- •American Literature : Colonial America -- prose and poetry
- •18Th & 19th Century American Prose
- •18Th & 19th Century American Poetry
- •Modernist Poetry
- •Modernist Novel
- •Harlem Renaissance
- •Post-Modern & Contemporary Poetry
- •Contemporary American Novel and Drama
- •British Literature Medeival and Early British literature
- •Renaissance
- •Important Quotations
- •Important Quotations
- •Important Quotations
- •The Restoration -- Historical Context
- •Restoration Commedy
- •Colley Cibber
- •William Congreve
- •Oliver Goldsmith
- •Richard Brinsley Sheridan
- •The Rivals (1775)
- •The School for Scandal (1777)
- •William Wycherley
- •The Restoration Aphra Behn (1640 - 1689)
- •John Bunyan
- •Samuel Butler
- •Hudibras
- •“Epigram on Milton”
- •“A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”
- •Anne Finch (1661-1720)
- •John Milton (1609-1674)
- •“How Soon Hath Time”
- •“On Shakespeare”
- •“On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”
- •“When I Consider How My Light Is Spent” (also sometimes called “On his blindness”)
- •Aeropagitica
- •Of Education
- •Samson Agonistes
- •Lycidas
- •Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
- •"The Rape of the Lock"
- •*“Essay on Criticism”
- •“Essay on Man”
- •The Dunciad
- •“Eloisa to Abelard”
- •“To a Lady”
- •Joseph Addison & Richard Steel
- •Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
- •*Gulliver’s Travels
- •A Modest Proposal
- •A Tale of a Tub
- •“A Description of a City Shower”
- •The Scriblerus Club
- •Late 17th & 18th Century British poetry The Cavalier Poets
- •Thomas Carew
- •“An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul’s, Dr. John Donne”
- •Robert Herrick
- •“To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time” (often compared to Marvell’s ‘Coy Mistress’)
- •“Upon julia's clothes”
- •"Upon Julia’s Breasts"
- •“The Night Piece, to Julia"
- •“Corinna’s Going a-Maying”
- •Ben Jonson (1572 – 1637)
- •“To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare”
- •“To Penhurst”
- •“On My First Son”
- •Volpone
- •Metaphysical Poets
- •John Donne (1572-1631)
- •"The Canonization"
- •“The flea”
- •“A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”
- •*“The Sun Rising”
- •“Air and Angels”
- •*Holy Sonnets: XIV
- •*Holy Sonnets: X
- •*"The Bait"
- •"The Ecstacy"
- •An Anatomy of the World
- •George Herbert
- •“The Pulley”
- •“The Collar”
- •“Easter-Wings"
- •"The Altar"
- •Richard Lovelace
- •“To Lucasta, on Going to the Warres"
- •"To Althea from Prison"
- •Andrew Marvell
- •* “To his Coy Mistress”
- •“The Definition of Love”
- •“On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost”
- •The “Mower” poems
- •"An Horatian Ode: Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland"
- •"Graveyard Poets"
- •Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
- •*“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
- •"On The Death Of a Favourite Cat, Drowned In a Tub Of Gold Fishes"
- •“The Progress of Poesy”
- •“The Bard”
- •Robert Blair
- •Robert Burns (late 1700s)
- •"A Red, Red Rose"
- •"Tam o’ Shanter: a Tale" (1790)
- •“A Fond Kiss”
- •18Th & 19th Century British Prose Henry Fielding
- •Shamela and Joseph Andrews
- •The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
- •Samuel Richardson (1689 –1761)
- •Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
- •Clarissa
- •Gothic Novel
- •Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
- •Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian
- •M. G. Lewis’s The Monk
- •Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
- •Jane Austen
- •Sense and Sensibility
- •Pride and Prejudice
- •Emily Bronte (1818 – 1848)
- •Wuthering Heights
- •Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
- •The Way of All Flesh (1903)
- •Erewhon (1872)
- •Fanny Burney (1752-1840)
- •Evelina
- •Charles Dickens David Copperfield
- •The Pickwick Papers
- •Bleak House
- •Nicholas Nickleby
- •Great Expectations
- •Hard Times (1854)
