1. Globe and the Rose theatres associated with William Shakespeare.
2. In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Shakespeare writes the following lines:
Brutus: Peace! Count the clock. Cassius: The clock has stricken three (Act II, scene I, lines 193-94).
3. Nietzsche said, "Talent is an adornment; an adornment is also a concealment."
4. Ann Landers once claimed, "The poor wish to be rich, the rich wish to be happy, the single wish to be married, and the married wish to be dead."
5. Samuel Johnson writes, "Labour and care are rewarded with success, success produces confidence, confidence relaxes industry, and negligence ruins the reputation which diligence had raised" (Rambler No. 21).
6. The character of Yoda states in Star Wars, Episode I: "Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hatred; hatred leads to conflict; conflict leads to suffering."
7. Beowulf, in which a hero with the strength of thirty men wrestles with the monster Grendel.
8. In medias res (Latin for “in the midst of things”) means the Opening of the plot in the middle of the action.
9. Tetrameter – a verse in a poem consisting of four metric feet.
10. Tercet – a grouping of three consecutive lines of poetry that may or may not rhyme.
11. Trimeter –a line of a poem that contains three metric feet.
12. The autobiography of Mohandas K. Gandhi, My Experiments with Truth, originally written in Gujarati between 1927 and 1929, is now considered a classic.
13. Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose elegy on the death of John Keats (Adonais, 1821) contains a prophetic vision of his own death.
14. Benjamin Kurtz’s The Pursuit of Death (1930) is on Shelley.
15. “The Owl and the Nightingale” (c. 1220), in which two birds, the symbols of love and religion, debate their respective values.
16. David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)
17. John Donne compared two separated lovers to the twin legs of a compass in his poem “The Anniversary.”
18. Plato called Archilochus “the prince of Sages”.
19. George Eliot’s pen name is Mary Ann Evans. Her famous debut novel is Adam Bede.
20. A Doll’s House is a three-act play in prose by Henrik Ibsen.
21. A House’s Tale is a novel by Mark Twain. His pen name is Samuel Clemens.
22. A Marriage Proposal is a one-act play (Farce) by Anton Chekhov written in 1888-1889 and first performed in 1890. Natalia, Stepan Stepanovitch Chubokov, Ivan are the characters in this play.
23. A Tale of a Tub is a satire by Jonathan Swift. It is a prose parody which divided into sections of “Digression” and “A Tale” of three brothers Peter, Martin and Jack.
24. Aeschylus is often described as “the father of tragedy”.
25. Alexander Pope translated Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Pope is the third most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson. The Rape of the Lock is dedicated to his friend John Caryll. Pope also contributed to Addison’s play Cato. The Rape of the Lock was published in 1712; with a revised version published in 1714. It is a mock epic which satirizes a high society quarrel between Arabella Fermor (Belinda) and Lord Petre. Belinda is compared to the Sun in the poem. “An Essay on Criticism” (1711) and “Windsor Forest” (1713) are also his works.
26. Arms and the Man is a comedy by George Bernard Shaw. The title was borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin ( Arms and the Man I Sing). Raina is a character in the play. Shaw’s other works are Candida, You Never Can Tell, and The Man of Destiny.
27. Between the Acts is the final novel by Virginia Woolf published in 1941 shortly after her suicide.
28. George Bernard Shaw’s Candida is set in the month of October.
29. Confidence is a novel by Henry James in 1879.
30. Death in Venice (1912) is a novella by German author Thomas Mann.
31. Dream of Four to Middling Women is Samuel Beckett’s first novel. It is an autobiographical novel. The main character Belacqua is a writer and teacher in the novel.
32. Edgar Allan Poe began his own journal “The Penn”. ( Later it was renamed “The Stylus”)
33. Thomas Hardy first employed the term “Wessex” in Far from the Madding Crowd.
34. Franklin Evans The Inebriate is the only novel ever written by Walt Whitman.
35. George Bernard Shaw is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in Literature ( 1925) and an Oscar (1938). Shaw wrote 63 plays. His first novel Immaturity was written in 1879 but the last one to be printed in 1931. His last significant play was In Good King Charles Golden Days.
36. George Eliot’s pen name was Mary Ann Evans. Her works- Adam Bede(1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1866), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch(1871-72), Daniel Doronda (1876).
37. Jonathan Swift wrote “Drapier’s Letters” in 1724.
38. Gustav Flaubert was a French writer and well-known for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857).
39. Happy Days is a play in two acts by Samuel Beckett. Winnie and Willie are the characters in the play.
40. Henrik Ibsen is often regarded as “the father of realism” and one of the founders of Modernism in Theatre.
41. Love in Several Masques was Henry Fielding’s first play.
42. Chaucer lived during the reigns of Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV
43. William Langland was the closest contemporary of Chaucer.
44. The Hundred Year's War was fought between England and France.
45. The War of Roses figures in the works of Shakespeare.
46. John Wycliffe is called 'the morning star of the Reformation'.
47. Twenty-Nine pilgrims in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were going on the pilgrimage from the Tabard Inn.
48. Three pilgrims in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales represent the military profession.
49. Eight ecclesiastical characters are portrayed in the Prologue in Canterbury Tales.
50. It is believed that the Host at the Inn was a real man. His name was Harry Bailly.
51. The pilgrims were going to the Shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
52. Three women characters figure in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
53. “The Parson's Tale” is in prose in Canterbury Tales.
