Quiz Bowl: British Literature Terms & Definitions

Beowulf

A hero from Geatland rescues King Hrothgar and the Danes from Grendel and his mother at Herot in Zealand with sword Hrunting; fire-breathing dragon later kills hero.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Canterbury Tales (a pilgrimage to St. Thomas a Becket shrine in Canterbury; pilgrims tell tales to pass the time)

Thomas Malory

Le Morte D'Arthur - Arthurian Legend - Camelot: King Arthur becomes king by pulling sword Excaliber from stone, dies on island of Avalon, Queen Guinevere [Arthur's wife], Lancelot [great knight, loved Guinevere], Percival [commits many gaucheries when first at Arthur's court but trained as knight and granted sight of Holy Grail], Tristan and Iseult [Cornish Tristan goes to Ireland to get princess Iseult for uncle King Mark but they drink potion that makes them love each other forever], Sir Gawain [beheads Green Night and allows retaliation, tempted to commit adultery with Lord Bertilak's wife], Igraine [Arthur's mom], Uther Pendragon [Arthur's father], Merlin [magician, tutors Arthur], Mordred [treacherous nephew, battles Arthur at Camlan], Sir Galahad [leads a quest for the Holy Grail]).

John Donne

Metaphysical poet; "Death, Be Not Proud," "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," "The Flea"

John Milton

Paradise Lost : Raphael tells Adam about Satan's revolt and expulsion; Satan as serpent tempts Eve to eat forbidden fruit and Adam does also; Sin and Death enter world; Michael leads them out of Garden of Eden

Christopher Marlowe

Dr. Faustus (Germany: scholar Faustus sells soul to devil),

Jew of Malta (Barabas looses fortune and wants revenge on invading Turks; murders daughter and whole nunnery with poisoned porridge; dies in bubbling cauldron)

Ben Johnson

The Alchemist (Subtle and Doll Common set up shop in Lovewit's house while he is gone; they trick Face and Sir Epicure Mammon but not Surly)

John Locke

Essay Concerning Human Understanding (views mind at birth as tabula rasa with no innate ideas; led to growth of empiricism); Second Treatise on Government (social contract theory)

Samuel Pepys

Secret Diary

John Bunyan

Pilgrims Progress (Christian leaves City of Destruction through Wicket- gate led by Evangelist; goes through Slough of Despond, Cross, Holy Sepulcher, Hill Difficulty, House Beautiful, Valley of Humiliation, Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity [with a fair that sells all empty things], plain of Ease, Hill of Lucre [free silver mine], Doubting Castle, Delectable Mountains, Enchanted Ground, Beulah, River of Death, and Celestial City; meets Mr. Worldly-Wiseman, Mr. Good-will, friend Apollyon, Hopeful, Faithful, and Giant Despair; in Part II wife Christiana, kids, Mercy, and Mr. Great-heart go to Celestial City)

Alexander Pope

Rape of the Lock (epic treatment of real incident in which Lord Petre cut a lock of Arabella Fermor's hair, leading to family feud; heroine Belinda); Essay on Man

Jonathan Swift

Modest Proposal (satirically proposes raising Irish children for food), Gulliver's Travels (ship physician Lemuel Gulliver visits Lilliput [tiny people], Brobdingnag [giants], Laputa [scientists], and Houyhnhnmland [horses, masters of Yahoo people])

Daniel Defoe

Robinson Crusoe (Robinson Crusoe [based on real-life Alexander Selkirk] is shipwrecked and lives 24 years on island near Orinoco River; saves native man Friday from cannibals and becomes his friend; recaptures ship and returns to England)

William Blake

Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (contrast each other; The Lamb vs. The Tiger [Tiger Tiger Burning bright], The Divien Image vs. The Human Abstract, etc.), Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (doctrine of Contraries), Milton (John Milton returns from Heaven to correct misinterpretations of his work)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Rime of the Ancient Mariner (seaman does penance for killing friendly albatross in Antarctic), Kubla Khan (Mongol emperor Kubla Khan; written during opium dream), Christabel (witch Lady Geraldine casts spell over Christabel and her father Sir Leoline, despite bard Bracy's revelatory dream)

William Wordsworth

Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (ivory-covered ruin on river Wye in Monmouthshire), Ode: Intimations of Immortality (Platonic "recollection"; celebrates child), nature, nature, nature!

