 Iliad – 24 books

 Horace – Ars Poetica

 “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song”
- Spenser, Prothalamion (Tudor period)
 Royal Society – 1660 – improve knowledge in England
 Charles I trial in 1649 -> Oliver Cromwell’s parliament -> COMMONWEALTH PERIOD -> END
of SECOND ENGLISH CIVIL WAR –> his death in 1658 –> his son Richard Cromwell for 2 years
–> Restoration of Monarchy in 1660 –> return of Charles II (1660-1685)
 Father of English poetry – Chaucer
 Paradise Lost – started in 1664 – officially published in 1667 – originally 10 books but later 12
books in 1674 following the model of Virgil’s Aeneid.
 “If Pope be not a poet, then where is poetry to be found.” – Dr. Samuel Johnson
 The Vicar of Wakefield – novel by Oliver Goldsmith – character of Squire Thornhill
 Virgin Queen of England – Elizabeth I – last of the five monarchs of the Tudor House
 Youngest British monarch – Mary, Queen of Scots aged 6 days in 1542.
 As You Like It – character of Orlando
 Last play of Shakespeare – The Tempest
 “Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss”
- Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
 “Sweet are the uses of adversity” – Shakespeare, As You Like It
 Resurrection – Leo Tolstoy’s novel – character of Katyusha Malaslova
 Virgil’s 3 epics – The Eclogues, the Georgics and the Aeneid in Latin.
 Lyrical Ballads – 1798 – second edition in 1800 (Preface added) – 1802 edition with the
appendix of “Poetic Diction”.
 John Dryden – first ever British Poet Laureate
 Lucy – series of 5 poems by Wordsworth
 Christabel – long narrative ballad by Coleridge in two parts – character of Geraldine
 “For men may come and men may go but I go on forever.” – The Brook; Alfred, Lord
Tennyson
 D.G. Rossetti – refused payment for his poems- he wrote poetry only for glory.
 Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue about the relationship of a husband and wife –
Andrea Del Sarto
 G.M. Hopkins introduced sprung rhythm in English poetry
 Easter, 1916 – poem by W.B. Yeats
 “Poetry makes nothing happen” – W.H. Auden
 Catalina – last novel by W. Somerset Maugham – 1948 – satire on the power of the church
 Fabliau – metrical tale, a humorous one, found in Early French Poetry
 The Waste Land – central character is Tiresias
 Celtic Renaissance – Irish Literary Revival
 Bloomsday – 16th June – the year was 1904
 Euphony – (meaning) the quality of being pleasing to the ear
 “I’ll publish right or wrong! Fools are my theme let satire be my song.” – Lord Byron
 ICLA – International Comparative Literature Association
 Rabindranath referred to Comparative Literature as Vishva Sahitya
 Magna Carta – a character of demands presented to John, King of England (1166-1216)
 Maximalism – disorganized, lengthy and highly detailed writing
 Untouchable – first novel of Mulk Raj Anand
 Orientalism – book by Edward Said
 Sir Philip Sydney called a poet “Maker”, “Prophet”, and “Creator”
 Comedy of Menace is associated with Harold Pinter
 R.K. Narayan – Waiting for Mahatma
 Mulk Raj Anand – The Sword and the Sickle
 Raja Rao – The Cat and Shakespeare
 Anita Desai – Cry, the Peacock
 Australian poet – Judith Wright
 Lyric – poem which has emotion, feeling, and thought
 Homology – a correspondence between two or more structures
 Fourth World literature – the works of native people living in a land that has been taken over
by non-natives
 David Crystal – a political analyst
 The Waste Land – 1922
 Lake Poets – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Southey
 French Revolution influenced the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge
 Late Romances of Shakespeare – Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest
 Tabula Rasa – blank mind – a supposed condition that empiricists have attributed tot her
human mind before ideas have been imprinted on it by the reaction of the senses to the
external world of objects.
 Jane Austen parodied Gothic Romance in her Northanger Abbey
 Single indivisible sound – Phoneme
 There are 8 diphthongs in English language
 Shelley was expelled from Oxford due to the publication of The Necessity of Atheism
 Ben Jonson was NOT a University Wit
 University Wits – John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nash
 Egotistical Sublime – acc to Keats, artists from fixed opinions suffered from this, obsessing
over singular truths to the point that they were unable to produce characters and storylines
that convincingly diverged from their personal worldviews.
 Practical Criticism – I.A. Richards
 Shutting down of theatres by the Puritans – 1642
 First authoritative dictionary of English language – Dr. Samuel Johnson
 Terza Rima – Ode to the West Wind
 Man and Superman – G.B. Shaw
 Celts were originally inhabitants of Wales
 The Indian Juggler – essay by William Hazlitt
 The earliest English version of Bible printed with verse division – The Geneva Bible
 Modern English emerged from East Midland dialect
 Glorious Revolution in England – 1688
 Hamlet is modelled on Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy
 “And miles to go before I sleep” – famous refrain of Robert Frost’s Stopping on the Woods
on a Snowy Evening
 Realism – Honore de Balzac; Stendhal; Emile Zola; Gustav Flaubert
 Osorio (later edited and retitled as Remorse by Coleridge after 6 years) – Tragedy by S.T.
