Literature

English was not spoken in England until 449, when three Germanic tribes from Denmark, the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, invaded Britain. The Angles, who settled along the east coast of north and central England, developed literate culture and gave their name to the country (Angle-land, England). The language of these tribes, Anglo-Saxon or Old English, … Read more

The author of the novels Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987) Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford.

“Laugh, and the world laughs with you,/ Weep, and you weep alone” are the opening lines of the poem “Solitude” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1855-1919).

Derived from the German words Doppel (double) and Ganger (walker), a doppelganger is the personification of another side of a character’s personality. The apparition often represents a demonic side and may herald oncoming death.

Dorothy Parker, known for her sharp wit, wrote the famous couplet, “Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses” in the poem “News Item” in 1926.

In The Winter’s Tale, Act III, Scene 3. Antigonus, a lord of Sicilia, runs for his life after hearing “A savage clamor!” He doesn’t make it; his death is reported later in the scene.

The Castle of Otranto was inhabited by Manfred, the Prince of Otranto, with his family, in the 1764 Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole.

In act 1, scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s father says she “hath not seen the change of fourteen years”, making her thirteen.

The Italian religious epic Jerusalem Delivered, written in 1575 by Torquato Tasso (1544-95), concerns the First Crusade, in which European Christians fought to regain the Holy Land from the Muslims. The First Crusade lasted from 1095 to 1099.

The title of Francis Bacon’s 1620 philosophical treatise Novum Organum means literally “new instrument.” It alludes to Aristotle’s treatise on logic and the theory of science, commonly known as the Organon.

The golliwog, a type of doll known as “the blackest gnome,” was invented by Florence K. Upton in The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwog” (1895). More golliwog tales followed until 1909.

Virginia Woolf drowned herself at the River Ouse near her home at Rodmell, Sussex, in 1941, following a bout with mental illness.

The Oberammergau Passion Play is said to have originated in 1633, when the people of this village in Upper Bavaria vowed to stage it in order to be rescued from the plague. The play depicting Christ’s passion is performed every tenth year. It is said to have originated in 1633, when the people of this … Read more

In Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel of the same name, it is the catch that prevents a U.S. Air Force pilot from asking to be grounded on the basis of insanity. A man “would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If … Read more

Jeeves’s boss was Bertie Wooster, a young man-about-town in P. G. Wodehouse’s stories beginning with My Man Jeeves (1919). Jeeves was his valet.

These lines from Section 27, Stanza 4 of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam lament the loss of Tennyson’s close friend Arthur Hallam, who died at twenty-two.

In the Paradiso (1321), the highest of Dante’s heavens is the Empyrean, the tenth heaven. It contains God’s Court, seen as a many-petaled rose.

In Green Mansions (1904) by William H. Hudson, Rima the Bird Girl is able to understand the language spoken by the creatures who live in the South American forests.

In the Italian poem Orlando Furioso by Ariosto (1532), the knight Orlando goes crazy with rage when he learns that Angelica, the woman he loves, has married someone else. Orlando runs around naked, destroying everything in sight. By the poem’s end, he is cured.

The Fugitives and Agrarians were a group of writers associated with Vanderbilt University in Nashville in the 1920s and 1930s. The most famous of the group were Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson.

The first line of Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel is “Call me Smitty.” Through his narrator, Word Smith, Roth not only spoofs Melville, but Hawthorne, Twain, Hemingway, and all other writers who pursued the Great American Novel.

In the 1928 essay “a room of one’s own”, it refers to the space a woman needs to write fiction. Specifically, Woolf says that a woman needs two things to be able to write: “money and a room of her own.” The essay was drawn from two papers Woolf gave at the Arts Society at … Read more

Agamemnon, commander-in-chief of the Greek armies at Troy, is forced to return a captive woman named Chryseis in order to stop a pestilence sent by the god Apollo at the beginning of Homer’s The Iliad. Agamemnon demands Achilles’ captive Briseis in exchange. Achilles, in anger, refuses to fight for the Greeks any longer.

William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1920) contains the line, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”.

Henry Fielding summoned poet laureate Colley Cibber to court in 1740 for the murder of the English language. Fielding issued the summons under the pseudonym “Captain Hercules Vinegar.”

This quote is in none of Shakespeare’s plays. In Hamlet, Act V, Scene 3, Hamlet says, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.” For some reason the incorrect version is the one most people remember.

There were two sets of twins: Bert and Nan and their younger siblings, Freddie and Flossie. The series about them began with The Bobbsey Twins (1904) by Laura Lee Hope.

Taken from the Greek word semeion, or “sign,” the term “semiotics” had its origins early in the twentieth century, when French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and American philosopher C. S. Peirce called for a new science of signs. Saussure called the discipline “semiology”; Peirce called it “semiotic.” Since then, semiotics as the study of cultural … Read more

Twelfth-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam wrote “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou” in his Rubaiyat, translated into English by Edward Fitz-Gerald in 1859.

The full title of Oliver Twist is Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy’s Progress.

Ernest Hemingway won one Pulitzer prize, for The Old Man and the Sea (1952).

Milton’s masque Comus was first performed on Michaelmas Night (September 29), 1634, at Ludlow Castle to celebrate the Earl of Bridgewater’s becoming Lord President of Wales and the Marches. The Earl’s children enacted the roles of the Lady and her two brothers in the play.

“II Penseroso,” written in 1632 is Milton’s companion work to “L’Allegro”.

In art, gusto is the excitement of the imagination that gives full expression to the dynamic character of an object. According to William Hazlitt (1778-1830) in his essay “On Gusto,” gusto is “power or passion defining any object.” Gusto unites the senses as “the impression made on one sense excites by affinity those of another.” … Read more

Ohio-born writer Earl Derr Biggers invented the portly Honolulu detective Charlie Chan. The first book about Chan was The House Without a Key (1925).

In The Iliad (ninth century B.C.), Zeus is Helen’s father?

The Babylonian epic The Epic of Gilgamesh dates back to about 2000 B.c. It concerns the adventures of the hero Gilgamesh and the “wild man” Enkidu, and Gilgamesh’s grief over Enkidu’s death.

The unhappy Werther’s beloved in Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther is Lotte.

Maud Gonne did not marry William Butler Yeats, the poet who made the actress famous through his poems of unrequited love. In 1903, after knowing Yeats for fourteen years, Gonne married Major John MacBride, an Irish revolutionary characterized by Yeats as a “drunken, vainglorious lout.” MacBride was executed for his role in the Easter Rebellion … Read more

Popularized in the 1960s by Roland Barthes and others, narratology is the study of narrative, linguistic or otherwise: myths, legends, novels, comic strips, stained-glass windows, psychological case studies. It employs methods drawn from structuralism, the study of the relations and functions of the internal elements of cultural phenomena.

Longinus’s critical treatise On the Sublime was not published in Europe until 1554. The first-century essay was then translated into several languages and gained wide prominence, eventually influencing the poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The young man Goethe is the protagonist of two novels, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-96) and Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, or The Renunciants (1829).

Captain Ahab’s first mate in Melville’s MobyDick is Starbuck, the second is Stubb, the third is Flask.

The earliest use of flashback in Western literature was in Homer’s Odyssey. Most of Odysseus’s adventures are recounted in a flashback set within a larger narrative frame. Odysseus tells his story at the court of the Phaeacians.

The title of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel “gone with the wind”comes from a poem by Ernest Dowson, a poet of the 1890s, called “Non Sum Qualis Eram,” or “Cynara.”

The archetypal villain Simon Legree first appeared in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) as the brutal degenerate who flogs Tom to death.

Daniel Defoe based The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719-20) on the real-life story of Alexander Selkirk (1676-1721), a Scottish sailor who survived for more than four years on the desert island of Juan Fernandez off the Chilean coast. He became a celebrity after his rescue and homecoming in 1709.

Although some biographers believe the story of Oz’s naming to be as fanciful as the tales themselves, author L. Frank Baum claimed that he was inspired by a file cabinet marked O–Z. Other suggested derivations include: a variation on Uz, Job’s house; a variation of children’s oh’s and ah’s; and a variation of Boz, the … Read more

“Udolpho” in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho was the castle of the evil Montoni in the Italian Apennines, and site of many scary events.

In the Old English poem Beowulf (eighth cent.), Beowulf came from The Geats, a Scandinavian people.

Euphemia Chalmers (“Effie”) Gray divorced English art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) on grounds of impotence. Gray obtained an annulment in 1854 after seven years of an unconsummated marriage. She went on to marry painter John Everett Millais, a favorite of Ruskin’s.

The novel of attempted suicide and recovery The Bell Jail was written by Sylvia Plath, but was first published under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas in 1963. It did not appear under the author’s name until 1966.

John Donne (1572?-1631) wrote, “Go and catch a falling star,/Get with child a mandrake root”, in the opening lines to the poem, “Song,” which was published posthumously, in 1633.

Ralph was the embattled elected leader in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The subtitle of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) was A Romance.

In the 1970s, the author of Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) Julian Barnes wrote the “Edward Pygge” gossip column for the British periodical, The New Review.

Alfonso II, the Duke of Ferrara in the mid-sixteenth century, is the speaker in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”.

