words Flashcards
epic invocation
a call to a divinity who will inspire and bless the verse
alexander pope
wrote Rape of the Lock, about a guy who takes a lady’s hair. mock epic, lady’s name is Belinda. Pope wrote it at the request of his friend Caryll.
heroic couplets
pairs of iambic pentameter lines rhyming aabbcc
wb yeats
poetry characterized by symbolism
matthew arnold
“sweetness and light,” referring to the quality and beneficial values of classical literature–Arnold was a devout classicist–wrote Culture and Anarchy which argued that art calls forth the best in mankind
colridge
divided imagination into “primary” and “secondary”
Aeschylus
Prometheus Bound–in his version Prometheus steals fire from Hephaistos, Zeus punishes him by tying him to a cliff and having his liver eaten daily. Same version used by PB Shelley in Prometheus unbound.
poetic inversion
inverting customary word order, i.e. noun and adjective
Achilles’ armor
made by Hephaistos, worn into battle by Patroclus, who is killed and stripped by the trojan Hector. Achilles’ mother, Thetis, orders a new one from Hephaistos and Achilles receives it the next day.
JM Synge
wrote Playboy of the Western World–where a son has to kill a father twice, first to acclaim, second to chagrin–father comes back again and they reconcile.
David Copperfield
Dickens, partly autobiographical; besides David characters are. Mr. and Mrs. Micawber and Uriah Heep
Scheherazade
narrator of 1001 Arabian Nights, uses stories to keep from being beheaded
Charles Lamb
friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge, used pen name Elia
tercet
group of three lines
ottava rima
eight line stanza, usually in iambic pentameter
rhyme royal
iambic pentameter lines rhyming ababbcc–usually only seven lines
Bigger Thomas
character in Richard Wright’s Native Son
The Awakening
Kate Chopin, featuring Pontellier and Lebrun, set in Louisiana and confronts idea that women are men’s property
House of Mirth
Edith Wharton, Lily Barton is character’s name and it’s set in NYC
North and South
Elizabeth Gaskell, upper class british who worte about social conditions in industrializing England
My Last Duchess
Robert Browning, Italian nobleman speaks to a portrait of his dead wife who he’s had killed; written in heroic couplets
Youth
by Joseph Conrad, young seaman loves danger
Dante’s guides
Virgil in first two books, but not third because V hasn’t been redeemed because he died before Jesus was born. Beatrice guides him in Paradiso–they met at nine and fell in love at first sight.
Prosopopoeia
personification that includes attributing speech to a nonhuman object
Donne’s early work
The Sun Rising, “lighthearted and saucy” according to PR, ambitious manboy in younger years, pre-deanship
Imogen
Shakespeare’s embodiment of goodness in Cymbelline
Lysistrata
Aristophanes play, name means “she breaks up armies”
Lucy Poems
Wordsworth’s poems about Lucy
Julia Poems
Robert Herrick’s poems about Julia
Andromanche
associated with Euripides and Racine; Racine’s Phaedra is an example of his mastery of French neoclassical theater
Chapman’s Homer
Chapman , referred to as “the high priest of Homer,” was an early English translator of the Greeks; treated by Keats in one of his first mature poems “On Chapman’s Homer”; Swinburne discusses him in verse.
octave
first eight lines of an Italian sonnet, also called a Petrarchan sonnet (the English sonnet is also called a Shakespearian sonnet); Italian sonnets can be divided into an octave and a sestet whereas English and Spenserian sonnets have three rhymed quatrains and end in a couplet
French Enlightenment figures
Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot; loved Reason
Absalom and Achitophel
Dryden
Volpone
Ben Jonson’s play about a fox; the fox and his comrade Mosca (the fly) outwit everyone but each other. Mosca tries to blackmail Volpone but he just outs them both; Corvino is the raven.
