English literature bullet tips set net exam

 

ENGLISH LITERATURE BULLET TIPS:

 

1.   Androgyny is 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.
2. Anglo-Irish Writers: George Farquahr, Richard Steele, Laurence Sterne, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Edmund Burke and Jonathan Swift.  
3.   William Butler Yeats returned to Celtic mythology as the inspirational source of his poetry.
4.    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.
5. She tragedies” is a term coined by Nicholas Rowe which focused on the sufferings of an innocent and virtuous woman became the dominant form of pathetic tragedy.
6. Victor Brombert points out, “Nineteenth and twentieth century literature is . . . crowded with weak, ineffectual, pale, humiliated, self-doubting, inept, occasionally abject characters . . .”
7.  Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) has unnamed protagonist.   Albert Camus wrote The Fall (1954)
8. Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820)
9. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876)
10. 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.
11. Apollonian/Dionysian are the Contrasting terms 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.
12. Aporia: The Greek word for complexity, 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.
13. Apostrophe: A figure of speech in which a speaker turns from the audience to address an absent person or abstract idea. It differs from a soliloquy in that the speaker of an apostrophe need not be alone on the stage. An example occurs in the second act of Hamlet, when the Prince turns from a conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
14. Apron stage is a stage that is thrust out into the audience on three sides, creating closer contact than is the case with a PROSCENIUM stage. The apron stage was a common feature of Elizabethan theatres, such as Shakespeare’s GLOBE THEATRE.
15. Arab-American literature: An early and important force in Ameen Rihani, a Lebanese-born scholar and diplomat, whose The Book of Khalid (1911), a novel written in free verse records the struggles and triumphs in the immigrant experience. The most important early work of Arab-American literature is Kahil Gibran’s world-famous The Prophet (1923), a meditative prose poem, extolling love as the central fact of the human condition.
16.   Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1587, 1590) is an elaborate, pastoral prose-romance that exerted a strong influence on English Renaissance literature.
17.  Aristotle defined literature as imitation (MIMESIS); gave an account of the origins, development, and structure of drama; distinguished between comedy and tragedy; and introduced the concept of CATHARSIS and the UNITIES.
18. Arnold introduced a number of terms that have enjoyed wide currency: HEBRAISM/ HELLENISM, PHILISTINE, SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, and the TOUCHSTONE principle.
19. Art for art’s sake: The argument that art should be autonomous and not compelled to serve a specific c social or moral purpose. The phrase was used in 19thcentury France and England as a slogan of AESTHETICISM.
20. Aside: In drama, a comment by a character directed to the audience, not intended to be heard by the other characters on stage. The use of the aside affects the role of the audience in the play.
21.  Assonance is a form of RHYME in which the vowels rhyme, but not the consonants. Examples: kite-bike; rate-cake.
22. Aubade: A poem in which lovers complain of the appearance of dawn, which requires them to part. The form achieved great popularity in medieval France and was employed by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde and by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet.
23. Walter J. Ongwrote an essay, “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction.”
24.  Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” is included in his Image, Music, Text (1977).
25.   Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” is reprinted in The Foucault Reader (1984).
26. Ballad is originally a song associated with dance, the ballad developed into a form of folk verse narrative. The majority of folk ballads deal with themes of romantic passion, love affairs that end unhappily, or with political and military subjects. The story usually is in dialogue form. The ballad form was imitated by Romantic poets, signaled by the publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798.
27. Motiveless malignity” is the phrase by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
28. Bathos is a term used to describe a writer’s failure to elicit a strong emotion, inadvertently producing laughter or ridicule.
29. Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books (1697) satirized the modernist position.
30. Beat is a term for a group of American writers who came into prominence during the 1950s and offered a radical critique of middle-class American values.
31.   Berliner Ensemble is a Theatrical company established in East Berlin in 1949 by the playwright Bertolt Brecht. It offered Brecht the opportunity to implement his theoretical conceptions, such as Epic Theatre and the Alienation Effect.
32. Bildungsroman (education novel): A German term for a type of novel that focuses on the development of a character moving from childhood to maturity. Sometimes known as a Coming-of-Age novel, the form usually charts a movement from innocence to knowledge. Prominent examples include Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959).
33. Fabliau is Humorous, frequently bawdy, tales in verse popular in Europe during the MIDDLE AGES. It was originated in France. The fabliau was adapted for use by Boccaccio in his Decameron (1350) and by Chaucer, who used the form for the “Miller’s Tale,” the “Reeve’s Tale,” and the “Summoner’s Tale” in his Canterbury Tales (1387–1400).
34. Arthur Miller wrote After the Fall (1964).
35. Fantasy is a form of literature characterized by highly imaginative or supernatural events. Ex: Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).
36.  Farce is a type of dramatic comedy characterized by broad, visual effects, fast moving action.
37.   The term “tragic farce” was also employed by T. S. Eliot to describe Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1590).
38. The decree was issued as a response to Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), a novel regarded as insulting to Islam in general and to the prophet Mohammed in particular. Living under the threat of assassination since that time, Rushdie, an English citizen, has publicly apologized and declared himself to be a faithful Muslim.
39. Thomas Mann wrote Doktor Faustus (1947), in which the story is recast as a commentary on the German people’s “pact” with Nazism. (Note: Christopher Marlowe wrote Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (1588–92), in which Faustus makes a pact for 24 years and he is dragged screaming into Hell.)
40. Feminist Works: Feminist criticism emerged in the late ’60s. Ex: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), Mary Ellmann’s Thinking about Women (1968), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex (1971), Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929)
41.  First Folio: The first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623, seven years after the playwright’s death. The book was published as a result of the efforts of John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of the principal actors of The King’s Men, Shakespeare’s theatrical company. The Folio included a total of 36 plays, half of which had never been published before.
42. Ben Jonson said Shakespeare as “not of an age, but for all time.”
43.  Foot is a unit of METER consisting of two or more syllables, each of which is treated as accented (stressed) or unaccented (unstressed). The most common feet in English are: IAMB, TROCHEE, ANAPEST, DACTYL, SPONDEE, Iamb, trochee, and spondee are two-syllable feet; dactyl and anapest are three-syllable feet.
44.  Amphibrach and amphomacer are also three-syllable feet. Choriamb contains four-syllables.
45. Foregrounding is the English translation of the Czech word aktualisace, a term coined by Jan Mukarovsky of the Prague School, early advocates of linguistic Structuralism.
46. Formalism An approach to literature that analyzes its internal features (its Structure, Texture, And Imagery, for example) and minimizes or ignores its relations to historical, social, political, or biographical factors. Ex: Henry James’s Washington Square (1880) focuses recurrent images, structural oppositions, and features such as FORESHADOWING, while ignoring such topics as 19th-century class consciousness, the role of women, and the relevance of the novel to the author’s biography.
47. Fourteener is a line of iambic verse consisting of 14 syllables (seven feet), also known as heptameter. The form was popular in the early Tudor period (1500– 60).
48.   Lord Byron wrote Cain (1831).
49. Frankfurt school: The name given to a group of German intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in the 1920s and ’30s, and later in London and New York. After World War II, the Institute was reconstituted in Frankfurt. The prominent figures associated with the School are the philosophers and social theorists Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, the psychologist Erich Fromm, and, on the fringe of the group, the theorist Walter Benjamin.
50.  P.B. Shelly - " Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar".