English Literature Vocabulary Flashcards from Video Notes

A comprehensive set of vocabulary-style flashcards covering authors, terms, genres, and key concepts from the video notes.

Paradise Lost (author)

John Milton

Macbeth theme

Ambition and its consequences

Pride and Prejudice (author)

Jane Austen

Neo-Classical Age

Age of Reason (Enlightenment), 18th century

The Waste Land (author)

T.S. Eliot

Hamlet (play)

William Shakespeare

Sonnet

A 14-line poem with a fixed rhyme scheme.

Pip (Philip Pirrip)

Protagonist of Great Expectations

Ulysses (author)

James Joyce

Absurd Drama

Genre of Waiting for Godot

The Rape of the Lock (author)

Alexander Pope

Renaissance

Rebirth or revival

The Canterbury Tales (author)

Geoffrey Chaucer

Soliloquy

A speech in which a character speaks to himself.

The Second Coming

W.B. Yeats

Othello (central hero)

Othello – the tragic hero in Othello

Frankenstein Creature name

The Creature (Frankenstein's Monster)

David Copperfield (author)

Charles Dickens

Negative capability

Term introduced by John Keats describing the ability to accept uncertainty and doubt.

Animal Farm theme

Corruption of power

Heart of Darkness (author)

Joseph Conrad

Byronic Hero

A flawed, romantic, and rebellious hero.

The Tempest (author)

William Shakespeare

Dr. Faustus (genre)

Tragedy

Metaphysical period

The Metaphysical Poets (early 17th century)

A Passage to India (author)

E.M. Forster

To the Lighthouse theme

Time, memory, and gender roles

Stream of Consciousness

Term coined by William James to describe the flow of thoughts in the mind.

Jane Eyre (author)

Charlotte Brontë

The Importance of Being Earnest (author)

Oscar Wilde

The Road Not Taken theme

Choices and consequences

Death of a Salesman (author)

Arthur Miller

The Guide (author)

R.K. Narayan

George Eliot (pen name)

Pen name of Mary Ann Evans

The White Tiger (author)

Aravind Adiga

Look Back in Anger (author)

John Osborne

Pygmalion (genre)

Comedy of manners

Romanticism

Literary movement associated with Wordsworth (and others)

The Daffodils (author)

William Wordsworth

King Lear (central character)

King Lear – central character of the play

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (author)

T.S. Eliot

Metaphysical Conceit

An extended metaphor with complex logic.

Dramatic Monologue

A poem with a single speaker addressing a silent listener.

Kubla Khan (poet)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Allegory

A story with symbolic meaning.

The Alchemist (play)

Ben Jonson

The God of Small Things (author)

Arundhati Roy

Things Fall Apart (author)

Chinua Achebe

Duchess of Malfi (author)

John Webster

The Old Man and the Sea theme

Struggle, resilience, and pride

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (author)

William Shakespeare

Chorus in Greek Tragedy

Provide commentary and background

Wuthering Heights (author)

Emily Brontë

Elegy (poem)

A mournful poem; often about loss or death.

Ode to a Nightingale (author)

John Keats

Picaresque novel

A novel about a roguish protagonist.

The Spanish Tragedy (author)

Thomas Kyd

Epistolary novel

A novel written as a series of letters

Brutus (tragic hero)

Brutus – the tragic hero in Julius Caesar

An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (author)

John Dryden

Chaucer narrator

Chaucer himself

Art for Art’s Sake (coinage)

Théophile Gautier

Lord of the Flies (author)

William Golding

The Lottery theme

Blind tradition and violence

Of Studies (author)

Francis Bacon

Because I Could Not Stop for Death (poet)

Emily Dickinson

Oxymoron

Two contradictory terms used together.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (author)

Mohsin Hamid

Leaves of Grass (author)

Walt Whitman

Frame narrative

A story within a story.

Odysseus (Odyssey)

Hero of The Odyssey.

The Bell Jar (author)

Sylvia Plath

Tragedy (definition)

A play dealing with sorrowful events.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles (author)

Thomas Hardy

Bildungsroman

Coming-of-age novel.

My Last Duchess (poet)

Robert Browning

Blank verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Father of English novel

Henry Fielding

Far from the Madding Crowd (author)

Thomas Hardy

A Tale of Two Cities (author)

Charles Dickens

Satire

Use of humor to criticize society.

Winston Smith

Protagonist in 1984.

The Crucible (author)

Arthur Miller

Nick Carraway (narrator)

Narrator in The Great Gatsby.

Fable

A story with a moral, often with animals.

The Cherry Orchard (author)

Anton Chekhov

Antigone (tragic heroine)

Antigone – the tragic heroine.

Mock-epic

A satire that imitates the style of epic poetry.

She Stoops to Conquer (author)

Oliver Goldsmith

Poetic meter

Rhythm pattern in poetry.

A Room of One’s Own (author)

Virginia Woolf

Theatre of the Absurd (coinage)

Term coined by Martin Esslin.

Raskolnikov

Protagonist in Crime and Punishment.

Sonnet sequence

Series of sonnets with a unified theme.

Song of Myself (author)

Walt Whitman

The Hobbit (author)

J.R.R. Tolkien

Intertextuality

The relationship between literary texts.

The Stranger (author)

Albert Camus

Climax

The point of highest tension.

The Kite Runner (author)

Khaled Hosseini