Coleridge
 The Cenci: A Tragedy in 5 Acts – Verse drama by P.B. Shelley
 Pippa Passes – Verse drama by Robert Browning
 William Jones postulated a common ancestry of Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek which promoted
the development of Comparative Linguistics
 First English translation of Bhagavad Gita was by Charles Wilkins – Introduction was by
Warren Hastings
 Compilers of the first folio of Shakespeare plays – Heminges and Condell
 English East India Company was established in 1600
 Thomas Malory is believed to have written a series of Arthurian romances from prison
 John Dryden accused John Donne of perplexing the “the mind of fair sex with nice
speculations of philosophy”
 10 Things I Hate About You – based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew
 The composition of Kubla Khan was interrupted by the arrival of “the person of Porlock”.
 Samson Agonistes – tragic closet drama by Milton
 Lycidas – death of Edward King – pastoral elegy by Milton
 Adonais – elegy by P.B. Shelley – on the death of Keats
 Thyrsis – elegy by Matthew Arnold on the death of Arthur Hallam
 Tottel’s Miscellany – first anthology of English poetry
 Robert Burns – well known for his Scottish songs
 Charles Lamb adapted the name ‘Elia’ as his pseudonym
 New Criticism – “words on page”, “close reading”, “irony”, “tension”, “paradox”.
 Pamela – subtitle is Virtue Rewarded – novel by Samuel Richardson – epistolary novel – one
of the first true English novel
 Wordsworth dedicated his Prelude to Coleridge
 Dr. Samuel Johnson on Gray’s Elegy: “I rejoice to concur with common reader… the
churchyard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to
which every bosom returns to echo”.
 Tess of d’Urbervilles – subtitle is A Pure Woman.
 Comparative Literature ‘methodology triad” – Historiography, Genology and Thematology
 Lord of the Flies – allegorical novel by William Golding – a group of boys stranded on a
deserted island
 Group of British playwrights and novelists from the 1950s – Angry Youngman – Kitchen Sink
Realism – John Osborne, John Braine, and Allan Sillitoe
 Nissim Ezekiel – through a dazzling experimentation, he has played a crucial role in
transforming Indian English poetry from its traditional mode to a modernist orientation
 Secondary Imagination – Poets, Scientists, Artists, Historians…
 Intentional Fallacy – the accessibility and desirability of the author’s intention in his/her
work
 1984 – George Orwell – characters of Winston Smith, Julia, Emmanuel Goldstein, O’Brien
 “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” – Leo Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina
 A good deal of cultural studies is centered on questions of field work.
 Dream allegory – middle English texts –
i. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Gawain Poet
ii. Piers Plowman by William Langland
iii. Pearl by Gawain Poet
 Venus and Adonis – Poem by Shakespeare
 A Lover’s Complaint – Poem by Shakespeare
 The Shepherd’s Calendar – Poem by Spenser
 Her and Leander – Poem by Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
 Thomas Wyatt – first English poet to introduce the divisions of quatrains in a sonnet
 • Euphuism: - an artificial, highly elaborate way of writing or speaking – John Lyly
 The Comedy of Errors – Mistaken identity involving twins as the central plot
 “A goodly apple rotten at the heart.” – Shylock, Merchant of Venice.
 “To take arms against a sea of troubles” – Hamlet; Act III, Scene I (mixed metaphor)
 Plot = soul of tragedy (Aristotle)
 The Duchess of Malfi – Revenge tragedy by John Webster
 Malapropism – the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar sounding one, often with an
amusing effect.

Eg.: - Dance of a flamingo instead of a flamenco

The term derives from Richard Sheridan’s character of Mrs. Malaprop inn his play The Rivals
(1775)

 Shakespeare collaborated with John Fletcher to write The Noble Kinsmen

 Mosca – character from Ben Jonson’s Volpone
 John Dryden adapted Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra for his All For Love
 Features of Restoration Comedy – Witty exchange of words, focus on courtship, and sexual
intrigue.
 A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning – John Donne compares lovers to “shift twin
compasses”.
