British Literature
120 flashcards by MentisLibrary
British and Irish writing from Beowulf and Chaucer through the Renaissance, the Augustans, the Romantics, the Victorians and modernism to the present, with the authors, dates, forms and periods behind each work.
- What is Beowulf?
- An Old English epic of roughly three thousand lines in which a Geatish hero kills the monster Grendel, then Grendel's mother, and dies fifty years later fighting a dragon.
- How does Old English verse work?
- Each line has four stresses split by a caesura into two half-lines, bound together by alliteration rather than by rhyme.
- What is a kenning?
- A compressed compound metaphor used in place of a plain noun.
- What are The Wanderer and The Seafarer?
- Old English elegies in which an exiled speaker describes lost lords, cold seas and the transience of everything built by people.
- What is The Dream of the Rood?
- A dream vision in which the cross itself speaks, describing the crucifixion as a warrior's ordeal that it was forced to share.
- Who was Caedmon?
- An illiterate cowherd at Whitby who, according to Bede, received the gift of religious song in a dream. His nine-line hymn is the earliest recorded English poem by a named author.
- What changed English after 1066?
- The Norman Conquest made French the language of the court and law for centuries, so English absorbed a huge French vocabulary and emerged as Middle English.
- What are The Canterbury Tales?
- A collection of stories told by pilgrims traveling to Thomas Becket's shrine, framed by a General Prologue that portrays each teller.
- Why is the General Prologue so important?
- It introduces around thirty pilgrims from across the social range, describing each with detail that quietly judges them without commentary.
- Who is the Wife of Bath?
- A much-married cloth maker whose long prologue defends female experience against clerical authority and outruns the tale that follows it.
- What is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?
- An Arthurian romance in which a green stranger offers a beheading game, and Gawain must keep a bargain that turns out to test his honesty rather than his courage.
- What is Piers Plowman?
- A long allegorical dream vision in alliterative verse in which the narrator searches for a truthful Christian life across a corrupt society.
- What is Le Morte d'Arthur?
- A prose compilation of the Arthurian stories, from Arthur's birth through the Round Table and the quest for the Grail to the collapse of the kingdom.
- Who brought printing to England?
- William Caxton, who set up a press at Westminster in 1476 and printed Chaucer, Malory and his own translations.
- What are the earliest English books by women?
- Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, an account of her visions, and The Book of Margery Kempe, which is often called the first autobiography in English.
- How did the sonnet reach English?
- Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey translated and adapted Petrarch in the 1530s and 1540s. Their poems reached print in Tottel's Miscellany in 1557.
- What is The Faerie Queene?
- An unfinished allegorical epic in which each book follows a knight embodying a virtue, written to honor Elizabeth I and to teach virtue by example.
- What is Sidney's Defence of Poesy?
- An argument that poetry teaches better than history or philosophy, because it can show virtue in action rather than merely record or define it.
- What is Astrophil and Stella?
- The first major English sonnet sequence, one hundred and eight sonnets and eleven songs tracing a lover's pursuit of an unavailable woman.
- What did Christopher Marlowe contribute to English drama?
- He made blank verse the natural language of the stage, in plays driven by overreaching protagonists: Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus and Barabas.
- What is Doctor Faustus about?
- A scholar sells his soul for twenty-four years of knowledge and power, wastes them on tricks, and is dragged to hell as the clock runs out.
- How many plays and sonnets did Shakespeare leave?
- The First Folio of 1623 collected thirty-six plays, and one hundred and fifty-four sonnets were printed in 1609.
- How are Shakespeare's plays traditionally classified?
- As comedies, histories and tragedies, the three divisions used in the First Folio, with a group of late plays often called romances.
- What is Hamlet about?
- A prince told by his father's ghost to avenge a murder delays, tests the ghost's word with a staged play, and destroys nearly everyone including himself.
- What drives the tragedy of Macbeth?
- A prophecy of kingship, a wife's insistence, and a murder that must be defended by further murders until the promised security is unreachable.
- What happens in King Lear?
- An aging king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters to profess their love, banishes the one who refuses to perform, and loses everything including his mind.
- What is The Tempest about?
- Prospero, a duke deposed and exiled to an island, raises a storm to bring his enemies ashore, and finally renounces his magic and forgives them.
- What is comedy of humours?
- A comic method in which each character is dominated by one governing trait, so the plot exposes the type rather than developing a person.
- Why does the King James Bible matter to literature?
- Its rhythms and phrasing entered English prose so thoroughly that later writers quote it without marking the quotation.
- Who were the Metaphysical poets?
- A loose group, named later by Samuel Johnson, whose poems argue in elaborate extended conceits drawn from science, exploration and law.