54. “Bath” is the name of the town to which she belonged in Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath”.
55. "He was as fresh as the month of May ".This line occurs in the Prologue. This is referred to the Squire.
56. Treatise on the Astrolabe is Chaucer's prose work.
57. The War of Roses was fought between The House of York and The House of Lancaster
58. The followers of Wycliffe were called “ the Lollards”
59. John Wycliffe was the first to render the Bible into English in 1380.
60. The Piers the Plowman is a series of visions seen by its author Langland. ‘The Vision of a 'Field Full of Folks' was the first vision that he saw.
61. Occleve in The Governail of Princes wrote a famous poem mourning the death of Chaucer.
62. Caxton was the first to set up a printing press in England in 1476.
63. William Tyndale’s English New Testament is the earliest version of the Bible.
64. Tottle's Miscellany is a famous anthology of 'Songs and Sonnets' by Wyatt and Surrey.
65. Amoretti contained 88 sonnets of Spenser.
66. Thomas Mores' Utopia was first written in Latin in 1516. It was rendered into English in 1551.
67. Roister Doister is believed to be the first regular comedy in English by Nicholas Udall.
68. Gorboduc is believed to be the first regular tragedy in English by Sackville and Norton in collaboration.
69. Chaucer's Physician in the Doctor of Physique was heavily dependent upon Astrology.
70. Spenser described Chaucer as "The Well of English undefiled’.
71. Chaucer's pilgrims go on their pilgrimage in the month of April.
72. Forest of Arden appears in the play As You Like It by William Shakespeare.
73. Globe Theatre was built in 1599.
74. When Sidney died, Spenser wrote an elegy on his death called “Astrophel”
75. Spenser’s Epithalamion is a wedding hymn.
76. The first tragedy Gorboduc was later entitled Ferrex and Porrex.
77. Sidney's “Apologie for Poetrie” is a reply to Gosson's “School of Abuse”.
78. In his Apologie for Poetrie, Sidney defends the Three Dramatic Unities.
79. Christopher Marlowe wrote only tragedies. He first used Blank Verse in his Jew of Malta.
80. "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships”. This line occurs in Doctor Faustus by Marlowe.
81. Ben Jonson used the phrase 'Marlowe's mighty line' for Marlowe's Blank Verse.
82. Ruskin said, "Shakespeare has only heroines and no heroes".
83. The phrase 'The Mousetrap' is used by Shakespeare in Hamlet. It is the play within the play.
84. Spenser dedicates the Preface to The Faerie Queene to Sir Walter Raleigh.
85. The Faerie Queene is an allegory. In this Queen Elizabeth is allegorized through the character of Gloriana.
86. Charles Lamb called Spenser the 'Poets' Poet'.
87. Spenser first used the Spenserian stanza in Faerie Queene.
88. In the original scheme or plan of the Faerie Queene as designed by Spenser, it was to be completed in Twelve Books. But he could not complete the whole plan. Only six books exist now.
89. Twelve Cantos are there in Book I of the Faerie Queene.
90. In the Dedicatory Letter, Spenser Says that the real beginning of the allegory in the Faerie Queene is to be found in Book XII.
91. The Faerie Queene is basically a moral allegory. Spenser derived this concept of moral allegory from Aristotle.
92. Ben Jonson said 'Spenser writ no language.'
93. Spenser divided his ‘Shepheardes Calender’ into twelve Ecologues. They represent twelve months of the year.
94. Bacon's Essays are modelled on the Essais of Montaigne.
95. Bacon is the author of Novum Organum.
96. Spenser dedicated his Shepherds Calendar to Sir Philip Sidney.
97. Ten Essays were published in Bacon's First Edition of Essays in 1597.
98. 58 essays Bacon were published in his third and last edition of Essays in 1625.
99. "......... a mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better, but it embaseth it". These lines occur in Bacon’s “Of Truth”.
100. Hamlet said "Frailty thy name is a woman” in Hamlet by Shakespeare.
101. "Life is a tale, told by an idiot, Full of sound and fury signifying nothing." These lines occur in Macbeth by Shakespeare.
102. "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact." These lines occur in A Mid-Summer Night's Dream.
103. "Neither a borrower nor a lender is”. This line was told by Polonius in Hamlet.
104. "Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more." These lines are in Macbeth.
105. Ben Jonson's comedies are called 'Comedies of Humour' because each of them deals with a particular 'Humour' in human nature.
106. The Age of James I is called the Jacobean Age.
107. Samson Agonistes is an epic written by John Milton.
108. Milton wrote Areopagitica to defend people's Freedom of Speech.
109. Twelve books are there in Paradise Lost. In Book IV of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve meet for the first time. Paradise was first published in 1667 in ten books. The Second Edition was followed in 1674 in twelve books. The longest book is BOOK IX with 1,189 lines and the shortest book is BOOK VII with 640 lines. It was written in blank verse. Satan is considered as the “Hero” in Paradise Lost. The story opens in Hell. Eve was created by God taken from one of Adam’s ribs.
110. Milton became blind in 1652 (at the age of 44) and he wrote Paradise Lost through dictation with the help of Amanuenses and friends.
111. The term 'Metaphysical School of Poets' was first applied to Donne and their companion poets by Dr. Johnson.
112. ‘Fame is the last infirmity of noble mind'. This line occurs in Milton’s Lycidas.
113. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”. Satan says this line in Paradise Lost.
