem (AABBA)
Ode (Poem)
Praise of someone or serious subject
Pastoral (Poem)
Depicts rural life or life of shepherds
Shakespearian Sonnet
14 lines (Three quatrains/ 1 Couplet)
ABAB
CDCD
EFEF
GG
Petrarchan Sonnet
14 lines (Two quatrains/ six lines rhymed in pairs)
ABBA
Triolet (Poem)
8 line poem
1st & 4th, 7th identical
2nd and final lines identical
Villanelle (Poem)
19 line poem
Two rhyme sounds
Satire (Poem)
make fun of individuals & society through comic exaggeration
Short Story
Brief work that concentrates on one incident and has one or two main characters
Alliteration (Lit Devices)
Repeating the initial consonant sounds in a sentence, paragraph or line of poetry.
Ex). “Lo-lee-ta: the rip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap at three on the teeth. Lo Lee. Ta”
Allusion (Lit Devices)
Reference in literary work to famous person, event, artwork or other literary work.
Anachronism (Lit Device)
Work that is not appropriate for its time setting.
Ex) Women in Victorian England making a call on a cell phone
Analogy (Lit Device)
Emphasizes the way two apparently unlike things are similar.
Antithesis (Lit Device)
Figure of speech that balances an idea with a contrasting one or the opposite.
Ex) “ Some say the world will end in fire/ Some Say in ice”.
Assonance (Lit Device)
Repetition of vowel sounds in a sentence or line of poetry.
Ex) Using the long o sound
Climax (Part of Story)
the point of greatest dramatic tension
Connotation
the use of precise words to give a positive or negative slant
Ex) Fragrance (positive connotation)
Stench (Negative)
Denotation
Dictionary definition
Dramatic Monologue
Poetic from written in blank verse that presents thoughts and emotions of a character in a particular situation.
Epigraph
quotation from another source that appears at the beginning of a literary work and suggests it theme
Epilogue
Concluding section added to the end of a literary work
Epiphany
realization about the meaning of something
Euphemism
Inoffensive phase used to replace a more direct or unpleasant expression
ex) She passed on instead of She died
Figure of Speech
Simile
Metaphor
Hyperbole
Personification
Onomatopoeia
Irony
Oxymoron
Metonymy
Antithesis
Euphemism
Hyperbole
Exaggerated statement
Ex) I am so thirsty I could drink the ocean dry.
Imagery
use of descriptive language to enlist the sense
Ex) Yellow leaves along the gutters
In the blue and bitter fall,
Shall content my musing mind
For the beauty of that sound
Verbal Irony
Saying one thing and meaning something else
Situational Irony
when a situation is in reality much different than the characters think
Dramatic Irony
when the audience is aware of something that the characters onstage/story do not know,
Metaphor
figure of speech in which two unlike things are compared without the use of like or as
Metonymy
a word is substituted for another word with which it is somehow linked or associated.
Ex) The pen is mightier than the sword
Onomatopoeia
using words that imitate sounds
Ex) crash, ring, clatter
Oxymoron
phrase made up of words that seem contradictory when placed together but actually express a special meaning
Ex) Act Naturally
Passive Aggressive
Paradox
“para=parts” “dox=deeper truth”
statement whose two parts seem contradictory yet conveys a deeper truth
ex) “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others”
Personification
human characteristics are given to a nonhuman such as an animal, object or concept.
Plot
sequence of events in a story, novel, play
Introduction (section of plot)
AKA Exposition, which the characters and setting are introduced
Rising action (section of Plot)
the main problem or conflict arises
Climax (Part of plot)
dramatic turn of events that creates tension
Falling Action (part of Plot)
climax leads to an unwinding of the problem or conflict
Resolution (part of Plot)
problem or conflict is worked out in the end
Prologue
the introductory section of a literary work
Refrain
line or phrase that is repeated at regular intervals in a poem (usually end of a stanza)
Simile
comparison of two unlike things using like or as
Theme
the central idea about life or human condition that it presents
Ex) Love, Coming of Age, Friendship, Freedom, Heroism, Courage, Good vs Evil, War, Identity
Tone
the manner in which a writer approaches his or her material and is expressed
ex) light, playful, dark, serious
Deus ex machina
Gods intervene at a point of crisis to save the hero or change the course of events
The Theater of the Absurd
dramatic movement that sought to illustrate the essentially purposeless and illogical nature of mankind’s conditions
Characters use cliched speech to present chaotic senseless modern world.
Structuralist (Lit Criticism)
Theory holds that certain patterns and symmetries are common to the lit. of almost all societies and cultures.
Formalist (Lit Criticism)
Concerned with how a texts literary elements contribute to a whole (style, word choice, use of conventions)
New Criticism ((Lit Criticism)
Focused on lyric poems and examines them as verbal objects (poems diction, imagery, meaning)
Historical (Lit Criticism)
Focus on a works context in history and how its allusions, style and point of view fit or defy the conventions of its period.
New Historicism (Lit Criticism)
Aim to understand a text through its historical context and influences
Interprets cultural and intellectual history through the study of relevant lit texts.
Biographical (Lit Criticism)
AKA Traditional Criticism
Focuses on details of the writer’s life and period
Postcolonial (Lit Criticism)
Try to show how works helped further ideas of racial and cultural inequality
Psychoanalytic (Lit Criticism)
Looks at concepts such as repressed consciousness, struggles of the superego etc.
Reader-Response
Focus is on the readers role and what each reader brings to a work with their biases, experiences
Marxist (Lit Criticism)
Views literature through a political lens and exploitation of workers by wealthy or powerful interests
Feminist (Lit Criticism)
Emphasizes the role of woman in literature and the feminine viewpoint
Deconstructionist (Lit Criticism)
Construction of words and its possible meaning , seeks to deconstruct a text to show its ideological biases to gender, race, class, culture and economic conditions
Philosophical (Lit Criticism)
Look at the ethical or religious questions, seeks to bring out the author’s own ideas about what is ethical and how life should be lived.
Qualitative Evaluation
Levels of meaning, structure, conventionality and clarity of language and demands on background knowledge
Quantitative Evaluation
Involves readability measures and similar methods of scoring complexity
