British Literature Reference Sheet

Beowulf

Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a dragon

A compound metaphorical expression used in Old English poetry (e.g., 'whale-road' for sea)

'Whale-road' means 'sea'

Heorot

Alliteration (repetition of initial consonant sounds)

Fate or destiny — a powerful force believed to govern the lives of men

Geoffrey Chaucer

A group of pilgrims traveling to Canterbury Cathedral tell stories to pass the time

He was among the first major writers to compose in Middle English rather than Latin or French

The legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the quest for the Holy Grail

Written by Sir Thomas Malory

A story in which characters, events, and settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities

Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from the mysterious Green Knight, testing his honor, courage, and honesty

Edmund Spenser

A 14-line poem in iambic pentameter, with a specific rhyme scheme

ABAB CDCD EFEF GG (three quatrains and a couplet)

ABBAABBA CDECDE (or CDCDCD) — an octave and a sestet

A line of poetry with five pairs of unstressed-stressed syllables (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM)

Comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances (late plays)

Ambition — his unchecked desire for power leads to his downfall

Whether to avenge his father's murder by killing his uncle Claudius, wrestling with moral and existential doubt

A speech in which a character speaks thoughts aloud while alone on stage

The famous London playhouse where many of Shakespeare's plays were performed (built 1599)

Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth

Hamlet

When the audience knows something that the characters on stage do not

John Milton

The fall of Satan from heaven and the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

John Bunyan

Written while in prison for unlicensed preaching

A Christian allegory following a character named 'Christian' on his journey to the Celestial City

Jonathan Swift

A satire — using humor and exaggeration to criticize human nature, politics, and society

Emphasis on emotion, imagination, individualism, nature, the supernatural, and rebellion against Enlightenment rationalism

William Wordsworth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This collection launched the Romantic movement

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

John Keats

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron)

The term 'Byronic hero' is named after him

A brooding, rebellious, emotionally complex protagonist, often an outcast with a dark past

William Blake

Mary Shelley

She was only 18 when she began writing it

Charles Dickens

Poverty, child labor, class inequality, and the failures of social institutions

Charlotte Bronte

Emily Bronte

Mary Ann Evans — she used a male pen name to ensure her work was taken seriously

Middlemarch

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Robert Browning

George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)

The dangers of totalitarian government, surveillance, propaganda, and the destruction of truth

J.R.R. Tolkien

C.S. Lewis

The Inklings

Aldous Huxley

C.S. Lewis — a satirical novel of letters from a senior demon to a junior one

T.S. Eliot

W.B. Yeats

A coming-of-age novel that follows the moral and psychological growth of a protagonist from youth to maturity

A simile compares using 'like' or 'as'; a metaphor states one thing IS another without comparison words

Unrhymed iambic pentameter — the meter Shakespeare used for most of his plays

A noble protagonist whose fatal flaw (hamartia) leads to their downfall

Hints or clues about events that will happen later in the story

A long narrative poem about a heroic figure whose actions affect a nation or people

Giving human qualities or characteristics to nonhuman things or abstract ideas