114. Samson Agonistes loved Delilah and he was betrayed by her in Samson Agonistes.
115. Lycidas is a pastoral elegy written by Milton on the death of his friend Edward King.
116. Wordsworth says of Milton: 'Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart'.
117. 'Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour!’. Wordsworth remembers Milton in one of his sonnets.
118. Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy is a critical treatise on dramatic art developed through dialogues.
119. Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy develops through dialogues among four interlocutors. They are - Eugenius, Crites, Neander, and Lisideius.
120. In Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy Neander speaks for Modern English Dramatists. (Neander is Dryden in Essay of Dramatic Poesy)
121. Conquest of Granada is a play written by Dryden.
122. Dryden's All For Love is based on Antony and Cleopatra.
123. John Locke is the author of The Essay on Human Understanding.
124. The central theme of Dryden's The Hind and the Panther is the Defence of Roman Catholicism.
125. Samuel Butler's Hudibras is a satire on Puritanism.
126. Grace Abounding is an autobiographical work by John Bunyan.
127. Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory.
128. 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may'. This is the opening line of 'Counsel to Girls' written by Robert Herrick.
129. "Here is God's plenty". Dryden refers to Chaucer in the line.
130. Nahum Tate gave a happy ending to King Lear.
131. The theatres were closed down during the Commonwealth period in England. In 1660 they were reopened.
132. "Here lies my wife, here let her rest ! Now she is at rest, and so am I ! " This was a proposed epitaph to be engraved on the tomb of John Dryden’s wife.
133. Dryden's The Medal is a personal satire on Shaftesbury.
134. Dryden is hailed as 'The Father of English Criticism' by Dr. Johnson.
135. "The Restoration marks the real moment of birth of our Modern English Prose." Matthew Arnold says this.
136. The term 'Augustan' was first applied to a School of Poets by Dr. Johnson.
137. Matthew Arnold called the eighteenth century "Our admirable and indispensable Eighteenth Century".
138. Matthew Arnold called the eighteenth century 'the Age of Prose and Reason'.
139. 'Dryden found English poetry brick and left it marble.' Dr. Johnson remarked this.
140. 'If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found? This observation was made by Dr.Johnson.
141. "I shall endeavour to enlighten morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality." Addison made this endeavour.
142. Richard Steele started the journal The Tatler.
143. The ‘Four Wheels of the Van of the English Novel are- Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Richardson.
144. Referring to one of his novels, Jonathan Swift said, "Good God! What a genius I had when I wrote that book! “He was referring to A Tale of the Tub.
145. Pope said, "The proper study of mankind is man”.
146. Absolem and Achitophel deal with the Popish Plot.
147. The Elegie in Praise of John Donne was written by Thomas Carew.
148. Joseph Andrews Fielding parodies Richardson's Pamela.
149. Swift said 'Pope can fix in one couplet more sense than I can do in six'.
150. The 'Coffee House Culture' flourished in The Age of Dr Johnson.
151. Pope observed, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring."
152. Lady M.W . Montagu said Pope's Essay on Criticism is 'all stolen'.
153. Matthew Prior's The Town and Country Mouse is a parody of Dryden's The Hind and the Panther.
154. Dr Johnson wrote the “Lives” of 52 poets in his "Lives of the Poets”.
155. Dr Johnson left out Goldsmith in his Lives of the Poets.
156. Tennyson called Milton "the mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies".
157. James Thomson’s Seasons is a Nature poem divided into four parts.
158. John Dyer is the author of the poem Grongar Hill.
159. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” begins with the line "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day".
160. 1798 was taken to be the year of the beginning of the Romantic Movement because Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads was published in that year.
161. Wordsworth's Prelude is an Autobiographical poem.
162. Cowper wrote, "God made the country and man made the town."
163. "We are laid asleep in body and become a living soul." This line occurs in Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey.
164. Collins's poem "In Yonder Grave a Druid lies" is an elegy on the death of James Thomson.
165. Thomas Love Peacock satirises Shelley and Coleridge in Nightmare Abbey.
166. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife". This line occurs in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
167. The phrase, "willing suspension of disbelief" is applied to Coleridge.
168. "When lovely woman stoops to folly" occurs in a play written by Oliver Goldsmith. (She Stoops to Conquer)
169. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven." This line occurs in Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
170. According to Shelley "Hell is a city much like London."
171. The Mariner kills an albatross in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
172. Robert Southey’s A Vision of Judgment is a ludicrous eulogy of George II.
173. Shelley was expelled from Oxford University for the publication of On the Necessity of Atheism.
174. Lord Byron was the poet who woke one morning and found himself famous.
175. Matthew Arnold called Shelley "an ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain".
176. Walter Scott’s novels are called Waverly Novels.
177. 'Elia' is a pen name assumed by De Quincey.
178. Shelley's Defense of Poetry is a rejoinder (reply) to Love Peacock's The Four Ages of Poetry.
179. Adonais is a Pastoral Elegy written by Shelley on the death of Keats.
180. Madeline is the heroine in Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats.
181. Matthew Arnold said about Keats, "He is with Shakespeare".
182. Keats said himself, "My name is writ in water."
183. Coleridge said. "I have a smack of Hamlet myself".
184. Shelley's death was caused by drowning.
185. "Life, like a dome of many coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity
Until death tramples it to fragments, die."
These lines occur in Shelley’s Adonais.
186. Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn ends with the line: "For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.”
187. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever ." This line is in Keats’s Endymion.