- •Oliver Twist
- •George Eliot (1819 – 1880)
- •Middlemarch
- •Silas Marner
- •Adam Bede (1859)
- •Thomas Hardy
- •Tess of the d'Urbervilles
- •The Mayor of Casterbridge
- •Jude the Obscure
- •Far from the Madding Crowd
- •Hardy's Poetry
- •William Thackeray (1811-1863)
- •Vanity Fair
- •19Th Century Essayists
- •John Ruskin
- •John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
- •John Henry, Cardinal Newman
- •Thomas Carlyle
- •British Romantic Poetry William Blake (1757–1827)
- •"Songs of Innocence"
- •“The Lamb”
- •Songs of Experience
- •“The Tyger"
- •“Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau”
- •The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
- •Visions of the Daughters of Albion
- •“London”
- •Lord Byron
- •“She Walks in Beauty”
- •"Manfred"
- •Byronic Hero
- •Childe Harold’s Pilgrimages
- •“Kubla Khan”
- •“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
- •John Keats (1795-1821)
- •Endymion
- •“The Eve of St. Agnes”
- •Isabella
- •“La Belle Dame sans Merci”
- •Theory from the Letters
- •“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
- •“Ode on Melancholy”
- •“Ode to a Nightingale”
- •**“On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”
- •“Ode to Autumn”
- •Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
- •"Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats”
- •“Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni”
- •“Ode to the West Wind”
- •*“Ozymandias”
- •Prometheus Unbound
- •Matthew Arnold
- •“Dover Beach”
- •“To Marguerite—Continued”
- •Robert Browning (1812-1889)
- •“The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church”
- •“Fra Lippo Lippi”
- •**“My Last Duchess”
- •*“Porphyria’s Lover”
- •Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889)
- •*“The Windhover”
- •“Carrion Comfort”
- •*“Pied Beauty”
- •“Spring and Fall”
- •‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend’
- •Christina Rossetti
- •Goblin Market
- •“Remember”
- •Dante Gabriel Rossetti
- •“A Superscription”
- •"The ballad of dead ladies"
- •Alfred Lord Tennyson
- •*“Ulysses”
- •*In Memoriam a.H.H.
- •“The Lady of Shalott”
- •“The Lotus-Eaters”
- •“Mariana”
- •“To e. FitzGerald”
- •The Idylls of the King
- •*“Break, Break, Break”
- •British and Irish Modernism
- •Irish Literary Revival
- •J. M. Synge
- •William Butler Yeats
- •Sean o’Casey
- •Oscar Wilde Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
- •Waiting for Godot
- •Happy Days
- •George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
- •*Pygmalion (1913)
- •Arms and the Man
- •Man and Superman (1902)
- •Major Barbara (1905)
- •Mrs. Warren’s Profession
- •Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
- •The Picture of Dorian Gray The Importance of Being Earnest
- •The Ballad of Reading Gaol
- •Poetry w.H. Auden (1907-1973)
- •**“Musée des Beaux Arts”
- •*“In Memory of w.B. Yeats”
- •“Lay your sleeping head, my love”
- •A.E. Housman (1859-1936)
- •"When I was one-and-twenty"
- •"Terence, this is stupid stuff"
- •"To an Athlete Dying Young"
- •Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
- •“Do not go gentle into that good night”
- •“And Death Shall Have No Dominion”
- •*“Fern Hill”
- •William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
- •"The Lake Isle of Innisfree"
- •"When You are Old"
- •"The Wild Swans at Coole"
- •**"The Second Coming"
- •“Sailing to Byzantium”
- •" Leda and the Swan"
- •“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”
- •Stanza VI from “Among School Children”
- •“The Dolls”
- •Fiction Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
- •Heart of Darkness
- •Lord Jim
- •The Secret Sharer
- •E.M. Forster (1879-1970)
- •Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
- •A Room with a View
- •Howards End
- •A Passage to India (1924)
- •The Road to Colonus
- •"What I Believe"
- •*Aspects of the Novel
- •James Joyce (1882-1941)
- •Dubliners
- •Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man
