RBSE VU English Literature cheat sheet

Meter is the patterned recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables; foot types are iamb (u/), trochee (/u), anapest (uu/), dactyl (/uu), spondee (//), pyrrhic (uu).

Line lengths by feet: monometer 1, dimeter 2, trimeter 3, tetrameter 4, pentameter 5, hexameter 6, heptameter 7, octameter 8.

Rhyme classification: perfect rhyme shares stressed vowel and following sounds; slant rhyme (near/oblique) approximates; eye rhyme matches spelling only (love/prove).

Figures of speech divide into schemes (arrangement: anaphora, chiasmus, zeugma) and tropes (substitution of meaning: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony).

Metonymy substitutes an associated term (crown for monarchy); synecdoche substitutes part for whole or whole for part (hired hands, all hands on deck).

Irony types: verbal (saying opposite of intent), dramatic (audience knows what character does not), situational (outcome reverses expectation), cosmic (fate thwarts human hope).

A metaphor asserts identity (A is B) while a simile compares using like/as; a conceit is an extended, often surprising metaphor sustained across a passage.

Allusion is an implicit reference to another text, person, or event; it differs from quotation, which reproduces wording, and from plagiarism, which conceals borrowing.

Sonnet: 14 lines in iambic pentameter; Petrarchan/Italian divides 8-line octave (abbaabba) plus 6-line sestet; Shakespearean/English is three quatrains plus couplet (abab cdcd efef gg).

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter (Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton); free verse lacks regular meter and rhyme but may use cadence, repetition, and line breaks as structure.

Ode: elevated lyric address; Pindaric ode follows strophe-antistrophe-epode; Horatian ode uses a single repeated stanza; English Romantic odes often use a ten-line stanza.

Elegy laments a death in formal, meditative stanzas; pastoral elegy adds shepherd convention (Milton's Lycidas, Shelley's Adonais); eulogy is prose or verse praise, not necessarily formal.

Villanelle: 19 lines, five tercets plus quatrain, only two rhymes, with line 1 repeated as lines 6, 12, 18 and line 3 as lines 9, 15, 19.

Ballad: narrative quatrains, often alternating tetrameter and trimeter (ballad meter), rhyme abcb, with refrain and abrupt leaps; literary ballads imitate folk originals.

Enjambment runs syntax past the line end; end-stopped lines close with punctuation; caesura is a mid-line pause; these control pace and emphasis in analysis.

Sound devices: alliteration (initial consonants), assonance (vowel rhyme), consonance (final consonants), onomatopoeia (imitative sound), euphony (smooth), cacophony (harsh).

Freytag's pyramid: exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax/turning point, falling action, denouement or catastrophe; five-act Elizabethan plays loosely follow this arc.

Tragedy per Aristotle's Poetics: serious action, magnitude, pity and fear producing catharsis; tragic hero has hamartia (error), often hubris (excess pride), and recognition (anagnorisis).

Soliloquy is spoken alone on stage revealing inner thought; aside is a brief remark to the audience unheard by other characters; monologue is a sustained speech before others.

Dramatic irony arises when the audience's knowledge exceeds a character's; it is structural in Oedipus Rex, where the audience knows the killer's identity before Oedipus does.

Comedy conventions: mistaken identity, disguise, witty repartee, blocking figures (senex), resolution through marriage; romantic comedy moves from confusion to union.

Stage directions and dialogue alone constitute the play text; performance choices (blocking, casting, set) are interpretations, not fixed meanings of the script.

Problem play and thesis play foreground social issues rather than resolving into conventional comedy or tragedy; the well-made play relies on tight exposition, secrets, and a climactic revelation.

Narrative point of view: first person (I), second person (you), third-person limited (one character's interiority), third-person omniscient (access to many minds), objective/dramatic (external report only).

Fiction elements: plot, character (flat/round, static/dynamic), setting, theme, conflict (person vs. self, person, society, nature, fate), and narrative voice.

Showing versus telling: scene dramatizes action and dialogue; summary compresses time; the ratio of scene to summary shapes pace and emphasis.

Stream of consciousness renders continuous thought association; interior monologue is a sustained unspoken utterance; free indirect discourse blends narrator's third person with a character's idiom.

Non-fiction forms: essay (formal or informal), memoir, biography, autobiography, travel writing, criticism, and journalism; the personal essay uses first-person reflection and digression.

An essay's argument relies on claims, evidence (examples, statistics, testimony), and warrants; logical fallacies include ad hominem, straw man, false dilemma, and post hoc.