188. Charles Lamb has written Tales from Shakespeare.
189. Walter Scott is considered to be the most remarkable Historical Novelist of the Romantic Period.
190. Ode of Wit is a small masterpiece of Abraham Cowley.
191. The first poet laureate of England was Ben Jonson (unofficial).
192. After Walter Scott’s refusal, the Poet Laureateship was conferred on Robert Southey.
193. Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel dealt with the people's plan to prevent James from coming to the throne and make the Duke of Monmouth the king, which is known as the Popish plot.
194. The title of the poet of laureate was first conferred by letters patent to John Dryden.
195. Queen Victoria succeeded to the throne of England after William IV.
196. D.G. Rossetti was the leader of the Pre-Raphaelite group of artists in England. (Pre-Raphaelites: D.G.Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne)
197. Elizabeth Barret Browning is the author of Aurora Leigh.
198. The basic theme of Arnold’s Literature and Dogma is Theology.
199. Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy deals with the subject of Education.
200. The subtitle of Vanity Fair is “Novel Without a Hero”.
201. George Eliot's novel Romola is a Historical novel.
202. Charles Dickens left Edwin Drood (his novel) unfinished.
203. Voltaire wrote: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’
204. In Memoriam, Tennyson mourns the death of Arthur Hallam.
205. Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis is an elegy written on the death of Hugh Clough.
206. Arnold defines Poetry as "Poetry is a criticism of life, under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty".
207. The Dynasts is an epic drama written by Hardy. It deals with The Napoleonic Wars.
208. The scene of a wife's auction takes place in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge.
209. 'Stormy Sisterhood' is applied to Bronte Sisters-Charlotte, Emily, and Anne.
210. "Happiness is but an occasional episode in the general drama of pain." This line appears in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge.
211. Charles Dicken’s David Copperfield is the most autobiographical.
212. Wilkie Collins is the author of the novel No Name.
213. In Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, the two cities referred to are: London and Paris.
214. Tennyson's Queen Mary is a drama.
215. Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra begins with the lines: "Grow old along with me ! The best is yet to be."
216. "Truth sits upon the lips of dying men." This line occurs in Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum.
217. War Poets : Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell and Siegfried Sassoon
218. Rudyard Kipling said, "Oh, East is East, and West is West, And never the twain can meet."
219. The Waste Land by T S Eliot is dedicated to Ezra Pound.
220. The Waste Land is divided into five parts.
221. The Waste Land ends with the line, "Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata, Shanti, Shanti, Shanti."
222. James Joyce's Ulysses is based on the pattern of Homer’s Odyssey.
223. D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers has autobiographical overtones.
224. D.H. Lawrence called one of his novels Kangaroo a “Thought Adventure".
225. The phrase ‘religion of the blood' is associated with D.H. Lawrence.
226. A character in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando changes his sex. Charles II is characterised in this novel.
227. A woman's search for a fitting mate is the central theme of Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman.
228. ‘Chocolate cream hero' appears in Shaw’s Arms and the Man.
229. The phrase 'Don Juan in Hell' occurs in Shaw’s Man and Superman.
230. Prostitution is the central theme of Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession.
231. Labour and Capital conflict is the central theme of Galsworthy’s Strife.
232. "The law is what it is -a majestic edifice sheltering all of us, each stone of which rests on another." These lines occur in Galsworthy’s Justice.
233. Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925.
234. Joseph Conrad's novels are generally set in the background of the sea.
235. Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem “ If”
236. The term 'Stream of consciousness' was first used by William James.
237. The terms 'Inscape' and 'Instress' are associated with Hopkins.
238. 'Sprung Rhythm' was originated by Hopkins.
239. T .S. Eliot called 'Hamlet' an artistic failure.
240. The World Within World is an autobiography of Stephen Spender.
241. G. B. Shaw said, "For art's sake alone I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence”.
242. Aldous Huxley borrowed the title ‘Brave New World’ from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
243. William Morris is the author of The Earthly Paradise.
244. T S Eliot was believed to be "a classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion”.
245. Virginia Woolf was the founder of the Bloomsbury Group, a literary club of England.
246. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty–Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are prophetic novels.
247. Plato said, ‘Art is twice removed from reality'.
248. Plato proposed in his Republic that poets should be banished from the ideal Republic.
249. Five principal sources of Sublimity are there according to Longinus.
250. In Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, there are four speakers representing four different ideologies. Neander expresses Dryden's own views.
251. Dr Johnson called Dryden 'the father of English criticism'
252. Shelley said, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
253. Dr . Johnson preferred Shakespeare's comedies to his Tragedies.
254. Coleridge said, "I write in metre because I am about to use a language different from that of prose."
255. Heroic Couplet is a two-line stanza having two rhyming lines in Iambic Pentameter.
256. Alexandrine is a line of six iambic feet occasionally used in a Heroic couplet.
257. Terza Rima is a run-on three-line stanza with a fixed rhyme scheme.
258. Rhyme Royal stanza is a seven-line stanza in iambic pentameter.
259. Ottava Rima is an eight-line stanza in iambic pentameter with a fixed rhyme scheme.
260. Spenserian stanza is a nine-line stanza consisting of two quatrains in iambic pentameter, rounded off with an Alexandrine.