George Gordan Lord Byron

Don Juan (Don Juan sent from Spain by mom Donna Inez; shipwrecks in Greece but nursed by Haidee; sold as slave to Gulbeyas of Constantinople but loves Dudu; attracts Empress Catherine in Russia; sent to England)

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Prometheus Unbound (son Demogorgon drives Jupiter from throne; Hercules rescues Prometheus, who is reunited with wife Asia), Ode to the West Wind; To a Skylark; Adonais (to Keats), The Cloud; Ozymandias (vanity of tyrants); The Sensitive Plant

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (Germany: student Frankenstein creates nameless monster by galvanism which is shunned by all and turns to evil; destroys Frankenstein at the North Pole)

John Keats

Eve of St. Agnes (Madeline glimpses future husband Porphyro on Eve of St. Agnes), Ode on a Grecian Urn; Ode to a Nightingale; Endymion (shepherd on Mount Latmus loved by moon goddess Selene); Hyperion (Titan sun god Hyperion overthrown by Apollo); La Belle Dame snas merci, Isabella or The Pot of Basil (Isabella plants head of beloved Lorenzo in pot of basil after her brothers killed him); On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Robert Burns

Poet who wrote in Scottish dialect; The Cotter's Saturday Night; The Holy Fair (sisters Fun, Usupersitition, and Hypocrisy visit Holy Fair at Mauchline); Tam O'Shanter (witches pursue Tam but cannot cross river Doon; Cutty Sark cuts off horse's tail); Auld Lang Syne

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Charge of the Light Brigade (Crimean War, Battle of Balaklava October 25 1854: 600 die following orders they know to be bad); In Memoriam (elegy for friend Arthur Hallam); Idylls of the King (King Arthur; The Coming of Arthur, Gareth and Lynette, Geraint and Enid, Merlin and Vivien, Lancelot and Elaine, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and Etarre, The Last Tournament, Guinievere, The Passing of Arthur); The Lotus-Eaters; The Lady of Shalott (Camelot: Lady of Shalott cannot engage real world directly); Crossing the Bar (putting out to sea compared to death)

Robert Browning

Love Among the Ruins (written about wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning); My Last Duchess (Dramatic monologue: duke of Ferrara murdered wife for not appreciating honor of marrying him),

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sonnets from the Portuguese (expression of love for husband Robert Browning)

Matthew Arnold

Essays in Criticism, Dover Beach, Culture and Anarchy, The Scholar-Gipsy

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Sense and Sensibility; Persuasion; Northanger Abbey; Mansfield Park

Emma

Jane Austen: (Emma Woodhouse interferes in love life of Harriet Smith, encouraging her to take Mr. Elton rather than Robert Martin; also interferes with Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill; eventually she marries George Knightley)

Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen: (Elinor Dashwood bears desertion by Edward Ferrars, who was secretly engaged to Lucy Steele and disinherited by mom, with dignity; Lucy turns to

Edward's brother Robert when he gets inheritance and Edward proposes to Elinor;

sister Marianne gets very upset about desertion by John Willoughby but finally marries Col. Brandon)

Persuasion

Jane Austen: (Anne Elliott breaks engagement with Captain Wentworth but then they renew the engagement)

Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen: (Mrs. Allen and Catherine Morland visit Bath; Catherine loves clergyman Henry Tilney but fears his home after reading Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho; they marry)

Mansfield Park

Jane Austen: (Fanny Price raised with Uncle Thomas Bertram's 4 kids; Fanny loves cousin Edmund who loves Mary Crawford; Mary's brother Henry loves Maria Bertgram then Fanny Price then Maria again; Edmund finally marries Fanny)

Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist; David Copperfield; Great Expectations; A Christmas Carol; Barnaby Rudge; A Tale of Two Cities; The Pickwick Papers; Nicholas Nickleby

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens: (Oliver born in workhouse and asked for more gruel; apprenticed by Mr. Bumble to undertaker Mr. Sowerberry; gang under Fagin including Jack Dawkins the Artful Dodger, Nancy, Bill Sikes, and Charley Bates tries to make Oliver a thief; half-brother Monks tries to corrupt him to get all of father's property; adopted by Mr. Brownlow and cared for by Mrs. Maylie and foster child Rose [his aunt])