 Darkness visible – this oxymoron was used by Milton in his Paradise Lost to describe Hell
 Lycidas – pastoral elegy by Milton
 Aphra Behn – first English woman to make a living from writing
 Samuel Pepys – famous diarist (1637-1703)
 She Stoops to Conquer – Anti Sentimental Comedy – play by Oliver Goldsmith
 Metrical scheme of Paradise Lost – Heroic verse
 T.S. Eliot – “dissociation of sensibility” – the separation of thought from feeling
 Absalom and Achitophel – John Dryden – political allegory
 Areopagatica – John Milton – freedom of speech and expression
 Thomas Hobb’s Leviathan – political philosophy
 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray – character of Becky Sharp
 John Ruskin criticized the Romantic Poets by using the term ‘Pathetic Fallacy’
 Thomas Hardy’s novels are set in semi-fictional region of Wessex
 Charles Lamb is most commonly associated with personal essays
 Dover Beach by Mathew Arnolds ends with “ignorant armies clash by night”
 Epiphany – a moment of sudden realization and revelation in Literature; refers generally to a
visionary moment when a character has a sudden insight or realization that changes their
understanding of themselves or their comprehension of the world. The term has a more
specialized sense as a literary device distinct to modernist fiction
 Goethe – concept of World Literature
 Practitioners of archetypal criticism focus on the narrative element of myths and symbols
 James Joyce was NOT a member of Bloomsbury Group
 Ezra Pound’s famous slogan “Make It New” represents modernist aesthetics
 Kitchen sink realism – British cultural movement developed in the late 50s and early 60s
whose protagonists usually could be described as “angry young man” who were disillusioned
with modern society – John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.
 Protagonist of J.D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye – Holden Caulfield.
 The Golden Gate – novel by Vikram Seth – poetic form of sonnet
 Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy – 19th century Indo-Chinese opium trade
 The Great Indian Novel – modern retelling of Mahabharata by Shashi Tharoor
 Nikolai Gogol – the namesake of the titular character in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
 Final Solutions – play by Mahesh Dattani- dilemma of Indian authors who chose to write in
English
 The Country Without a Post Office – 1997 collection of poems written by the Kashmiri-
American poet Agha Shahid Ali.
 Jayanta Mahapatra – first Indian poet to win the Sahitya Akademi award for English poetry.
 A.K. Ramanujan – author of the essay titled Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?
 Rasas in Bharata’s Natyashastra: - Karuna, Sringara, Bibhatsya, Hasya, Veer, Adbhut,
Roudra, and Bhayanak
 Phoneme- Smallest element in a language. The smallest unit of speech that distinguishes one
word from another.
 Morpheme – smallest meaningful lexical item in a language.
 Lexeme – a basic lexical unit of a language consisting of one word or several words, the
elements of which do not separately convey the meaning of a whole
 Allomorph – any of two or more actual representations of a morpheme
 Allophone – a set of multiple possible spoken sounds – or phones – or signs used to
pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language.
 sprung rhythm – first syllable is stressed and followed by a number of unstressed ones – The
Windhover by G.M. Hopkins.
 Minute on Indian Education – Thomas Babington Macaulay – sought to establish the need to
impart English education to Indian natives – 1835
 Bimonthly journal published by Sahitya Akademi – Indian Literature.
 Current Poet Laureate of England – Simon Armitage (2019– )

Dame Carol Ann Duffy (2009–2019)

 Train to Pakistan – 1956 – Khushwant Singh

 Pen name of George Orwell – Erik Arthur Blair
 Tamasha – Maharashtra
 Bhavai – Rajasthan
 Theyyam – Kerala
 Jatra – West Bengal
 22 languages are there in VIII Schedule of Constitution of India.
 Matthew Arnold critiqued the Philistines in his Dover Beach
 Philistine – a person who is hostile or indifferent to the culture and the arts.
 Indian aesthetics – Vakrokti was proposed by Kuntaka.
 Homophone – each of two or more words having the same pronunciation but different
meanings, origins or spellings. For example: - “new” and “knew”
 Homonym – each of two or more words having the same spelling or pronunciation but
different meanings or origins. For example: - Quail (bird) and Quail (to cringe)
 First complete English language Bible – 1382 – John Wycliff
  Bhagavad Gita – Mahabharata’s Bhishma Parva
 Girish Karnad – the play Haryavardana, Tughlaq


Monologue Soliloquy
Literary device used in drama. Presented by a single character to
Characterized by a long speech delivered by himself/herself as an expression of his/her
or presented by an individual character inner thoughts to himself/herself

 Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature – Sharankumar Limbale

Semantics Pragmatics
Study of words and their meanings Concerns context
Focuses mainly on the literal meaning Focuses on the intended, contextual, and
inferred meanings as well

 Mulk Raj Anand – Coolie – 1936

 Essay of Dramatick Poesie – John Dryden – attempts to justify drama as a legitimate form of
poetry comparable to the epic as well as defends English drama against that of the ancients
and the French
 Ode – Pindaric, Horatian, and irregular
 Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography – The Story of My Experminets with Truth
 Father of English essays – Francis Bacon
 Feminism – Bell Hooks
 Marxism – Frederic Jameson
 Keats –
i. Ode on a Grecian Urn
ii. La Belle Dame Sans Merci
iii. Ode to a Nightingale
 Hamlet -> Othello -> King Lear -> Macbeth (chronologically)
 “Hegemony” is problematized by Antonio Gramsci
 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe suggested the idea of World Literature
 Quibble – a slight objection or criticism about trivial matters
 Pantomime – a theatrical entertainment, mainly for children, which involves music, topical
jokes, and slapstick comedy and is based on a fairy tale or nursery story (British)