261. Blank verse has a metre but no rhyme.
262. Simile is a comparison between two things which have at least one point in common.
263. Hyperbole is an exaggerated statement for the sake of emphasis.
264. The poem by Chaucer known to be the first attempt in English to use the Heroic Couplet is The Legend of Good Women.
265. Chaucer introduced the Heroic couplet in English verse and invented Rhyme Royal.
266. The invention of the genre, the Eclogues (pastoral poetry) is attributed to Alexander Barclay.
267. Mort D' Arthur is the first book in English in poetic prose.
268. First to use blank verse in the English drama Thomas Sackville.
269. The first English playhouse called The Theatre was founded in London, in 1576.
270. Thomas Wyatt introduced the sonnet form to England.
271. Thomas Nash was the creator of the picaresque novel. ( The Unfortunate Traveler)
272. Francis Bacon is the first great stylist in English prose.
273. Marlowe wrote only tragedies.
274. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote the introductory sonnet to Spencer's Fairy Queen.
275. Wordsworth viewed that "poetry divorced from morality is valueless".
276. Longinus is called the first romantic critic.
277. Dr Johnson defined poetry as "Metrical Composition".
278. Carlyle defined poetry as 'Musical thought'.
279. Bacon is known as the father of English essays.
280. Imaginary characters were first introduced in the periodical essay of Addison and Steele.
281. Montaigne is known as the father of Essay.
282. To Arnold, Nature is, “A Calm refuge and solace to the troubled heart”.
283. Father of Greek tragedy – Aeschylus
284. Father of Comedy – Aristophanes
285. Father of English Poetry - Geoffrey Chaucer
286. Father of English Printing - William Caxton
287. Father of detective stories - Edgar Allen Poe
288. Father of English Prose - King Alfred
289. Morning Star of Reformation - John Wycliffe
290. Wolf Hall (2009) is a historical novel by English author Hilary Mantel.
291. Boz is the pen name of Charles Dickens.
292. Henry James described novels as "loose baggy monsters".
293. T. S. Eliot has made an attempt to combine religious symbolism and societal comedy in his plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party.
294. In 1960, the ban finally lifted on D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, written in 1928.
295. Strophe, antistrophe and epode are the components of the Pindaric ode.
a. Strophe: Dancers danced from the right to the left
b. Antistrophe: Left to the right or counterturn
c. Epode: When the dancers were fixed on the stage.
296. Pneumonia was the cause of William’s death in Sons and Lovers.
297. ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’ is a quotation from William Shakespeare. 298. Sir Toby Belch speaks the lines: “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale.” in the Twelfth Night. 299. In Paradise Lost, Book I, Satan is the embodiment of Milton’s Spirit of Revolt. 300. Wordsworth called poetry “the breadth and finer spirit of all knowledge”. 301. Twelfth Night opens with the speech of Duke.
302. Kubla Khan of Coleridge is an opium dream. (Xanadu is a place in this poem) 303. Shelley used Terza rima stanza form in his famous poem ‘Ode to the West Wind’. 304. The phrase ‘Pathetic fallacy’ is coined by John Ruskin. 305. Five soliloquies are spoken by Hamlet in the play Hamlet.
306. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” These lines are from “The Second Coming” by W. B Yeats.
307. Sensuousnessisthe most notable characteristic of Keats’ poetry.
308. Optimism is the keynote of Browning’s philosophy of life.
309. The title of Carlyle’s ‘Sartor Resartus’ means Tailor Repatched.
310. “Epipsychidion” is composed by Shelley.
311. “The better part of valour is discretion” occurs in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I.
312. Graham Greene used a pseudonym, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, for much of his early work.
313. Pride and Prejudice was originally a youthful work entitled‘First Impressions’.
314. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” The line given above occurs in Hamlet.
315. Sir John Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s greatest comic figures. (The character appears both in Henry IV Part 1 and The Merry Wives of Windsor)
316. Samuel Pepys began his diary on New Year’s Day 1660 and wrote till 1669.
317. Blake said, “That Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it”.
318. Women’s Education and Rights is the theme of Tennyson’s Poem ‘The Princess’.
319. Oedipus complex and Electra complex are the terms used by Carl Jung.
320. D. H. Lawrence wrote, “My own great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh as being wiser than the intellect.”
321. Shakespeare makes fun of the Puritans in his play Twelfth Night.
322. “The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.” This line occurs in The Tempest.
323. ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy’. This line occurs in the poemImmortality Ode by Wordsworth.
324. Wordsworth calls himself ‘a Worshipper of Nature’ in his poem Tintern Abbey.
325. Direct or epic method of narration has been employed by Dickens in his novel Great Expectations.
326. Coleridge said ‘Keats was a Greek’.
327. D. G. Rossetti was a true literary descendant of Keats.
328. Browning’s famous poem ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ is included in Dramatis Personae. (Browning has used Italian styles in his poetry)
329. Sandition is an unfinished novel by Jane Austen.
330. Miss Havisham was arrogant in Great Expectation and she remained a spinster throughout her life.
331. The Romantic Revival in English Poetry was influenced by the French Revolution.
332. ‘O, you are sick of self-love’. Malvoliois referred to in these words in The Twelfth Night.
333. Hamlet is a passionate lover.
334. Miranda exclaims; ‘Brave, new, world!’ in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.
335. Paradise Lost shows the influence of Christianity and the Renaissance.
336. Polonius in Hamlet suggests that one should neither be a lender nor a borrower. 337. How Do I Love the poem ends 'I shall but love thee better after death' by Elizabeth Barrett. 338. Lord Byron is considered a national hero in Greece. 339. The three gallants were going to a wedding in the poem 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Coleridge.