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens: (London: David Copperfield sent to Mr. Creakle's school by cruel stepfather Mr. Murdstone; idolizes classmate Steerforth; works in warehouse and lives with Mr. Micawber; runs away to great-aunt Betsey Trotwood; later lives with lawyer Mr. Wickfield; marries Dora Spenlow but she dies; unctuous Uriah Heep foiled; David marries Wickfield's daughter Agnes; other characters include reliable Traddles, "ever willin'" Barkis, and eccentric Peggotty family)

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens: (Philip Pirrip [Pip] raised by blacksmith Joe Gargery; meets convict Magwitch; visits Miss Havisham, who had been left at the altar years before, and her niece Estella; goes to London due to patron Magwitch, who is Estella's father; Estella's husband Bentley Drummle dies)

Barnaby Rudge

Charles Dickens: (Barnaby participates in anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 and sentenced to death but reprieved by Gabriel Varden; carries raven Grip with him; father murdered employer Mr. Haredale)

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens: (miser Ebinezer Scrooge, partner of deceased Marley, converted by visions of past, present, and future Christmases; sees the Cratchits, including Tiny Tim and Bob, Scrooge's secretary)

A Tale of Two Cities

(Dr. Alexander Manette, unjustly imprisoned in Bastille, is released and waits for rescuers in attic of Defarge's wine shop, and then returns to London with daughter Lucie; St. Evremonde's nephew Charles Darnay is accused of treason but defense counsel Stryver points out resemblance to Sydney Carton; Darnay marries Lucie and later returns to Paris to save a servant but is arrested during French Revolution; Sydney takes Charles's place on the guillotine because he loves Lucie)

The Pickwick Papers

Charles Dickens under the pseudonym Boz (illustrated by Seymour; letters about club founded by Samuel Pickwick; "Pickwickian sense" means insults that aren't really meant; others include servant Sam Weller, landlady Mrs. Bardell, lawyers Dodson, Fogg, and Serjeant Buzfuz, and actor Alfred Jingle)

Nicholas Nickleby

Charles Dickens: (to support mom and sister Nicholas Nickleby works as usher for cruel Wackford Squeers, in Mr. Crummles theater, and Cheeryble counting house; sister Kate worked for milliner Mantalini; Uncle Ralph encourages Mulberry Hawk to seduce Kate; Gride loves Madeline Bray; Ralph learns mistreated Smike is his son and commits suicide; others include Ralph's clerk Newman Noggs)

Anne Bronte

Agnes Gray (ill-treated governess Agnes Gray marries curate Mr. Weston), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights (Ellis Bell pseudonym; Mr. Earnshaw raises waif Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights; his daughter Catherine likes him while his son Hindley hates him; Heathcliff leaves for 3 years when Catherine says marrying him would degrade her; Catherine marries Edgar Linton; years later Hindley invites polished Heathcliff back and he elopes with Edgar's sister; Catherine dies in childbirth; widower Heathcliff makes Catherine's daughter marry his sickly son Linton; Heathcliff dies and Cathy devotes herself to cousin Hareton, Hindley's son)

Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre (governess Jane Eyre eventually marries employer Mr. Rochester, who is married to an insane woman), Shirley (Yorkshire wool mill owner Robert Gerand Moore deals with worker strife; heroine Shirley Keeldar based on Emily Bronte)

George Eliot

Real name: Mary Ann Evans Cross; Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (Dorothea Brooke marries Rev. Mr. Casaubon, a scholar, who disillusions her and dies; she marries his cousin Will Ladislaw, forfeiting Casaubon's estate; Dr. Lydgate marries selfish Rosamond Vincy and loses his earlier medical ideals)

Lewis Carroll

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Alice, Mad Hatter, Ugly Duchess, Mock Turtle, Queen of Hearts, Cheshire Cat, Hatter, March Hare, Dormouse; illustrated by Sir John Tenniel), Through the Looking Glass (includes the poem Jabberwocky; Alice goes into mirror; world is reversed; becomes white pawn in chess game with land divided by brooks and hedges; meets Humpty Dumpty, Lion, Unicor, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and White Knight)

