- •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
Thomas Hardy
The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-imaginary county of Wessex, is marked by imaginative poetic descriptions, and a foreboding sense of fatalism. D.H. Lawrence greatly admired Hardy’s ability to ennoble the common man.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
It is Hardy's penultimate written novel. Though now considered to be a great classic of English literature, the book was poorly received at the time of its initial publication. The poignant portrait of heroine Tess illustrates Hardy's deep understanding of women.
The story concerns a simple country girl, Tess Durbeyfield, whose father's pretensions to social status lead her into the company of the nouveau-riche d'Urberville family. In a scene which suggests rape, though it is open to interpretation, Tess is made pregnant by the rakish Alec d'Urberville. Tess returns home in disgrace, but the child she bears soon dies, leaving her free to leave her village once again to look for work. While employed as a milkmaid, she encounters the morally upright Angel Clare, who falls in love with her. After their marriage, she is honest with him about her past; though Angel is educated, he remains basically naive, and cannot reconcile his real affection for Tess, his wounded pride, and his image of Tess as a semi-pagan Mary figure.
Abandoned by Angel, Tess is lured into a liaison with Alec d'Urberville, who comes back into her life by chance. When Alec lays eyes on Tess once more, he ruthlessly hunts her down, determined to win her back into his life of sin. Tess, influenced by her desprate situation and the perception that her husband will never rejoin her, yeilds to Alec's determination and allows him to support her while she lives with him. Eventually Angel returns, repentant, to reclaim her, and Tess murders Alec in order to be with her legal husband. They flee together, but the police catch up with them at Stonehenge, in a memorable finale. Tess is hanged for the murder of Alec.
The Mayor of Casterbridge
It is set in the fictional town of Casterbridge (based on the town of Dorchester in Dorset). Hardy subtitled the novel "The Life and Death of a Man of Character".
Under the influence of alcohol, Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, sells his wife and daughter in a country fair to a sailor. Once sober, he swears never to touch liquor again.
Eighteen years later, Henchard, now a successful grain merchant and the Mayor of Casterbridge, is reunited with Susan, the wife he gave away at a country fair. The return of his wife and daughter sets in motion a decline in his fortunes. The daughter, Elizabeth Jane, soon falls in love with Donald Farfrae, whom Henchard has employed as an assistant. Until his wife's death, Henchard is unaware that Elizabeth Jane is not his own child, but that of the man who "bought" Susan from him. He conceals the secret from her. His growing resentment of Donald Farfrae leads to his standing in the way of a marriage between Donald and Elizabeth Jane.
In the meantime, Henchard's former mistress, Lucetta, arrives in town, and attracts Donald, who marries her. Rumours spread of her previous relationship with Michael Henchard, and both are disgraced. Lucetta dies. When Newson, Elizabeth Jane's real father, returns, Henchard, afraid of losing her companionship, pretends she is dead. By the time Elizabeth Jane, now married to Donald Farfrae and reunited with Newson, goes looking for Henchard to forgive him, he has died.