 Political pamphlet Annihilation of Caste by B.R. Ambedkar
 Italy witnessed the beginning of Renaissance
 G. Sankara Kurup won the first Jnanpith Award in 1965.
 Silent Spring by Rachel Carson – responsible for launching ecocriticism
 Prima Facie – based on first impression
 Carte Blanche – complete freedom to act as one wishes
 Vox Populi – the opinions or beliefs of majority
 Faux pas – a significant or embarrassing error or mistake
 Carnivalesque – theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin – a literary mode that subverts and liberates
the assumption of the dominant style or atmosphere through humour and chaos. It
 originated as “carnival” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics and was
further developed in Rabelais and His World.
 Polyphony – feature of narrative which includes a diversity of simultaneous point of view and
voices that Caryl Emerson describes it as “a decentered authorial stance that grants validity
to all voices”. The concept was introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin, using a metaphor based on
the musical term polyphony. Bakhtin’s primary example of polyphony was Dostoyevsky’s
prose.
 Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida does not contain any Shakespearean sonnet.
 Surrealism – influenced by French Surrealist painting, that uses surprising images and
transitions to play off of formal expectations and depict the unconscious rather than the
conscious mind. The term “Surrealism” is said to have been coined by Guillaume Apollinaire.
 Lake Poets – Lived in the Lake district of England at the beginning of the 19th century. As a
group, they followed NO single school of thought or literary practice then known. Eg.: -
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey.
 Bloomsbury Group – circle of artists, writers, and intellectuals including Virginia Woolf, John
Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey. They lived, worked or studied together
near Bloomsbury, London. They had an influence on innovative, literary, artistic and
intellectual developments in the two decades after the first World War. The members of this
group opposed the narrow post-Victorian restrictions in both the arts and morality.
 Cavalier Poets – school of English poets of the 17th Century that came from the classes that
supported King Charles I during the English Civil War (1642-1651), Charles, a connoisseur of
fine art, supported poets who created the art he craved. Eg.: - Robert Herrick, Richard
Lovelace, Thomas Carew and Sir John Suckling
 The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 – a failed assassination attempt against King James I by a group
of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby who sought to restore the Catholic
monarchy to England after decades of persecution against the Catholics.
 Manto was charged for obscenity for writing Thanda Gosht.
 Logos – Rhetorical or persuasive appeal to the audience’s logic and rationality. Logos is when
we use cold arguments – like data, statistics or common sense – to convince people of
something, rather than trying to appeal to an audience’s emotion.
E.g.: - “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man.”
 Pathos – the means of persuasion that appeals to the emotions of an audience
 Ethos – the character or emotions of a speaker or writer that are expressed in attempt to
persuade an audience
E.g.: - “As a doctor I am qualified to tell you that this course of treatment will likely generate
best results.”
 Kairos is a rhetorical strategy that considers the timeliness of an argument or message, and
its place in the zeitgeist.
 Zeitgeist (noun) – the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the
ideas and beliefs of the time.
 Natyashastra - Earliest systematic work on Indian dramaturgy.
 Typical Petrarchan sonnet – unrequited love
 Negative capability – John Keats
 First English tragedy – Gorboduc by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton
 A Defence of Poetry – essay by Shelley
 • Aspect of the Novel – E.M. Forster about cause and effect as viral to the plot.
 Dylan Thomas described his poems as “statements on the way to the grave”
 Dr. Samuel Johnson praised John Dryden as the Father of English Criticism.
 Longinus – On The Sublime – Epistolary format
 “I will work harder” – Boxer, Animal Farm
 Noam Chomsky – distinction between Competence and Performance
 Agatha Christie’s pseudonym – Mary Westmacott
 Psycholinguistics – the discipline that investigates and describes the psychological processes
that make it possible for humans to master and use language.
 Neurolinguistics – study of how language is represented in the brain: how and where brains
store our knowledge of the language that we speak, understand, read and write, what
happens in our brains as we acquire that knowledge, and what happens as we use it in our
everyday lives.
 Assonance – Vowel rhyming syllable
 Consonance – Consonant rhyming syllable
 Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett – Picaresque novel
 Bildungsroman (German term) – novel of formation and education.
 The Palace of Illusions – mythological novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni – retelling of the
Mahabharata through the point of view of Draupadi
 Henrik Ibsen – Father of Modern drama
 Lycidas of Milton – elegy in memory of Edward King
 Dryden – “I admire Ben Jonson but I love Shakespeare.”
 Deuteragonist – second actor- introduced by Aeschylus – while the third actor was
introduced by Sophocles
 Leader of the Imagist Movement – Ezra Pound
 Thula – ancient poetic genre in Germanic literature. These are metrical name lists or lists of
poetic synonyms compiled mainly, for oral recitation. The main function of a thula is thought
to be mnemonic. E.g.: -Widsith.