Thomas Hardy

Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Tess Durbeyfield takes service with Mrs. D'Urberville, and has child with her son Alec; Tess becomes dairymaid and marries Angel Clare, but he leaves her because of her past; she returns to Tess but stabs him when Angel returns and is hanged);

Jude the Obscure (stonemason Jude Fawley marries Arabella who deserts him and their son; cousin Sue Bridehead marries teacher Phillotson but flees to Jude; Jude and Sue don't marry but have kids, who are killed by Arabella's son Father Time)

Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island (Jim Hawkins finds treasure map from sailor at mom's inn and goes on schooner Hispaniola with Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelaney to find it; Jim thwarts mutiny of Long John Silver; marooned sailor Ben Gunn helps them get treasure; blind villain Pew)

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Dr. Jekyll creates drug that transforms him into evil alter ego Mr. Hyde and eventually commits murder; kills self; narrated by Mr. Utterson)

Rudyard Kipling

The Jungle Book (Mowgli raised by wolves in Indian jungle), The White Man's Burden, The Man Who Would Be King (white trader Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan take control of Kafristan but Daniel is killed and Peachey is tortured)

Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness (1890 Belgian Congo, Congo River: narrator Marlowe searches jungle for powerful trader Kurtz; tells of exploitation of natives; movie version: Apocalypse Now),

Lord Jim (Jim abandons sinking Indian ship Patna, but the 800 Muslims are rescued; he

lives in African trading post Patusan but his white friends betray him and murder Chief Doramin's son Dain Waris, and he is executed)

HG Wells

The War of the Worlds (Martians invade England but are killed by bacteria; 1938 radio broadcast in US caused panic), The Time Machine (inventor visits stages in degeneration of life; ape-like Morlocks eat aristocratic Eloi; eventually only crabs remain),

The Invisible Man

George Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion (phonetics Prof. Henry Higgins teaches Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle to speak like a lady; she loves him); movie version: My Fair Lady

Bram Stoker

(Irish) Dracula (diary tells of Count Dracula, who feeds on blood of young women, who then

become vampires; Dutch scientist Van Helsing kills the vampire; set in London and Transylvania)

Oscar Wilde

Irish writer; The Importance of Being Earnest (Jack Worthing loves Gwendolen Fairfax but her mom Lady Bracknell objects until she learns he is actually Ernest John Moncrieff, brother of Algernon Moncrieff; Jack had created imaginary younger brother Ernest for Cecily Cardew under tutelage of Miss Prism, who marries Algernon),

The Picture of Dorian Gray (Basil Hallward paints portrait of Dorian Gray, which deteriorates instead of Dorian as he joins Lord Henry Wotton and sins; Dorian kills Hallward, stabs picture and dies)

Aldous Huxley

Brave New World (632 After Ford: John is a savage from NM who believes in moral choice and commits suicide in new world of collectivism and passivity; title from the Tempest)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A Study in Scarlett, The Hound of the Baskervilles (English moors: Sherlock Holmes and assistant Dr. Watson investigate death of Sir Charles Baskerville, involving an apparition and a family curse)

Agatha Christie

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None (detective Hercule Peroit)

George Orwell

1984 (two rebel against Big Brother [Stalin]), Animal Farm (parody of Russian Revolution; Jones' farm controlled by pig Napoleon)

EM Forster

A Room with a View (Mr. Emerson offers Lucy Honeychurch, who is visiting Italy, his hotel room since it has a view; Lucy is engaged to Cecil Vyse but overcomes prejudice and marries George Emerson)

A Passage to India (Adela Quested, visiting India with mom Mrs. Moore to see fiance. City Magistrate Ronny Heaslop, accuses Dr. Aziz of assaulting her in Marabar Caves; liberal principal Mr. Fielding breaks friendship with Aziz; Adela retracts and Ronny breaks engagement)

DH Lawrence

Sons and Lovers (Paul Morel, son of coal miner and educated Puritan, becomes artist and has affairs with Miriam and Clara Dawes),

Women in Love (sculptor Gudrun Brangwen loves mining industrialist Gerald Crich; her sister Ursula marries school inspector Rupert Birkin; Gerald refuses Birkin's friendship and kills self on Tyrol mountains),

Plumed Serpent (Kate Leslie attends Mexican bullfight; Don Ramon and General Cipriano try to resurrect Aztec religion),