- •Ulysses
- •Finnegans Wake
- •D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
- •The Rainbow (1915)
- •Women in Love
- •Sons and Lovers (1913)
- •“The Odour of Chrysanthemums”
- •“The Horse Dealer’s Daughter”
- •Lawrence's non-fiction
- •Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
- •Mrs. Dalloway
- •A Room of One's Own
- •Postmodern/Contemporary British Literature Philip Larkin
- •Antiquity and "World" Literatures Classical Literature
- •The Trojans
- •The Gods and Immortals
- •The Eclogues
- •Cupid and Psyche (Roman myth)
- •Albert Camus (1913-1960)
- •The Plague
- •The Fall
- •The Stranger
- •Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
- •Madame Bovary
- •The Sentimental Education
- •Molière (1622-1673)
- •Tartuffe
- •Jean Racine
- •Jean-Paul Satre (1905 – 1980)
- •No Exit
- •Stendhal (1783-1842)
- •The Red and the Black
- •Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
- •The Seagull (1896)
- •The Cherry Orchard (1904)
- •Three Sisters (1901)
- •Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)
- •Notes from Underground
- •* Crime and Punishment (1866)
- •* The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
- •Leo Tolstoy
- •What is Art?
- •War and Peace
- •Anna Karenina
- •Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
- •Buddenbrooks
- •“Death in Venice”
- •The Magic Mountain
- •Henrik Ibsen
- •A Doll’s House
- •An Enemy of the People
- •The Wild Duck
- •Hedda Gabbler
- •Chinua Achebe (b. 1930)
- •Things Fall Apart (1958)
- •Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)
- •Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
- •“The Library of Baebel”
- •Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928)
- •One Hundred Years of Solitude
- •Literary Terms, Verse Forms, Meter, etc.
- •Literary Terms, Verse Forms, Meter, etc.
- •Grammar
- •The Sonnet
- •Italian Sonnet (Petrarchan)
- •The English (or Shakespearian) Sonnet
- •Spenserian Sonnet
- •Curtal Sonnet
- •Literary Theory
- •Formalism
- •New Criticism
- •Structuralism
- •Post-structuralism
- •Deconstructionism
Literary Terms, Verse Forms, Meter, etc.
DO NOT underestimate the importancee of this section. There are A LOT of questions on the GRE about forms, verse, meter, etc. You won't need to count feet (probably), but you will need to be able to identify a Spensarian stanza, an alexandrine, etc. Not only will knowing these terms help you get questions that specifically ask you to identify a form, but it will also help you distinguish between different poets. For example, if you see a poem that is written in heroic couplets, you can pretty much be certain that the poet is not going to be anybody modern, that the poet is almost certainly Alexander Pope or John Dryden.
Literary Terms, Verse Forms, Meter, etc.
alexandrine – Another name for iambic hexameter. ETS is going to ask you to identify the final line of a Spenserian stanza as an alexandrine.
Alliterative verse -- Verse tradition stemming from the Germanic lands and evidenced in Anglo-Saxon epics and Icelandic sagas. The alliterative line was normally written in two halves - with each half containing two strongly stressed syllables. Of the four stressed syllables two, three or even four would begin with the same sound. During the 14th century in England there was an alliterative revival which produced works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland.
apostrophe – is an exclamatory rhetorical figure of speech, when a speaker or writer breaks off and directs speech to an imaginary person or abstract quality or idea. In dramatic works and poetry, it is often introduced by the word "O" (not the exclamation "oh").
~ To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, / And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?" John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn".
~ "Roll on thou dark and deep blue ocean." Lord Byron, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage".