340. Harold Nicholson described T. S. Elliot as 'Very yellow and glum. Perfect manners'. 341. Emily Dickinson rarely left home. 342. Rupert Brooke wrote his poetry during the First World War. 343. Maya Angelou wrote 'A Brave and startling truth' in 1996. 344. Using words or letters to imitate sounds is called onomatopoeia. 345. The study of poetry's meter and form is called prosody. 346. Shakespeare composed much of his plays in iambic pentameter. 347. 'Did my heart love til now?/ Forswear it, sight/ For I never saw true beauty until this night is a famous line from Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. 348. Auld Lang Syne is a famous poem by Robert Burns. 349. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote "The Hound of the Baskervilles”. 350. Agatha Christie wrote "Ten Little Niggers”.
351. Haiku is a Japanese poetic form.
352. Dylan Thomas's 'Under Milk Wood' is known as A radio play.
353. A funny poem of five lines is called Limerick.
354. W. H. Auden described poetry as “A game of knowledge”.
355. Bildungsroman and Erziehungsroman German terms signifying “novels of formation” or “novels of education”.
356. Black Death is the name given to the epidemic of plague that occurred in Chaucer's Age.
357. Occleve wrote a famous poem The Governail of Princes mourning the death of Chaucer.
358. William Tyndale’s English New Testament is the earliest version of the Bible.
359. Thomas Mores' Utopia was first written in Latin in 1516. It was rendered into English in 1551.
360. Roister Doister is believed to be the first regular comedy in English in Nicholas Udall.
361. Spenser described Chaucer as "The Well of English undefiled”.
362. Rahel and Estha are the twins in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.
363. Tinu and Dinu are the characters in Mrinal Pande’s Daughter’s Daughter.
364. In The Branded, Laxman Gaikwad retrospects the subhuman condition of the Uchalya community.
365. The Sunshine Cat is an outstanding poem by Kamala Das.
366. Bianca or The Young Spanish Maiden is a novel by Toru Dutt.
367. Rukmini is the protagonist in Nectar in the Sieve by Kamala Marakandaya.
368. The Good Earth is a novel by Pearl C Buck.
369. Mahesh Dattani founded a theatre group known as ‘Playpen’.
370. Part II of An Essay on Criticism by Pope includes a famous couplet:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
371. An Essay on Criticism was famously and fiercely attacked by John Dennis, who is mentioned mockingly in the work. Consequently, Dennis also appears in Pope's later satire, The Dunciad.
372. “To err is human, to forgive divine” is a famous line that appears in Pope’s An Essay on Criticism
373. An Essay on Man is a poem published by Alexander Pope in 1734.
374. Pope's Essay on Man and Moral Epistles were designed to be the parts of a system of ethics which he wanted to express in poetry.
375. Voltaire called An Essay on Man "the most beautiful, the most useful, the most sublime didactic poem ever written in any language"
376. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramaturge and author. Chekhov was a doctor by profession.
377. Anton Chekhov said, "Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress."
378. Anton Chekhov’s works are : The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard
379. Keat's Endymion has 4,000 lines.
380. Venus and Adonis, Glaucus and Scylla, Arcthusa and Alpheus – These pair of lovers Endymion meets in Keat’s Endymion.
381. Wordsworth wrote the famous Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
382. Lyrical Ballads were published in1798.
383. The Lyrical Ballads opens with Rime of the Ancient Mariner
384. The Lyrical Ballads closes with Lines Written above Tintern Abbey.
385. Dorothy Wordsworth was the third person with Coleridge and Wordsworth at Quantico Hills when the Lyrical Ballads were composed.
386. John Keats is known for his Hellenic Spirit.
387. PB. Shelley wrote: "Our Sweetest songs are those that tell our saddest thoughts"
388. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound is a lyrical drama.
389. S.T Coleridge wrote this: "He prayed well, who loved well both man and bird and beast"
390. The journal to which Southey contributed regularly was The Quarterly Review.
391. Sir Walter Scott collected Scottish ballads, and published them along with his own, in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
392. Byron was 19 years old when he published Hours of Idleness, a collection of poems in heroic couplets.
393. When Hours of Idleness was criticized by the Edinburgh Review, Lord Byron retaliated by writing a satiric piece. The title of this satire was English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
394. The first two cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold take a reader to Spain, Portugal, Greece and Albania
395. In Byron’s Childe Harold, the "Battle of Waterloo" description appears in Canto III.
396. The hero of Childe Harold is the poet himself.
397. "Michael", "The Solitary Reaper," and "To a Highland Girl" - all these poems depict simple common folk.
398. Purchas's Pilgrimage inspired Coleridge's, Kubla Khan.
399. The Vision of Judgment is a satire on Southey.
400. Don Juan has 16 cantos.
401. Halide is the Daughter of an old pirate in Don Juan
402. "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, "This woman's whole existence...." These lines appear in Don Juan.
403. Don Alfonso, Julia, Sultana, and Don Juan – are the characters in Don Juan.
404. Shelley was only 18 When he wrote Queen Mab.
405. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound has a story from Greek mythology.
406. Asia, Hercules, and Jupiter- are the characters in Shelly’s Prometheus Unbound.
407. The enmity of Saxon and Norman is the background of Ivanhoe.
408. Thomas Love Peacock wrote Headlong Hall, Maid Marian, Melincourt, Nightmare Abbey, Misfortunes of Elphin, Crotchet Castle and Gryll Grange.
