- •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
Arms and the Man
Arms and the Man is a comedy, the title of which comes from the opening words of Virgil's Aeneid: "Arma virumque cano" (Of arms and the man I sing). The play was first produced in 1894, and published in 1898 as part of Shaw's Plays Pleasant volume. Shaw's plays often point out the hypocrisy or worthlessness of Victorian values, and Arms and the Man is no exception. Its satirical target is the people who think war is "glorious" or "noble."
The play takes place during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War. Its heroine, Raina, is a young Bulgarian woman engaged to one of the heroes of that war, whom she idealizes. One night, a Swiss voluntary soldier to the Serbian army bursts into her bedroom and begs her to hide him, so that he is not killed. Raina complies, though she thinks the man a coward, especially when he tells her that he doesn't carry rifle cartridges, but chocolates. During the course of the play, Raina comes to realize the hollowness of her romantic idea and her fiancé's values, and the true nobility of the "chocolate-cream soldier."
Man and Superman (1902)
This title comes from Nietzsche's philosophical ideas about the "Superman." The plot centers around John Tanner, author of "The Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion" and a confirmed bachelor, and the lovely Ann's persistent efforts to make him marry her. Ann is referred to as "The Life Force" and represents Shaw's view that in every culture, it's the women who force the men to marry them, rather than the men taking the initiative.
Major Barbara (1905)
The story is about an officer in The Salvation Army, Major Barbara Undershaft, who becomes disillusioned by social ills and the willingness of her Christian denomination to accept money from armament manufacturers, which includes her own father.
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
The story centers on the relationship between Mrs. Warren, a prostitute, described by Shaw as "on the whole, a genial and fairly presentable old blackguard of a woman," and her daughter, Vivie. More than about prostitution, the play explores the conflicts of the new women of the Victorian times - the middle-class girls who wanted greater social independence in work and education.
Other themes include criticism of the sexual triteness of the times and a want for greater social sexual awareness.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Oscar Wilde was an Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, poet, short story writer and Freemason. One of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day, known for his barbed and clever wit, he suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned after being convicted in a famous trial for gross indecency (homosexual acts).
Two prose pieces of Wilde's that may appear on the GRE are “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist.” However, I was unable to secure synopses of either of these works.
The Picture of Dorian Gray The Importance of Being Earnest
Algernon, a wealthy young Londoner, pretends to have a friend named Bunbury who lives in the country and frequently is in ill health. Whenever Algernon wants to avoid an unwelcome social obligation, or just get away for the weekend, he makes an ostensible visit to his "sick friend." In this way Algernon can feign piety and dedication, while having the perfect excuse to get out of town. He calls this practice "Bunburying."
Algernon's real-life best friend lives in the country but makes frequent visits to London. This friend's name is Ernest...or so Algernon thinks. When Ernest leaves his silver cigarette case at Algernon's rooms he finds an inscription in it that claims that it is "From little Cecily to her dear Uncle Jack". This forces Ernest to eventually disclose that his visits to the city are also examples of "Bunburying," much to Algernon's delight.
In the country, "Ernest" goes by his real name, John Worthing, and pretends that he has a wastrel brother named Ernest, who lives in London. When honest John comes to the city, he assumes the name, and behaviour, of the profligate Ernest. In the country John assumes and more serious attitude for the benefit of Cecily, who is his ward.
John himself wishes to marry Gwendolen, who is Algernon's cousin, but runs into a few problems. First, Gwendolen seems to love him only because she believes his name is Ernest, which she thinks is the most beautiful name in the world. Second, Gwendolen's mother is the terrifying Lady Bracknell. Lady Bracknell is horrified when she learns that John is a foundling who was discovered in a handbag at a railway station.
John's description of Cecily appeals to Algernon who resolves to meet her. Algernon soon gets the idea to visit John in the country, pretending that he is the mysterious brother "Ernest." Unfortunately, unknown to Algernon, John has decided to give up his Bunburying, and to do this he has announced the tragic death of Ernest.
A series of comic misunderstandings follows, as Algernon-as-Ernest visits the country (as a dead man, as far as the hosts are aware), and John shows up in his mourning clothes. There he encounters John's ward, Cecily, who believes herself in love with Ernest - the non-existent brother she has never met. After Lady Bracknell arrives, it is discovered that John is a nephew of Lady Bracknell who was lost by Miss Prism, Cecily’s governess, who was then working for Lady Bracknell’s sister. It is also discovered that John’s real name is Ernest. It is suggested at the end of the play that Ernest/John will marry Gwendolyn and Algernon will marry Cecily. The play contains many examples of Wilde's famous wit.