Joseph Andrews

Text:
Bibliomania edition

Quotes:

• "A comic romance is a comic epic poem in prose." (H. Fielding, from the "Preface" to Joseph Andrews)
  
• "Life everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous." (ibid.)
• "The Monstrous is much easier to paint than describe, and the Ridiculous to describe than to paint." (ibid.)
• "It hath been thought a vast commendation of a painter to say his figures seem to breathe; but surely it is a much greater and nobler applause, that they appear to think." (ibid.)
• "To discover any one to be the exact reverse of what he affects, is more surprising, and consequently more ridiculous, than to find him a little deficient in the quality he desires the reputation of." (ibid.) --> showing hypocrisy in action is better for achieving the effect of the ridiculous than revealing somebody's vanity.
• "Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults, of our pity; but affectation appears to me the only true source of the Ridiculous." (ibid.)
  

Contexts:

• a wiki article
• dmoz links on Fielding

Terms:
comic epic in prose; picaresque; Bildungsroman; novel of the road; intrusive narrator; digressions; the ridiculous; burlesque.

Pamela

Samuel Richardson, Pamela or Virtue Rewarded

Text:
The Project Gutenberg text

Context:
Pamela wiki article
Richardson links at the IPL
A Uni. of Michigan article

Terms:
epistolary novel; conduct book

Gulliver's Travels

Text:
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver or Gulliver's Travels (Part IV)

Quotes:
"Nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison." (part II)
"In reality all things imaginable are but Nouns." (part III)
"My principal Design was to Inform, and not to amuse thee." (part IV)

(for other quotes from the Travels see here)


Contexts:

• A wiki bio of Jonathan Swift
• Cummings's study guide of Gulliver
• Cummings's study guide of the "Modest Proposal"
  
• The rise of the novel form -- a wiki article

Terms:

• Liliput, Man-Mountain, Brobdingnag, Laputa, Yahoo, Houyhnhnm

• political satire; verbal irony; verisimilitude

Rape of the Lock

Text:

The Rape of the Lock (with notes by Cummings)

Quotes:

• "A little learning is a dangerous thing" (from the Essay on Criticism)
• "Those rules of old discovered, not devised, /Are Nature still, but Nature methodized" (ibid.)
• "A perfect judge will read each work of wit / With the same spirit that its author writ" (ibid.)
  
• "To err is human, to forgive, divine" (ibid.)
  
• "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread" (ibid.)
• "The proper study of mankind is man" (from the Essay on Man)
• "Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, / A being darkly wise, and rudely great..." (ibid.)
  

Contexts:

• RotL study guide by Cummings
• RotL study guide @ SparkNotes
  
• RotL article on Wikipedia
• Alexander Pope article on Wikipedia
• Pope on CHEAL
  

Terms:
mock-heroic; heroic couplet; epigrammatic style; hyperbole; juxtaposition; satire; Augustan; classicism; the Age of Reason; Enlightenment;

Paradise Lost

Texts:

• Book IV

• Book IX

Quotes:

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
[...] Sing, Heav'nly Muse... [Book i. Lines 1-6]

***

[...] what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That, to the height of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men. [Book i, I.22-26]

***

Yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible. [Book i. Line 62]

***

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. [Book i. Line 261]

***

Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven. [Book iv. Line 73]

***

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost.
Evil, be thou my good. [Book iv. Line 108]

***

Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe
That all was lost. [Book ix. Line 782]

Contexts:

• Arnie Sanders' summary of PL: Books I and II; Books IV, IX and XII

• SparkNotes on PL
• PL study guide by Cummings
• PL study guide at Bibliomania
  

• A good introduction to PL

• Norton Anthology overview of PL

• PL on Wikipedia
  

• John Milton on Luminarium

• Andrew Marvell's poem as a preface to PL
  

• Major events in the 17th century
• Historical background: age of Milton and Marvell (at Bibliomania)
  

Terms:

epic; epic hero; in medias res; ab ovo; epic (extended) simile; soliloquy; flash-forward (prolepsis); flashback (analepsis); focalization (point of view); blank verse;

hubris; prelapsarian; felix culpa;

Civil War; Commonwealth; Puritans; Roundheads; Cavaliers; Restoration, Great Fire of London.

Metaphysical Poetry

Texts:

• Grierson's take on Metaphysicals

• John Donne

• George Herbert

• Henry Vaughan

• Andrew Marvell

• Ben Jonson

Listen to John Donne's “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”

Quotations:

• Dull, sublunary lovers' love... (from “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”)

• Our two souls therefore, which are one, [...] / Like gold to aery thinnes beat. (from “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”)

• As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, / To taste whole joys. (from “To His Mistress Going to Bed”)

• Busy old fool, unruly sun... (from “The Sun Rising”)

• Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; (from “Sonnet 6”)

• Batter my heart, three-personed God; (from “Sonnet 10”)

• Gather ye rosebuds while ye may... (from Robert Herrick's “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”)

• I saw eternity the other night / Like a great ring of pure and endless light... (from Henry Vaughan's “The World”)

• Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime. (from “To His Coy Mistress”)

