- •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
"On The Death Of a Favourite Cat, Drowned In a Tub Of Gold Fishes"
'Twas on a lofty vase's side, Where China's gayest art had dyed The azure flowers that blow, Demurest of the tabby kind, The pensive Selima, reclined, Gazed on the lake below.
Her conscious tail her joy declared; The fair round face, the snowy beard, The velvet of her paws, Her coat, that with the tortoise vies, Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes, She saw; and purred applause.
Still had she gazed; but 'midst the tide Two angel forms were seen to glide, The genii of the stream: Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue Through richest purple to the view Betrayed a golden gleam.
The hapless nymph with wonder saw: A whisker first, and then a claw, With many an ardent wish, She stretched, in vain, to reach the prize. What female heart can gold despise? What cat's averse to fish?
Presumptuous maid! with looks intent Again she stretched, again she bent, Nor knew the gulf between: (Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled) The slippery verge her feet beguiled, She tumbled headlong in.
Eight times emerging from the flood She mewed to ev'ry wat'ry god Some speedy aid to send. No dolphin came, no nereid stirred; Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard. A fav'rite has no friend!
From hence, ye beauties undeceived, Know, one false step is ne'er retrieved, And be with caution bold. Not all that tempts your wand'ring eyes And heedless hearts is lawful prize; Nor all that glisters, gold.
“The Progress of Poesy”
it begins: Awake, Aeolian lyre, awake, And give to rapture all thy trembling strings. From Helicon's harmonious springs A thousand rills their mazy progress take: The laughing flowers that round them blow Drink life and fragrance as they flow. Now the rich stream of Music winds along, Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong, Thro' verdant vales, and Ceres' golden reign; Now rolling down the steep amain, Headlong, impetuous, see it pour; The rocks and nodding groves re-bellow to the roar.
“The Bard”
a long poem that begins: 'Ruin seize thee, ruthless King! Confusion on thy banners wait, Tho' fanned by Conquest's crimson wing They mock the air with idle state. Helm, nor Hauberk's twisted mail, Nor even thy virtues, Tyrant, shall avail To save thy secret soul from nightly fears, From Cambria'sÊ curse, from Cambria's tears!' Such were the sounds, that o'er the crested pride Of the first Edward scatter'd wild dismay, 10 As down the steep of Snowdon's shaggy sideÊ He wound with toilsome march his long array. Stout Glo'ster stood aghast in speechless trance: 'To arms!' cried Mortimer, and couch'd his quiv'ring lance.
Robert Blair
A Scottish poet,his sole work, “The Grave” (1743), is a poem written in blank verse, and is much less conventional than its gloomy title might lead one to expect. Its religious subject no doubt contributed to its great popularity, especially in Scotland. It extends to 767 lines of very various merit, in some passages rising to great sublimity, and in others sinking to commonplace. It inspired William Blake to undertake a series of twelve illustrative designs, which were engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti, and published in 1808.