The group of writers and thinkers, the Bloomsbury Group, which included Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey, among others, was named for the place where they held their meetings-46 Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury, London.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Water, Water, everywhere/Nor any drop to drink” in his poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). The lines are often misquoted as “and not a drop to drink.”

The transatlantic flier and isolationist won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for his autobiography, The Spirit of St. Louis. The book was made into a movie starring James Stewart in 1957.

Frank Stockton wrote the story “The Lady or the Tiger?” in 1882.

At the end of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819), Washington Irving’s schoolmaster Ichabod Crane disappears after being hit by the Headless Horseman’s “head.”

Considered the oldest full novel in the world, The Tale of Genji was written in Japan toward the start of the eleventh century.

Increase Mather(1639-1723) was the father of Cotton Mather(1663­1728). Both were clergymen, theologians, and prolific writers in Puritan New England.

Philip Freneau (1752-1832), whose poems include “American Liberty” (1775) and “The Indian Burying Ground” (1788), is known as the “poet of the American Revolution”. He was a favorite of Thomas Jeffer­son’s.

William Butler Yeats’ epitaph that he wrote for himself was: “Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!” The epitaph appears on Yeats’s tombstone in Drum-cliff churchyard under a mountain called Ben Bulben in County Sligo, Ireland, just as Yeats wrote in his poem “Under Ben Bulben” (1939).

Bellow’s friend Delmore Schwartz (1913-66), poet, fiction writer, and critic, was the model for Saul Bellow’s hard-drinking poet Von Humboldt Fleisher in the novel Humboldt’s Gift.

Jessica Tandy first played Blanche DuBois in the first production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, opposite Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski.

The title to the drug-induced stream-of-consciousness narrative Naked Lunch means a “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork” and is repulsed by it. The title was suggested to the author William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac.

Kate Chopin was born Kate O’Flaherty (1851-1904) in St. Louis, Missouri, to an Irish father and French mother. Her married name came from her husband, Oscar Chopin. Her fiction includes the novel The Awakening (1899).

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were three Jews who were thrown into a fiery furnace by order of King Nebuchadnezzar in chapter 3 of the Old Testament Book of Daniel, as punishment for refusing to worship a golden idol. God saved them, however, allowing them to walk through the fire unharmed.

The Society of Arts and Sciences gave the O. Henry Prize three times to Stephen Vincent Benet, for “An End to Dreams” (1932), “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1937), and “Freedom’s a Hard-Bought Thing” (1940). Benet was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for John Brown’s Body in 1929.

Sinbad the Sailor was an Iraqi, a merchant shipwrecked after setting sail from Basra, now Iraq. The story of his seven voyages is told in The Thousand and One Nights.

The Latin translation of the Bible was written mostly by St. Jerome in 382-384 A.D. The term comes from Latin editio vulgata, “spread among the people.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky translated Eugenie Grandet (1833) into Russian. Dostoyevsky’s 1844 translation was his first publication.

The first published work of the poet and novelist Alice Walker was a book of poetry: Once: Poems (1968). She followed up soon after, however, with a novel: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970).

Thirty-three of these poems in honor of various Greek gods survive. Written in imitation of Homer, they date from the eighth century B.C. to the fifth or fourth century B.C.

Osric, a foppish courtier, is the referee in the duel between Hamlet and Laertes in Act 5 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Dr. Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s play Dr. Faustus (c. 1588-92), on conjuring up Helen of Troy.

The Charles Dickens novel Nicholas Nickleby (1838-390) exposed the “ragged schools” and helped get them abolished.

The wits who traded barbs at New York’s Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s included: Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Frank Case, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Neysa McMein, Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, Robert E. Sherwood, and Alexander Woollcott. The Algonquin Hotel still stands. It was recently sold to a group of … Read more

The Dublin theater known as the Abbey Theatre dedicated to presenting Irish drama opened in 1904. Its directors included William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory. Destroyed by fire in 1951, the theater reopened in 1966.

In 1789, The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown was published. This first American novel, written by the son of a Boston clockmaker, concerned seduction, incest, rape, and suicide.

Henry Fielding (1707-54) called the novel a “comic-epic poem in prose”, in the preface to his 1742 novel Joseph Andrews.

The epigraph for Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is “So foul a sky clears not without a storm” (Shakespeare).

Shamela’s last name in Henry Fielding’s parody Shamela was also Andrews. The name was used a third time in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), the story of Pamela’s brother, Joseph.

Hesiod, the reputed author of the Theogony, the oldest surviving account of the origin of the Greek gods, was a poor Boeotian farmer of the eighth century B.C. His Works and Days gives advice on fanning and moral life.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Hell is—other people” in his existential play No Exit (1944).

Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) is subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero”.