 Flaneur – a man who saunters around observing society
 Teleologist – explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than the
cause by which they arise
 Gender fluid – gender expression… gender identity is not fixed
 Luddite –
1. (historical) a member of any bands of English workers who destroyed machinery,
especially in cotton and woolen mills, that they believed were threatening their jobs
(1811-1816)
2. a person opposed to new technologies or ways of working
 Raconteur – a person who tells anecdotes in a skillful and amusing way
 Mariculture – activity involving food production for human consumption
 Silviculture – practice of controlling growth, composition/structure and quantity of forests to
meet value and needs.
 Pisciculture – the rearing and breeding of fish under controlled condition
 Sericulture – silk farming… cultivation of silkworms to produce silk
 Epigraph – a short quotation or saying at the beginning of a book to suggest its theme
 Epigram –
1. A pithy saying or remark expressing an idea in a clever and amusing way
2. a strong, satirical poem with a witty ending
 Epilogue – a section at the end of a book that serves as a comment on or a conclusion to
what has happened.
 Loquacious (adj) – talkative/tending to talk to a great deal
 Boz is the pen name of Charles Dickens
 Poet as “a man speaking to men” – Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
 Imagist Movement – an effort to free poetry from excessive romanticism and facile
emotionalism, replacing it with a precision and clarity of imagery. Leader: - Ezra Pound.
 Elizabethan Revenge tragedies: -
1. Rape, adultery and murder are prominent features.
2. Structure of world seems mysterious and it results into a lot of cynicism.
3. These plays underline the limitations of criminal vision
 Pathetic Fallacy – some human emotions or feelings being ascribed to an inanimate object
 Jacobean Drama: -
1. Audience expected intense evil and intrigue
2. Fear of female agency breaded the need for prurient entertainment
3. Necessity and fear became motivating force in the new world
 Formalist critics –
1. Everything outside the text is irrelevant for them because it is not static
2. They seek a static unchanging universal truth within the text
3. They look only at the text and how well it is dressed
 Distant reading – a controversial alternative way of analysing literature created by scholar
Franco Moretti.
 Badal Sircar – associated with Third Theatre.
 Partition – poem about 1947 Partition of India by W.H. Auden
 Synesthesia – a rhetorical figure in which a sense of impression is rendered by words that
normally describe another.
 Epiphany (literary) – a sudden, and often, spiritual awakening
 Duality of language – any utterance in a language consists of an arrangement of the
phonemes of that language. At the same time any utterance in the language consists of an
arrangement of the morphemes of that language
 Boys and Girls – short story by Alice Munro.
 The Nutcracker and Mouse King – short story by E.T.A. Hoffman
 Dr. Marigold – short story by Charles Dickens
 The Mirror and the Lamb – book on critical and poetic theory by M.H. Abrams
 The Wheel of Fire – book on modern Shakespearean criticism by G. Wilson Knight
 Black Skins, White Masks – an autoethnographic book by Frantz Fanon
 Rabelais and His World – a book on literary and cultural studies by Mikhail Bakhtin. It is
considered to be a classic of Renaissance studies.
 “I came, I saw, I conquered.” – Julius Caesar (anaphora)
 “The power of the crown was mortally weakened” or “Lend me your ear” (Mark Antony’s
speech in Julius Caesar) – metonymy
 “Love is an ideal thing. Marriage is a real thing” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (antithesis)
 Parabasis – a direct address to the audience. It is sung or chanted by the chorus on behalf of
the author.
 A subtype of the Modern Problem play is the s the discussion play, in which the social issue is
not incorporated into a plot but expounded in the give and take of a sustained debate among
the characters.
 Doggerel – a comic verse composed in irregular rhythm.
 Julia Kristeva – first to coin the term “intertextuality” in an attempt to synthesise Saussure’s
semiotics with Bakhtin’s dialogism.
 Intertextuality – James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses bears an intertextual relationship to
Homer’s Ulysses.
 My Name is Red – novel by 2006 Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk.
 Eclogue – a short poem, especially a pastoral dialogue.
 Shloka – four verses of S syllable each OR two half-verses with 16 syllables each
 Harvest – Play by Manjula Padmanabhan
 Stream of Consciousness – first coined by the psychologist William James in The Principles of
Psychology (1896)
 Agra Bazar – play by Habib Tanvir
 Charandas Chor – play by Habib Tanvir, which itself is an adaptation of a classic Rajasthani
folktale by Vijaydan Detha
 The Day of the Jackal – political thriller novel by Frederick Forsyth
 Karukku – (Tamil) the first autobiography of a Dalit woman writer, Bama
 Bama – Dalit Tamil writer – Sangati; Karukku; Vanmam; Kusumbukkaram.