Lady Chatterley's Lover (Constance Chatterley leaves husband Clifford, made impotent by a war wound, for her gameskeeper Mellors; banned as obscene)

James Joyce

Irish writer (Dublin especially); Ulysses (describes June 16, 1904 in the lives of Jewish advertisement canvasser Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus; parallels Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus; Leopold and Stephen experience exile)

Finnegans Wake (presents dreams of the Earwicker family, including Protestant tavern-keeper Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, wife Anna, and kids Isobel, Kevin, and Jerry; divine, heroic, human, and confusion ages),

Dubliners (short stories of middle-class Catholics who have epiphanies, including Clay [Maria goes to family party], The Dead [Irish college teacher Gabriel Conroy and wife Gretta at Christmas dance], and The Sisters [boy confronted with death and learns priest is insane]),

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Stephen Dedalus grows up and leaves Dublin for Paris to become writer)

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own (feminist essay)

W Somerset Maugham

Orphan Philip Carey becomes country doctor and gives up love for waitress Mildred Rogers but is rescued and marries Sally Altheney

Dylan Thomas

(Welsh) - Wrote Villanelles; Eighteen Poems, Do not go gentle into that good night, Fern Hill, Altarwise by owl-light, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Under Milk Wood, Adventures in the Skin Trade

William Golding

Lord of the Flies (British schoolboys crash on uninhabited island; try to form organized society but revert to savagery), The Inheritors, The Spire, The Paper Men, Pincher Martin (shipwrecked man struggles to live on barren rock)

William Butler Yeats

(Obsession with Actress Maud Gonne) The Tower, The Winding Stair, The Second Coming (22 lines from Michael Robartes and the Dancer collection), The Countess Cathleen (Cathleen sells soul to devil for souls of starving Irish; accompanied by nurse Oona and poet Aleel), The Herne's Egg (two Irish kings steal eggs of the sacred Great Herne and rape its priestess), Purgatory (old man and son see his mom's ghost; man kills son), A Vision

TS Eliot

(American-British) The Waste Land (5 sections explore psychic stages of a soul in despair; waste land contrasted with regeneration sources from the past; Medieval waste land ruler Fisher King cured by purifying knight),

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (shy Prufrock becomes introspective at a drawing room party)

JRR Tolkien

Lord of the Rings (including The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, sequels to The Hobbit; Third Age of Middle Earth: Lord of Darkness Sauron lost a magical ring which gives absolute power but corrupts its users; Bilbo Baggins recovered the ring and his nephew Frodo becomes heir; hobbits form a Fellowship to burn the ring at Mount Doom; Frodo and servant Sam Gamgee try to complete mission; Third Age gives way to Dominion of Man; sorcerer Gandolph)

CS Lewis

The Screwtape Letters (devil Screwtape advises nephew Wormwood how to deal with humans), Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, The Chronicles of Narnia (The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Horse and His Boy, The Magician's Nephew, The Last Battle; lion Aslan and 4 children who enter Narnia through a wardrobe save the country from a witch)

James M. Barrie

Peter Pan (Peter Pan, searching for lost shadow with lost children, saves Wendy, Michael, and John Darling, from pirates under Capt. Hook; Indian princess Tiger Lily and fairy Tinker Bell protect kids) , What Every Woman Knows, The Admiral Crichton, Little Minister, Little Brutus

Samuel Beckett

(Irish, drama)

Waiting for Godot (tramps Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot to come but he never does; Pozzo mistreats his servant Lucky)

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen, 1813; regarded as the first "chic-lit" novel. The novel encompasses strong female protagonists and their journeys to find love, in a world centered around marriage. Austen provides a spot on view of propriety in society as well as well-rounded, believable characters.

Comedy of Manners; the story follows the Main Character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, moral rightness, education, and marriage in her aristocratic society of early 19th century England

Themes of moral blindness and self-knowledge. Pride and Prejudice cloud moral judgement

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Collin's is a static character. Mr. Collins, Mr. Bennet's heir and proposed suitor of the Bennet sisters, is fully described in the story but does not change during the course of the plot. He remains unctuous and odious to Elizabeth. Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth are both round and dynamic characters who change during the course of the plot. Charles Bingley is also a dynamic character because he changes his mind about Jane when he is swayed by Mr. Darcy and then returns to his original admiration of her.