409. Sidney Smith, Henry Brougham, and Francis Jeffrey are associated with the 'Edinburgh Review'.
410. "A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment." These lines are said by Darcy in Pride and Prejudice ( Jane Austen’s novel)
411. His sonnet was rejected by a magazine “Gem”, on the plea that it would "shock mothers". At this, he wrote to a friend, "I am born out of time... When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed 'Hang the age, I will write for antiquity.' He is Charles Lamb.
412. This patriotic song is often prescribed for school anthologies in India: "Breathes there the man, with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, this is my own, my native land." The Poet is Walter Scott.
413. Bingley is a character in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
414. "About thirty years age, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram ". This is the beginning of the novel Mansfield Park by Jane Austen.
415. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice begins with: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
416. America's Age of Reason took place in 1750-1800.
417. Genres and styles of the Age of Reason were typically political pamphlets, essays, travel writing, speeches, and highly ornate writing.
418. Romantic author Mary Robinson wrote the lines:
"Pavement slipp'ry, people sneezing, Lords in ermine, beggars freezing; Title gluttons dainties carving, Genius in a garret starving"
419. Unto This, Lost was written by John Ruskin. This work of Ruskin influenced Mahatma Gandhi.
420. R.L.Stevenson is the author of Dr . Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
421. Charles Dickens's characters are generally: Flat
422. The theme of Tennyson's Idylls of the King is The story of King Arthur and His Round Table
423. "Others abide our question. Thou art free
We ask and ask : Thou smilest and art still,
Out - topping knowledge."
In these lines from a poem written by Matthew Arnold, 'Thou' refers to Shakespeare.
424. Some Elizabethan Puritan critics denounced poets as 'fathers of lies' and 'caterpillars of a commonwealth'. Stephen Gosson used these offensives terms in his The School of Abuse.
425. "The tragi-comedy , which is the product of the English theatre, is one of the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet's thoughts." - Joseph Addison
426. "Be Homer's works your study and delight. Read them by day, and meditate by night." This advice was given to the poets by Pope.
427. "The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing." – Dr Johnson
428. "There neither is nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition." – William Wordsworth
429. "I write in metre because I am about to use a language different from that of prose." – Coleridge
430. Walter Pater gave the concept of "Art of Art's sake'.
431. Matthew Arnold gave the concept of "Art for life's sake’.
432. 'Objective correlative', 'Dissociation of sensibilities', 'Unification of sensibilities, Impersonality theory- are associated with T S Eliot.
433. John Crowe Ransom is believed to be the pioneer of the so-called New Criticism.
434. Prosody is the science of all verse forms, poetic metres and rhythms.
435. Longinus is called the first romantic critic.
436. Aristotle is known as the first scientific critic.
437. Fred invites Scrooge to Christmas dinner in A Christmas Carole.
438. "Lycidas" is a poem by John Milton, written in 1637 as a pastoral elegy. It is dedicated to the memory of Edward King. Milton describes King as "selfless."
439. Elizabethan Theatres: Blackfriars Theatre, The Boar’s Head Theatre, Cockpit Theatre or The Phoenix, The Curtain, The Fortune, The Globe, The Hope, The Red Bull ( Play House), The Red Lion, The Rose Salisbury Court Theatre, The Swan, The Theatre, White friars Theatre.
440. The Globe Theatre was built in 1599 by Shakespeare’s playing company and was destroyed by fire on 29June, 1613. A second theatre was built on the same land by June 1614 and closed in 1642. A modern reconstruction of the Globe, named “Shakespeare’s Globe “opened in 1997.
441. Samuel Taylor Coleridge adopted the Absolute principle in developing his theory of literature, a theory in which NATURE appears as the Absolute.
442. New Humanism: It was led by the scholars Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, who called for a rejection of transcendental, idealist terms, of which the Coleridge an Absolute was a major example.
443. The scholar Robert Calasso used the term absolute literature to describe writings that reveal a search for an absolute.
444. French writer Albert Camus employed the term “Absurd” to describe the futility of human existence, which he compared to the story of Sisyphus, the figure in Greek mythology condemned for eternity to push a stone to the top of a mountain only to have it roll back down again.
445. Martin Esslin found “the theatre of the absurd,” to describe plays that abandoned traditional construction and conventional dialogue.
446. Absurd Play and playwrights: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and Endgame (1957), Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1960), Arthur Adamov’s Ping Pong (1955), Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1959), Edward Albee’s The American Dream (1961) and The Zoo Story, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Gunther Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959) etc
447. Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd was written in 1961. He first used “Theatre of Absurd” in this work.
448. The ELIZABETHAN five-act structure derives from the Roman playwright Seneca.
449. Kenneth Burke analyzes the tragic rhythm of action in his A Grammar of Motives (1945).
450. Action painting is a term coined by the critic Harold Rosenberg to describe a central principle of the Abstract Expressionist art movement that developed in the 1940s and ’50s.
451. In novels such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856–57), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1875–77) and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), the heroines of all three of these novels commit adultery and are punished as social outcasts.
452. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne forms the basis of three novels by Updike (A Month of Sundays,1975; Roger’s Version,1986; and S,1988) in which the perspectives of the three main characters of the Hawthorne novel (Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth, and Hester Prynne) are recreated in contemporary terms.