 Cracking India – novel by Bapsi Sidhwa – film adaptation is Deepa Mehta’s 1947 Earth
 Sons and Lovers – (characters) Gertrude Coppard, Mrs. Radford, Walter Morel, Paul Morel,
Baxter Dawes
 India’s 16th Century mystic poet, Mirabai – most bhajans are dedicated to Krishna
 “The most heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together” – Dr. Samuel Johnson about
Metaphysical Poets.
 In Memory of W.B. Yeats – an elegy by W.H. Auden
 Kumarasambhava – epic poem by Kalidasa
 Orlando Furioso – Italian epic poem by Ludovico Ariosto (1516)
 On His Blindness – poem by John Milton
 “They also serve who only stand and wait.” – last lines from Milton’s On His Blindness
 Dr. Samuel Johnson – A Dictionary of the English Language – 1755
 “Here lies one whose name is writ in water” – John Keats’ epitaph
 “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” – Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In
Memoriam
 Tamburlaine the Great (1590) – Christopher Marlowe’s first play
 William Makepeace Thackeray – born on 1811 in Calcutta
 The Life of Charlotte Bronte – posthumous biography of Charlotte Bronte by the English
author Elizabeth Gaskell.
 Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw – deals with phonetics and pronunciations.
 “Poetry is a speaking picture” – Philip Sydney, An Apology for Poetry.
 J.C. Ransom coined the term New Criticism after the publication of his 1941 book The New
Criticism
 Dialogic Criticism – Mikhail Bakhtin
 Defamiliarization – coined in 1917 by Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky in his essay Art as
Device
 Hegemony – used in political analysis for the first time by Antonio Gramsci
 Collective Unconscious – term used by Carl Jung
 “Poetry is the criticism of life” – Matthew Arnold
 “A novel by Tolstoy is not a work but a piece of work” – Matthew Arnolds.
 Voices in the City – Epic on Calcutta – Anita Desai
 The Dunciad – mock-heroic narrative poem – Alexander Pope – it celebrates a goddess
Dulness and the progress of her chosen agents as they bring decay, imbecility, and
tastelessness to the Kingdom of Great Britain.
 A Defence of Poesy (or An Apology for Poetry) – by Philip Sydney – a response to Stephen
Gosson’s School of Abuse
 Pablo Neruda – poet – Chile
 The Pickwick Papers – first novel of Charles Dickens
 Something to Answer For – first to win the Booker Prize – P.H. Newby – 1969
 Mulk Raj Anand’ Untouchables’ Foreword was written by E.M. Forster
 Elain Showalter begins her essay Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness by discussing a
dialogue between Carolyn Heilbrun and Cathryn Stimpson
 The Waste Land – cruelest month is April.
 Aspects of the Novel – E.M. Forster – a series of lectures
 The Lay of the Last Minstrel – narrative poem ion six cantos by Walter Scott
 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf – play by Edward Albee
 The Defence of Lucknow – poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
 Sylvia Plath married Ted Hughes
 Archetypal Criticism – Northrop Frye
 Biographia Literaria – 1817
 When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d – Walt Whitman’s elegy to President Abraham
Lincoln – later editions of his Leaves of Grass
 The first great, published metaphysical poem – Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle
about the death of ideal love
 The Dublin George Bernard Shaw admired the drama of Henrik Ibsen
 Moby Dick opens with the lines “Call me Ishmael”
 The Hungry Generation – Bengali literary movement launched by what is known today as
Hungryalist Quartet – Shakti Chattopadhyay, Malay Roy Chowdhury, Samir Roy Chowdhury
and Debi Roy – during the 1960s
 Bodily humours suggested by the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Hippocrates is
often credited with developing the theory of four humours –
1. Blood
2. Yellow Bile
3. Black Bile
4. Phlegm
 For a body to be healthy the four humours should be balanced in amount
and strength, according to Hippocratic medicine.
 “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money” – Samuel Johnson
 “To err is human, to forgive divine” – Alexander Pope
 “A little learning is a democratic thing” – Alexander Pope
 “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” – Alexander Pope
 The Charge of the Light Brigade – poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
 The Lotos-Eaters – poem by Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (he was the Poet Laureate
during much of Queen Victoria’s reign)
 The Shoemaker’s Holiday – play by Thomas Decker
 The Poetaster – Elizabethan satire by Ben Jonson – it was one element in the back-and-forth
exchange between Jonson and his rivals John Marston and Thomas Dekker in the so-called
Poetomachia or War of the Theatres of 1599-1601
 the main theme of Webster’s plays – preoccupation with Death
 Leviathan – book on political philosophy by Thomas Hobbes
 The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come – 1678 Christian allegory
written by John Bunyan
 Hudibras – satirical poem written in a mock-heroic style on Puritanism by Samuel Butler
 John Evelyn’s – describes major social events of his time
 Samuel Pepys’ Diary – confessional
 The Faerie Queene – Epic poem by Edmund Spenser
 The Anatomy of Melancholy – treatise by Robert Burton
 Cavalier Poets – Herrick, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace
 An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland by Andrew Marvell is addressed to
Cromwell
 Comus – masque written in honour of chastity by John Milton
 The Compleat Angler – book by Izaak Walton – a celebration of the art and spirit of fishing in
prose and verse
 Aureng-zebe – 1675 Restoration drama by John Dryden – based loosely on the figure of
Aurangzeb, then then-reigning Mughal Emperor in India – last drama that Dryden wrote in
rhymed verse
 To Celia – song by Ben Jonson – “drink to me only with thine eyes”
 Objective Correlative – coined by American poet and painter Washington Allston and
introduced by T.S. Eliot in Hamlet and His Problem – “the only way of expressing emotion is
by finding an ‘objective correlative’ – in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of
events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion”, and which will evoke the
same emotion from the reader.