An Essay on Criticism
Alexander Pope; tended to be more mocking than chastising as far as responding to other poets; more likely to critique in droll rhyming couplets
skeltonics
verse form practiced/propagated by John Skelton in the late 15th/early 16th Cs; short lines with choppy rhythm suitable only for comedy and satire
euphemism
assocated with John Lyly, characterized by an extreme, elaborate line construction
Child Harolde’s Pilgrimage
Lord Byron; written in cantos
Spenserian stanza
only major nine-line form; final line is an alexandrine in iambic hexameter (six-footed)
Maya Angelou
read her poem, On the Pulse of Morning, at Clinton’s inauguration in addition to I know Why th Caged Bird Sings
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding’s well known work; characters include Goody Brown and Molly; reads as farcical comedy
Pamela and Clarissa
Samuel Richardson’s didactic, classicist novels that Fielding mocks in Shamela
Ptolemaic universe
succeeded by Copernicus, Kepler, and then Galileo; holds that stars and other heavenly bodies are nested in spheres that rotate around the earth and created divine music
Dylan Thomas
20th C, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
17th C diary question
Samuel Pepys, wrote in code that wasn’t deciphered until 19th C, frank portrayal of London man’s life
Carlyle
Contemporary to other Victorians like Charles Lamb, funny–not like Arnold or Ruskin or Pater. His writing is idiosyncratic, rancours and philosophical. Most famous fiction is Sartor Resartus.
decorum
neoclassical constraint that insists a person’s speech should keep with their station
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Rilke’s most important prose work, characterized by biographical spiritual musings; his object poems are supposed to dissolve the space between observer and observed
Pere Goriot
Balzac’s examination of 19th C bougie French life, main character’s name is Rastignac; he starts out naive and grows increasingly cynical and successful as the series of novels continues
Absalom and Achitophel
Dryden’s witty but ultimately serious work allegorizing the political situation in Restoration England, using biblical figures to promote an “essentially pro-Charles” position
Dunciad
Alexander Pope’s satire in which the pope makes fun of poets
Mac Flecknoe
also by Dryden, makes fun of boring poets
The Red and the Black
by Stendhal, a novel in which “a young man of humble origins and formerly a seminary student had been executed for the attempted murder of the woman he loved”
“Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
and yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity”
Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress
“Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest”
Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard”
The Spanish Tragedy
Thomas Kyd super violent play
The Fairie Queene
Spenser’s poem written in nine-line stanzas in pentameter except for the last line which has an extra foot, so in hexameter, CALLED AN ALEXANDRINE. Also, weird spelling is just what Spenser was into–it was published between 1590 and 1596.
Flat and round characters
Important to Forster’s criticism–and he cites Dickens as an example of good use of both
Lady Bertram, Fanny
Character’s from Austen’s Mansfield Park
Shakespeare’s title character that cares more about ladies than politics, is misshappen, ambitious, evil, and brilliant
Richard III
sturm und drang
German romantic movement; influential/apparent in Goethe and Schiller; works have a romantic hero that confronts the arbitrary or unnatural laws of society, flouts them, and ultimately pays the price
Dystopian story about a girl who is raised in poverty, raised by a terrible mother and ends up being a prostitute after being tricked into it by her lover named Pete and then kills herself.
Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A girl of the streets.
Nebraska pioneer life novel about characters named Antonia and Jim Burden
Willa Cather’s My Antonia
April 23, 1564; April 23, 1616
Shakespeare’s birth and death dates
“To My Beloved Master William Shakespeare”
Ben Jonson
Erewhon
Samuel Butler’s parody of Utopia
William Langland
wrote Piers Ploughman between 1350 and 1380, middle english (if you can read it, it isn’t old english)
poet turned priest; early work is racy and fun, later work is death-obsessed and addressed to a congregation in sermons, in one of which he coins the phrase “for whom the bell tolls”
John Donne
Aphra Behn
considered first professional female prose writer and dramatist, lived in 17th C, writing characteristically makes the narrator part of the action and draws the reader close
Eudora Welty
southern writer, more interested in human relationships than feminism
George Eliot
given name Marian Evans, disregarded feminist writing in favor of common folk in Adam Bede (which includes “This Rector of Broxton”), Middlemarch, and Silas Marner
“some mute and inglorious Milton”
from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Church yard;
Ellis Bell, Acton Bell, Currer Bell
pen names used by the Bronte sisters: Emily, Anne, and Charlotte, respectively
Eugene O’Neill
American playwright, work is profoundly melancholic, parallels lotsa Greek tragedy, big and powerful emotionally; created worlds and characters the size of Shakespeare’s.