• But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near; (from “To His Coy Mistress”)

• Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. […] the essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.
  T.S. Eliot “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921)

• The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
  Samuel Johnson “The Life of Cowley” (1779)

Contexts:

• Metaphysical poets at Luminarium

• Early 17^th century poetry at Luminarium

• Grierson's intro to Metaphysicals

• Early 17^th century at Norton Topics Online

• Historical background -- age of Donne (at Bibliomania)
• Historical background -- from Donne to Dryden (at Bibliomania)
  

• John Donne study guide at Bibliomania
  
• On Donne's metaphors in "Valediction...Mourning"

• "Valediction" study guide by Cummings
• "Death be not proud" study guide by Cummings
  
• "To His Coy Mistress" study guide by Cummings
• Marvell study guide @ Bibliomania
  
• "To Celia" study guide by Cummings
  

• 17^th century major events

• Arnie Sanders' take on John Donne and George Herbert

• Google directory on 17^th century British literature

Terms:

Metaphysical ; Cavalier; Sons of Ben; conceit; emblematic conceit; microcosm-macrocosm analogy; paradox; coincidentia oppositorum; oxymoron; juxtaposition; discordia concors; concordia discors; hyperbole; shaped / pattern verse; aubade; pun; wit; masque; mannerism; baroque; counterreformation.

King Lear

Texts:

• Full text of the tragedy, with variations, annotations and commentary.

Quotations:

• Nothing will come of nothing. (Lear I.1.90)

• Thou, Nature, art my goddess. (Edmund I.2.1)

• Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend... (Lear I.4.257)

• How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is / To have a thankless child! (Lear I.4.287-8)

• I am a man / More sinned against than sinning. (Lear III.2.59-60)

• Is man no more than this? (Lear III.4.101)

• As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport. (Gloucester IV, 1.36-7)

• Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep. (Albany IV.2.50-1)

• When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools. (Lear IV.6.182-3)

• The wheel is come full circle. (Edmund V.3.177)

Contexts:

• It's probably best to start looking around here, a Shakespeare vortal

• KL on SparkNotes

• Arnie Sanders' take on KL

• Cummings' KL study guide
  

• How to enjoy King Lear

• A nice introduction to King Lear

• A Joyce Carol Oates essay on KL

• An essay on the role of foreshadowings in the play

• The lunar calendar and temporal references in KL

• A Christian perspective

• Read about the British Theatre at the time of Shakespeare

• A .pdf text by Wheeler on tragedy, with quotes and explanations of basic terms

• A .pdf text by Wheeler comparing tragedy and comedy

• Shakespearean pronouns by Cummings
  

Terms:

tragedy, English Renaissance theatre, Elizabethan tragedy, Jacobean tragedy, tragic curve, peripeteia, tragic hero, fatal flaw, hubris, anagnorisis, catharsis, soliloquy.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Texts:

• Annotated edition by Basia Siedlecki
  
• Midsummer Night's Dream @ the University of Virginia
• MOO edition
  

Quotations:

• "I woo'd thee with my sword, / And won thy love, doing thee injuries: / But I will wed thee in another key..." (Theseus, I.1)
  
• "Fair Hermia, question your desires..." (Theseus, I.1)
• "O teach me how you look..." (Helena, I.1)
  
• "The course of true love never did run smooth..." (Lysander, I.1)
• "Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
  Love can transpose to form and dignity." (Helena, I.1)
• "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
  And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind." (Helena, I.1)
• "Who will not change a raven for a dove?" (Lysander, II.2)
• "What fools these mortals be!" (Puck, III.2)
• "Dark night, that from the eye his function takes, / The ear more quick of apprehension makes, / Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense, / It pays the hearing double recompense." (Hermia, III.2)
  
• "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. " (Bottom's synaesthesia, IV.1)
• Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
  More than cool reason ever comprehends.
  The lunatic, the lover and the poet
  Are of imagination all compact:
  One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
  That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
  Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
  The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
  Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
  And as imagination bodies forth
  The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
  Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
  A local habitation and a name. (Theseus, V.1)
  
  
• If we shadows have offended,
  Think but this, and all is mended,
  That you have but slumber'd here
  While these visions did appear. (Puck, epilogue)

Contexts:

• SparkNotes study guide
• Shakespeare @ eNotes
• Cummings' study guide to MND
• VoS links to Shakespeare resources
• Shakespeare resources

• Jack Lynch's links (scroll down to Shakespeare)

• Shakespeare Study Guides at Bibliomania
  

• Shakespeare Study Guides by Cummings
  

• Everyday expressions taken from Shakespeare (collected by Cummings)
• Shakespeare quotations (by Cummings)
  
• Four phases of Shakespeare's life (by Cummings)
  
• Facts from Shakespeare's life (by Cummings)
• Folios and quartos (by Cummings)
• Shakespeare's manuscripts (by Cummings)
  
• The Globe theatre (by Cummings)
• Special effects in Elizabethan theatre (by Cummings)
• Medicine in Shakespeare (by Cummings)
  

Terms:
masque, masque (2), a play within a play, breaking the frame, mechanicals' (or: craftsmen's) play, apron stage (or T-stage)