 Willing Suspension of Disbelief – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria.
 Sound and Fury – name taken from a monologue of Macbeth
 Mark Twain is the pen name of Samuel Clemens
 “Give me the extension and motion and I will construct the universe.” – Rene Descartes.
 The Jungle – novel by Upton Sinclair
 The Birthday Party – play by Harold Pinter
 “The Language of age is never the language of poetry.” – Thomas Gray
 Goblin Market – poem by Christina Rossetti
 Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot – satire in poetic form by Alexander Pope
 John Keats regarded William Shakespeare as the prime example of negative capability.
 Shock is the name of Belinda’s lapdog in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock
 Practitioner of New Criticism – T.S. Eliot; John Crowe Ransom; I.A. Richards
 Train to Pakistan, Tamas, The Shadow Lines - all partition novels
 Touchstone method of criticism – suggested by Matthew Arnold
 In Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Crites opens the discussion on behalf of the Ancients.
 “All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.” – Ralph Ellison
 Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule – book by Mohandas Karamnchand Gandhi
 Godaan – novel by Premchand
 A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields – collection of essays and sketches by Toru Dutt
 The Old Playhouse – poem by Kamala Das
 An Anthem of Love – poem by Sarojini Naidu
 Without Place – poem by Meena Alexander
 D.H. Lawrence uses the expression “one bright book of life” to describe the novel
 Sexual Politics – book by Kate Millett
 The term Metaphysical Poets was first used by Samuel Johnson
 Ralph Roister Doister – play by Nicholas Udall – considered as the first English Comedy
 G.M. Trevelyan – a historian
 Mac Flecknoe – Verse by John Dryden. It is a direct attack on Thomas Shadwell, another
prominent poet of the time
 Playboy of the Western World – John Millington Synge
 Man and Superman; Back to Methuselah; Saint Joan – plays by G.B. Shaw
 She Stoops to Conquer – play by Oliver Goldsmith. Comedy of Manners
 The Way of the World – play by William Congreve. Comedy of Manners.
 The Importance of Being Earnest – play by Oscar Wilde. Comedy of Manners
 Pygmalion – play by G.B. Shaw. Comedy of Manners
 Gorboduc was written in blank verse
 An Essay on Man – poem by Alexander Pope
 An Essay on Criticism- poem by Alexander Pope. “To err is human; to forgive, divine”. “A little
learning is a dang’rous thing”. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”.
 First English Press was set up by William Caxton in 1476
 Central protagonist and the narrator in Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope – Rama
 Ghasiram Kotwal; Kanyadan; Shantata Court Chaluy Aahe (Sahitya Akademi award); Gidadhe
– plays by Vijay Tendulkar
 Tomb of Sand – Hindi-language novel by Geetanjali Shree
 Savitri – epic in blank verse by Sri Aurobindo
 Intertextuality – Julia Kristeva
 Nouveau novel – New Novel
 New Criticism – the concern of literary criticism with the detailed consideration of the work
itself.
 New Historicism – a literary text is situated within the totality of the institutions and social
practices of a particular time and of place
 New Formalism – A positive programme which has undertaken to connect formal aspects of
literature to the historical, political and worldly concerns
 New Humanism – It argues for a return to humanistic education
 Discourse Analysis –
 Translation Studies – introduced by James Holmes.
 “Poetry is what gets lost in transklation.” – aphorism by Robert Frost#
 Comparative Literature: Indian Dimensions – Swapan Majumder
 The Task of the Translator – essay by Walter Benjamin
 Poetry as a “speaking picture” – Sir Philip Sydney in An Apology for Poetry
 Gynocriticism – Elaine Showalter – A Literature of their Own
 “Poetry is primarily an auditory system of symbols2 – Edward Sapir – Language: An
Introduction to the study of Speech
 Verbose – using or expressed in more words than are needed
 George Bernard Shaw – won both Oscar and Noble Prize
 Yoknapatawapha County – fictional county of William Faulkner
 Chronicles of Barsetshire – Anthony Trollope
 Middlemarch – fictional town of George Eliot
 Fallible narrator or Unreliable Narrator
 Pale Fire – Novel by Vladimir Nabokov
 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead – existential tragicomedy by Tom Stoppard
 Under the Greenwood Tree – Novel by Thomas Hardy
 Cakes and Ale, or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard – novel by W. Somerset Maugham
 Senecan Tragedy – originally written to be recited rather than acted but the English
Playwrights thought that these tragedies were intended for stage so they provided the
model for an organized five-act play with a complex plot and elaborately formal style of
dialogue
 Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida – no sonnet
 Joseph Conrad’s real name was J.T.K. Korzeniowski
 Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury; Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth – written by
Francis Meres. It is the first critical account of the poems and early plays of William
Shakespeare.
