Literature MAIN POINTS

History of English Literature Key Points

• Plato called Archilochus “the prince of Sages”.
• George Eliot’s pen name is Mary Ann Evans.
• Her famous debut novel is Adam Bede.
• A Doll’s House is a three act play in prose by Henrik Ibsen
• A House’s Tale is a novel by Mark Twain.
• His name is Samuel Clemens.
• A Tale of a Tub is a satire by Jonathan Swift. 
• “An Essay on Criticism” (1711) and “Windsor Forest” (1713) are also his works. 
• Arms and the Man is a comedy by George Bernard Shaw.  
• The title was borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin (Arms and the man I Sing). Raina is a character in the play. 
• Shaw’s other works are Candida, You Never Can Tell, The Man of Destiny.
• Between the Acts is the final novel by Virginia Woolf published in 1941 shortly after her suicide.
• George Bernard Shaw’s Candida set in the month of October.
• Confidence is a novel by Henry James in 1879.
• Death in Venice (1912) is a novella by German author Thomas Mann.
• Dream of Four to Middling Women is Samuel Beckett’s first novel.
• It is an autobiographical novel. The main character Belacqua is a writer and teacher in the novel.
• Edgar Allan Poe began his own journal “The Penn”. ( Later it was renamed as “The Stylus”)
• Thomas Hardy first employed the term “Wessex” in Far from the Madding Crowd.
• Franklin Evans or The Inebriate is the only novel ever written by Walt Whitman.
• George Bernard Shaw is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize in literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938).
• Shaw wrote 63 plays. His first novel Immaturity was written in 1879 but last one to be printed in 1931
• His last significant play was In Good King Charles Golden Days.
• George Eliot’s real name was Mary Ann Evans.
• Her works- Adam Bede(1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1866), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch(1871-72), Daniel Doronda (1876).
• Jonathan Swift wrote “Drapier’s Letters” in 1724.
• Gustav Flaubert was a French writer and well known for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857).
• Happy Days is a play in two acts by Samuel Beckett. Winnie, Willie are the characters in the play.
• Henrik Ibsen is often regarded to as “the father of realism” and one of the founders of Modernism in Theatre.
• Love in Several Masques was Henry Fielding’s first play.
• Chaucer lived during the reigns of : Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV
• William Langland was the closest contemporary of Chaucer.
• The Hundred Year's War was fought between England and France.
• The War of Roses figures in the works of Shakespeare.
• John Wycliffe is called 'the morning star of the Reformation'.
• Twenty Nine pilgrims in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were going on the pilgrimage from the Tabard Inn. (30, including Owner of Tabard Inn)
• Three pilgrims in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales represent the military profession.
• Eight ecclesiastical characters are portrayed in the Prologue in Canterbury Tales.
• It is believed that the Host at the Inn was a real man. His name was Harry Bailly.
• The pilgrims were going to Shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
• Three women characters figure in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
• “The Parson's Tale” is in prose in Canterbury Tales.
• “Bath” is the name of the town to which she belonged in Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath”.
• "He was as fresh as the month of May" .This line occurs in the Prologue. This is referred to the Squire.
• Treatise on the Astrolabe is Chaucer's prose work.
• The War of Roses was fought between The House of York and The House of Lancaster
• The followers of Wycliffe were called “the Lollards”
• John Wycliffe was the first to render the Bible into English in 1380.
• The Piers the Plowman is a series of visions seen by its author Langland. ‘The Vision of a 'Field Full of Folks' was the first vision that he saw.
• Occleve in The Governail of Princes wrote a famous poem mourning the death of Chaucer.
• Caxton was the first to set up a printing press in England in 1476.
• William Tyndale’s English New Testament is the earliest version of the Bible.
• Tottle's Miscellany is a famous anthology of 'Songs and Sonnets' by Wyatt and Surrey.
• Amoretti contained 88 sonnets of Spenser.
• Thomas Mores' Utopia was first written in Latin in 1516. It was rendered into English in 1551.
• Roister Doister is believed to be the first regular comedy in English by Nicholas Udall.
• Gorboduc is believed to be the first regular tragedy in English by Sackville and Norton in collaboration.
• Chaucer's Physician in the Doctor of Physique was heavily dependent upon Astrology.
• Spenser described Chaucer as "The Well of English undefiled’.
• Chaucer's pilgrims go on their pilgrimage in the month of April.
• Forest of Arden appears in the play As You Like It by William Shakespeare.
• Globe Theatre was built in 1599.
• Astrophel: A Pastorall Elegy upon the Death of the Most Noble and Valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney is a poem by the English poet Edmund Spenser.
• Spenser’s Epithalamion is a wedding hymn.
• The first tragedy Gorboduc was later entitled as Ferrex and Porrex.
• Sidney's “Apologie for Poetrie” is a reply to Gosson's “School of Abuse”.
• In his Apologie for Poetrie, Sidney defends the Three Dramatic Unities.
• Christopher Marlowe wrote only tragedies. He first used Blank Verse in his Jew of Malta.
• "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships”. This line occurs in Doctor Faustus by Marlowe.
• Ben Jonson used the phrase 'Marlowe's mighty line' for Marlowe's Blank Verse.
• Ruskin said, "Shakespeare has only heroines and no heroes".
• The phrase 'The Mousetrap' used by Shakespeare in Hamlet. It is the play within the play.
• Spenser dedicates the Preface to The Faerie Queene to Sir Walter Raleigh.
• The Faerie Queene is an allegory. In this Queen Elizabeth is allegorized through the character of Gloriana.
• Charles Lamb called Spenser the 'Poets' Poet'.
• Spenser first used the Spenserian stanza in Faerie Queene.
• In the original scheme or plan of the Faerie Queene as designed by Spenser, it was to be completed in Twelve Books. But he could not complete the whole plan. Only six books exist now.
• Twelve Cantos are there in Book I of the Faerie Queene.
• In the Dedicatory Letter, Spenser Says that the real beginning of the allegory in the Faerie Queene is to be found in Book XII.
• The Faerie Queene is basically a moral allegory. Spenser derived this concept of moral allegory from Aristotle.
• Ben Jonson said 'Spenser writ no language.'
• Spenser divided his ‘Shepheardes Calender’ into twelve Ecologues. They represent twelve months of a year.
• Bacon's Essays are modelled on the Essais of Montaigne.
• Bacon is the author of Novum Organum.
• Spenser dedicated his Shepheards Calendar to Sir Philip Sidney.
• Ten Essays were published in Bacon's First Edition of Essays in 1597.
• 58 essays of Bacon were published in his third and last edition of Essays in 1625.
• "......... a mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better , but it embaseth it". These lines occur in Bacon’s “Of Truth”.
• Hamlet said "Frailty thy name is woman” in Hamlet by Shakespeare.
• "Life is a tale, told by an idiot, Full of sound and fury signifying nothing." These lines occur in Macbeth by Shakespeare.
• "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact." These lines occur in A Mid - Summer Night's Dream.
• "Neither a borrower nor a lender be”. This line was told by Polonius in Hamlet.

For MCQS visit: History of English Literature MCQs