453. Donald Greiner’s Adultery in the American Novel (1985) looks at the uses of the theme in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and John Updike.
454. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was written in 1883.
455. Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), concludes with the famous invitation to “burn with a hard gemlike flame” in the “desire for beauty, the love of art for its own sake.”
456. Oscar Wilde, at the end of his life, lamented in De Profundis (1905), “I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.”
457. An affective fallacy is a term in NEW CRITICISM used to describe the error, from a New Critical perspective, of analyzing a work of literature in terms of its impact upon a reader. William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley coined the term to call attention to the distinction between the text of a work and “its results in the mind of its audience.” “The Affective Fallacy” is included in Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon (1954).
458. Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was the first novel by an African American writer to be published in the United States.
459. African-American literature was dominated by three novelists: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Wright’s Native Son (1940), Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952), and Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).
460. Major African-American Writers: Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,1969), Ishmael Reed ( Mumbo Jumbo,1972), Alice Walker ( The Color Purple,1982), the playwright August Wilson (Fences,1987), and the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (Beloved,1987).
461. Dr Samuel Johnson was a poet, critic, editor, and lexicographer.
462. Gibbon wrote Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–87)
463. Boswell wrote Life of Johnson (1791).
464. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773), and William Congreve’s A Way of the World– are examples of the Comedy of Manners.
465. Tobias Smollett wrote the novel Humphrey Clinker (1771).
466. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–67), is one of the great comic novels in English.
467. At the polar opposite of the view of age in King Lear is Robert Browning’s depiction in “Rabbi Ben Ezra”:
Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be
468. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy, Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest (1990). Rabbit, Run depicts three months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player Harry’Rabbit’ Angstrom.
469. Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (1935), is a passionate pro-labour union drama focusing on a taxi drivers’ strike.
470. Shakespeare’s notable drinkers, Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night and Falstaff in his three plays.
471. Sidney Carton, in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) declares “It is a far, far better thing I do than anything I have ever done.”
472. “I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference” is a line from the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost.
473. “Good fences make good neighbours” is a line from “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost.
474. Alexandrine is a line of six iambic feet (12 syllables). Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, consists of nine-line stanzas, the first eight in iambic pentameter, with the ninth line an alexandrine.
475. Eugene O’Neill wrote Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1940)
476. Sartre wrote No Exit in 1945.
477. Alienation Effect is a term coined by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht to describe a desired detachment on the part of both actors and the audience to prevent them from becoming emotionally involved in the action of the play.
478. Allegory: Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704), Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851).
479. An allusion is a reference within a literary text to some person, place, or event outside the text.
480. William Butler Yeats’s reference to “golden thighed Pythagoras” in his poem “Among School Children.” It is an example of personal allusion.
481. William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), is a work that had a powerful impact on the development of New Criticism. Empson used the term to describe a literary technique in which a word or phrase conveys two or more different meanings.
482. William Empson defined ambiguity as “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”
483. The American critic F. O. Matthiessen first employed the term American renaissance to describe the major works of Emerson (Essays, 1841, Poems, 1847); Thoreau (Walden, 1854); Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, 1850); Melville (Moby Dick, 1851), and Whitman (Leaves of Grass, 1855).
484. Anapaest is a metrical FOOT containing two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable.
485. Anaphora: In RHETORIC, a figure of speech in which a word or words are repeated, usually at the beginning of successive sentences or lines of verse. William Blake’s “London” provides an example:
In every cry of every man In every infant’s cry of fear In every vice, in every ban, The mind-for’d manacles I hear.
486. Janie Crawford is the heroine of Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Are Watching God.
487. In his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye defines the term as “a form of fiction . . . characterized by a great variety of subject matter and a strong interest in ideas.”
488. Androgyny is the combination of male and female characteristics. The word itself combines the Greek words for male (Andros) and female (gynous). Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Dickens’s unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), Poe’s
“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1838), and John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1974) employ opposite-sex twins as embodiments of androgynous ideals.
489. Anglo-Irish Writers: George Farquhar, Richard Steele, Laurence Sterne, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Edmund Burke and Jonathan Swift.
490. William Butler Yeats returned to Celtic mythology as the inspirational source of his poetry.
491. Angry young men: A term applied to a group of English writers, whose novels and plays in the 1950s featured protagonists who responded with articulate rage to the malaise that engulfed post-war England.
492. “She tragedies” is a term coined by Nicholas Rowe which focused on the sufferings of an innocent and virtuous woman who became the dominant form of pathetic tragedy.
493. Victor Brombert points out, “Nineteenth and twentieth century literature is . . . crowded with weak, ineffectual, pale, humiliated, self-doubting, inept, occasionally abject characters . . .”
494. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) has an unnamed protagonist.
495. Albert Camus wrote The Fall (1954)
496. Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820)
497. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876)
498. Aphorism is a brief, elegant statement of a principle or opinion, such as “God is in the details.” An aphorism is similar to an EPIGRAM, differing only in the epigram’s emphasis on WIT.
499. Apollonian/Dionysian is the Contrasting term coined by the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche employs these terms in his The Birth of Tragedy (1872), in which he argues that Greek tragedy is essentially Dionysian, rooted in powerful and primitive emotions and that the Apollonian element is a later accretion.
500. Aporia: The Greek word for complexity, is used in classical philosophy to describe a debate in which the arguments on each side are equally valid. The “answer” to the question “Which comes first, the seed or the tree?” is an example of an aporia.
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