Aubade – An aubade is a poem or song of or about lovers separating at dawn. Donne’s “The Sunne Rising” is a famous example.
assonance – the repetition of vowel sounds within a short passage of verse or prose.
Ballad – The ballad stanza is a quatrain where the second and fourth lines rhyme. La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats is in ballad form. It usually features alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. The lines alternate between 8 and 6 syllables. Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a ballad.
Blank verse – a type of poetry, distinguished by having a regular meter, but no rhyme. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter. It is widely associated with Shakespeare and Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was first used by the Earl of Surrey around 1540.
bob and the wheel – this is the mechanism used to end stanzas in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It consists of a short line (bob), followed by a trimeter quatrain (wheel).
Breton Lay – is a form of medieval French and English romance literature. Lais are short (typically 600-1000 lines), rhymed tales of love and chivalry, often involving supernatural and fairy-world Celtic motifs. “The Franklin's Tale” from the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is an example
caesura – an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. This may come in the form of any sort of punctuation which causes a pause in speech; such as a comma; semicolon; full stop etc. It is especially common and apparent in Old English verse. Ex. Hwæt! we Gar-Dena || on geardagum ("Lo! we Spear-Danes, in days of yore. . .")
chiasmus – a rhetorical construction in which the order of the words in the second of two paired phrases is the reverse of the order in the first. ("Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure" –Byron)
conceit – an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs an entire poem or poetic passage. It is especially associated with the metaphysical poets.
elegy – a poem of mourning. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a good example. A subset of this classification is a pastoral elegy, in which the mourner is a shepherd. Milton’s Lycidas and Shelley’s Adonais are both examples of pastoral elegies.
End-stopped line – A line of verse which ends with a grammatical break such as a coma, colon, semi-colon or full stop etc. It is the opposite of enjambment.
Enjambment - the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. Its opposite is end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line.
The following lines from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (c. 1611) are heavily enjambed:
I am not prone to weeping, as our sex Commonly are; the want of which vain dew Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have That honourable grief lodged here which burns Worse than tears drown.
epithalamium – refers to a form of poem that is written for the bride or to celebrate a wedding generally. See Spenser’s Epithalamium.
Eclogue – An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics. See Virgil’s Ecologues and Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar.
euphuistic prose: Tending to or resembling euphuism; of the nature of euphuism; characterized by euphuism. Chiefly in inaccurate sense: Abounding in ‘highflown’ or affectedly refined expression. Highly associated with John Lyly whose popular prose romance, Euphues, or The Anatomy of Wit, set the fashion for the decade before Shakespeare started writing and is a moral romance distinguished by its elaborate style. Also, self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech—a popular form in the late 16th century.
fabliau – comic works that typical concern cuckolded husbands, rapacious clergy and foolish peasants. The form was popular in medieval times. Several appear in Chaucer’s Cantebury Tales.
feminine rhyme – a rhyme that matches two or more syllables at the end of the respective lines. Usually the final syllable is unaccented. Shakespeare's Sonnet number 20, uniquely among the sonnets, makes use exclusively of feminine rhymes: A woman's face with nature's own hand painted, Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion; A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change, as is false women's fashion...
flat and round characters – used to describe characters who do and do not develop over the course of a work respectively. The distinction was first made by E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel.
Free verse – a term describing various styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or rhyme, but that still are recognizable as 'poetry' by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers can perceive to be part of a coherent whole. Walt Whitman was a practitioner of free verse.
georgic – a poem dealing with agriculture. Derived from Virgil’s Georgics.
hamartia – tragic mistake or tragic flaw. It is derived from Aristotle’s Poetics.
*Heroic couplets – rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. You should associate heroic couplets almost exclusively with Restoration verse. Example: Pope’s Rape of the Lock.
Homeric epithet – A characteristic of Homer's style is the use of recurring epithets, such as the rosy-fingered dawn or swift-footed Achilles. These epithets were metric stop-gaps as well as mnemonic devices.