Frame narrative encloses one story within another (Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Conrad's Heart of Darkness); epistolary fiction is told through letters or documents.

Old English (c. 450-1066): alliterative verse, caesura, kennings; Beowulf survives in a single manuscript; Norman Conquest (1066) shifts literary language to Anglo-Norman French.

Middle English (c. 1100-1500): Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Langland's Piers Plowman, mystery and morality plays; alliterative revival in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Renaissance/Elizabethan (c. 1500-1600): sonnet sequences, blank-verse drama, humanist prose; Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe; King James Bible (1611) shapes English prose rhythm.

Jacobean and Caroline (1603-1649): revenge tragedy, masque, metaphysical poetry (Donne, Herbert, Marvell) with extended conceits; Civil War closes theatres in 1642.

Restoration and Augustan (1660-1745): heroic drama, satire, and neoclassical decorum; Dryden, Pope, Swift; the periodical essay (Tatler, Spectator) develops prose.

Romanticism (c. 1798-1832): Lyrical Ballads (1798) marks the start; imagination, nature, the sublime, common language, and the individual lyric; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats.

Victorian (1832-1901): serialized novels, industrial and imperial themes, doubt and faith; Dickens, Eliot, the Brontës, Tennyson, Browning; dramatic monologue flourishes.

Modernism (c. 1890-1945): fragmentation, allusion, stream of consciousness, impersonality; Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Pound; postmodernism adds metafiction, pastiche, and ironic play.

Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth (tragedies); Twelfth Night, As You Like It (comedies); The Tempest (romance); Sonnets (1609) in Shakespearean form.

Milton: Paradise Lost (1667) in blank verse with epic similes and a grand style; Areopagitica defends free press; Lycidas is a pastoral elegy.

Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales frames pilgrims' tales in a General Prologue with estates satire; Troilus and Criseyde uses rhyme royal.

Romantic pairings: Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) defines poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility; Keats's odes; Shelley's Prometheus Unbound; Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.

Victorian: Dickens's Bleak House (dual narration), Eliot's Middlemarch (web of provincial lives), Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (framed narration), Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Modernist landmarks: Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925), Yeats's later lyrics, Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899).

Postcolonial and later voices: Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), Naipaul, Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), Walcott, Heaney, and Atwood appear on survey reading lists.

Formalist/New Criticism: close reading of the text as autonomous object; intentional fallacy (author's intent irrelevant) and affective fallacy (reader's emotion irrelevant) are its warnings.

Structuralism analyzes underlying systems and binary oppositions (Saussure's signifier/signified); post-structuralism and deconstruction (Derrida) show meaning deferred and hierarchies unstable.

Psychoanalytic criticism applies Freud (unconscious, repression) or Lacan (mirror stage, symbolic order) to desire, symptom, and language in texts.

Marxist criticism reads literature through class, ideology, commodity, and hegemony; it asks whose labor and whose interests the text naturalizes.

Feminist criticism examines gender construction, patriarchy, and the canon; gynocriticism studies women's writing traditions; queer theory interrogates normative categories of sexuality.

Historicism and New Historicism treat texts as embedded in power and discourse, reading them alongside non-literary documents of the period.

Reader-response criticism locates meaning in the transaction between text and reader (Iser's implied reader, Fish's interpretive communities).

Postcolonial criticism examines empire, migration, hybridity, and othering (Said's Orientalism, Spivak's subaltern, Bhabha's mimicry); ecocriticism reads nature and environment.

Rhetorical triangle: ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion), logos (reason); appeals should be identified by textual evidence, not by author reputation alone.

Classical arrangement: exordium, narratio, partitio, confirmatio, refutatio, peroratio; the five canons are invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery.

Schemes of repetition and balance: anaphora (repeated opening), epistrophe (repeated close), symploce (both), antimetabole (ABBA reversal), parallelism, tricolon.

Syntax analysis: periodic sentence suspends the main clause to the end; loose/cumulative sentence places it first; parataxis coordinates clauses; hypotaxis subordinates them.

Diction registers: formal, neutral, colloquial, slang, jargon; connotation versus denotation; abstract versus concrete nouns; Latinate versus Anglo-Saxon word stock.

Punctuation as style: semicolon joins balanced clauses, dash marks interruption or emphasis, colon introduces explanation; sentence length variation controls tempo.

Persuasive fallacies to name precisely: ad hominem, begging the question, equivocation, hasty generalization, slippery slope, red herring, bandwagon.

Tone words must be earned by evidence: ironic, elegiac, sardonic, reverent, nostalgic, didactic, ambivalent; each should be tied to diction, syntax, or image.