 A Group of Noble Dames – Collection of woman-centric stories by Thomas Hardy
 Futility – poem by Wilfred Owen
 The Man He Killed – war poem by Thomas Hardy
 Ultima Ratio Regum – war poem by Stephen Spender
 The Old Familiar Faces – poem by Charles Lamb
 An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization – book by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
 Thula – metrical name list. Old English Poetry
 Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – the section The Nun’s Priest Tale is a beast fable
 Thomas Wyatt introduced Ottava rima in English poetry and Byron applied it in his Don Juan.
 The Book of Philip Sparrow – poem by John Skelton
 Anglo-Saxon Attitudes – satirical novel by Angus Wilson
 Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial – book by Thomas Browne
 Anatomie of the World – book by John Donne – a poetic and philosophical exploration of the
imperfections an failings of the world
 The Compleat Angler, Or The Contemplative Man’s Recreation – book by Izaak Walton.
Celebration of art and fishing in prose and verse
 The Unfortunate Traveller; or The Life of Jack Wilton – novel by Thomas Nashe – published
in 1594 and set during the reign of Henry VIII of England
 Eulogy
 To Penshurst – eulogy to the family seat of Philip Sidney written by Ben Jonson
 Francis Bacon in his prose works developed the inductive method of reasoning
 Canterbury Tales – The Parson’s Tale is written in prose
 “Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging” – Ben Jonson
 The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella – parody and imitation of the ideas of
Cervantes’ Don Quixote written by Charlotte Lennox
 Richard Steele edited The Spectator, The Rambler, The Tatler and London Gazette
 The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society – philosophical poem by Oliver Goldsmith – in heroic
verse of an Augustan style iot discusses thye causesa of happiness and unhappiness of the
nations
 The Travels of Dean Mahomet – first book in English in India – published in 1794
 Citizen of the World – book by Oliver Goldsmith – features a series of travel letters of
Chinese philosopher Lien Chi Altangi
 The Man of Feeling – sentimental novel by Henry Mackenzie – series of moral vignettes
 “The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with
that stormy sisterhood” – Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte
 The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling – comic novel by Henry Fielding – Bildungsroman and
picaresque novel – ST Coleridge argued that it has “three most perfect plots ever planned”
alongside Oedipus Tyrannus and The Alchemist.
 The Life and Opinions of Tristram, Shandy, Gentleman – novel by Laurence Stern, inspired by
Don Quixote – digression, double entendre and graphic devices – many of his similes are
reminiscent of the works of metaphysical poets – focuses on the problem of language has
constant regard for John Locke’s theories in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding –
Arthur Schopenhauer called Tristram Shandy as one of the “four immortal romances” –
precursor to the stream of consciousness narrative technique
 A Sentimental Journey – novel by Laurence Stern – possibly an epilogue to Tristram Shandy –
answer to Tobias Smollett’s decidedly unsentimental Travels Through France and Italy.
 Adventures of David Simple – book by Sarah Fielding – didactic and portrays with comic
sensibility the hazards of British social life for the moral development of women.
 Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams – novel by William Godwin
 Tristram Shandy – deliberately disrupts narrative coherence to explore the relativity of time
in human experience
 St. Leon – novel by William Godwin
 Mandeville – novel by William Godwin
 Deloraine – novel by William Godwin
 Thomas Carlyle’s works dealt with ‘Condition of England’ in his prose works – “Condition of
England Question” in Chartism.
 Henry Newman – priest and poet who helped to originate and lead the Oxford Movement
 Pearl – alliterative verse
 Faerie Queene – character of Gloriana represented Queen Elizabeth I
 Francis Quarles – seventeenth century poet noted for Emblem Poetry
 Immediate cause of WW1 – Assassination of the Archduke, Franz Ferdinand of Austria
 An Unsocial Socialist – George Bernard Shaw
 Wordsworth praised Robert Burns as a labouring class writer “who walked in glory and in
joy/ following his plough along the mountain side”
 George Eliot’s Felix Holt – set during the time of First Reform Act in England
 Inscape – the unique inner nature of a person or object as shown in the work of art,
especially a poem.
 Sthayi-bhava develops into Rasa
 John Henry Newman – oxford movement – collected lectures Idea Of A University – writer of
the popular hymn Lead, Kindly Light
 Esemplastic imagination – ST Coleridge