Hudibrastic – Hudibrastic is a type of English verse named for Samuel Butler's Hudibras of 1672. For the poem, Butler invented a mock-heroic verse structure. Instead of pentameter, the lines were written in iambic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme is the same as in heroic verse (aa, bb, cc, dd, etc.).
Kunstlerroman – a kind of Bildungsroman, a novel about an artist's growth to maturity. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers are both examples.
Litotes – a figure of speech in which the speaker emphasizes the magnitude of a statement by denying its opposite. Example: “That [sword] was not useless / to the warrior now." (Beowulf) Masculine rhyme – a rhyme that ends on a final, stressed syllable (as opposed to two final rhyming syllables in feminine rhyme).
monody – an ode sung by one voice (Arnold’s Thyrsis and parts of Milton’s Lycidas)
Neo-classical unities – principles of dramatic unity popular in antiquity and until after the renaissance. The three unities are place, time, and action.
Ottava Rima – The ottava rima stanza in English consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters. Each stanza consists of three rhymes following the rhyme scheme a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c.. Byron’s Don Juan and Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” are examples.
Pathetic fallacy – the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human emotions, thoughts, sensations, and feelings. The term was coined by John Ruskin. Ruskin’s famous examples is “The cruel crawling foam.”
Picaresque novel – a popular subgenre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts in realistic and often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt society. Daniel DeFoe’s Moll Flanders is a good example.
Poetic inversions - An inversion of the normal grammatical word order; it may range from a single word moved from its usual place to a pair of words inverted or to even more extremes (e.g. “chains adamantine” – Paradise Lost)
Prosopopoeia – a rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates to the audience by speaking as another person or object.
*Rhyme Royal – The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” is a good example.
roman à clef – a novel describing real-life events behind a façade of fiction. Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, and Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar are all examples.
Sestina – consists of thirty-nine lines; six six-line stanzas, usually ending with a triplet. It is an uncommon verse form. “Ye Goatherd Gods” from Sidney’s Arcadia is the only example that comes to mind.
*Spensarian – a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene. Each verse contains nine lines in total: eight lines of iambic pentameter, with five feet, followed by a single line of iambic hexameter, an "alexandrine," with six. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "ababbcbcc." Shelley’s elegy “Adonais” and Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Progress” both employ the Spensarian stanza.
Sprung rhythm – poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables. The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed to have discovered this previously-unnamed poetic rhythm in the natural patterns of English in folk songs, spoken poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, et al.
Sturm und Drang – a German literary movement which emphasized the volatile emotional life of the individual. This genre is especially associated with Goethe.
Synaethesia – The description of a sense impression (smell, touch, sound etc) but in terms of another seemingly inappropriate sense e.g. 'a deafening yellow'. Synesthesia is particularly associated with the French symbolist poets. Keats also uses synesthesia in Ode to a Nightingale with the term 'sunburnt mirth'.
Synecdoche: a figure of speech that presents a kind of metaphor in which: * A part of something is used for the whole, * The whole is used for a part, * The species is used for the genus, * The genus is used for the species, or * The stuff of which something is made is used for the thing. Synecdoche, as well as some forms of metonymy, is one of the most common ways to characterize a fictional character. Frequently, someone will be consistently described by a single body part or feature, such as the eyes, which comes to represent their person.
terza rima: a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d, etc. Terza rima is especially associated with Dante’s Divine Comedy. See also “Ode to the West Wind” by Shelley.
“ubi sunt” – a phrase taken from the Latin Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent?, meaning "Where are those who were before us?" Ubi Sunt is a phrase that begins several Latin medieval poems. It refers to the tone of the poem, and can even be used to indicate the tone of another work, such as Beowulf.
Villanelle – The essence of the form is its distinctive pattern of rhyme and repetition, with only two rhyme-sounds ("a" and "b") and two alternating refrains that resolve into a concluding couplet. Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is a good example. Stephen Dedalus also writes one in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.